Police in Armenia detained more than 200 anti-government protesters on Tuesday as opposition parties called on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to quit over his handling of a territorial dispute with Azerbaijan.
Protests erupted in Yerevan, the capital, on Sunday, after opponents of Mr Pashinyan demanded his resignation.
They have accused him of plotting to cede to Azerbaijan the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, over which the countries went to war in 2020.
Demonstrations were held on Monday, and on Tuesday police cracked down on protesters who blocked traffic in central Yerevan.
The interior ministry said “206 demonstrators were detained” in Yerevan and provincial cities.
The protests highlight bitterness over Mr Pashinyan’s leadership since the six-week war in 2020 that killed more than 6,500 people before ending with a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a decades-long dispute over Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s Armenian-populated region.
On Saturday, Armenia’s security service warned of “a real threat of turmoil in the country”.
The parliament speaker played down the risk of instability.
“There is no political crisis in Armenia,” said Alen Simonyan, an ally of Mr Pashinyan.
“Political forces, which lost parliamentary elections in 2021, are aggressively trying to mount a wave of protests, but our citizens have already made their choice and will stay away from their attempts,” he told a news conference Tuesday.
Opposition leader and parliament vice speaker Ishkhan Saghatelyan said: “Pashinyan is a traitor and permanent street protests, which are mounting, will force him to resign.”
He called for a protest rally later Tuesday in Yerevan’s central Square of France, where thousands rallied against Pashinyan on Sunday and Monday.
“Nikol must go – he will go – because he is a symbol of defeat and Armenia has no future with such a leader,” said one protester, 57-year-old blacksmith Sergei Hovhannisyan.
“He is ready to give away Karabakh for which we have shed our blood,” he told AFP.
Opposition parties accuse Pashinyan of plans to give away all of Karabakh to Azerbaijan after he told lawmakers last month that the “international community calls on Armenia to scale down demands on Karabakh”.
Under the Moscow-brokered deal, Armenia ceded parts of the territory it had controlled for decades, and Russia sent 2,000 peacekeepers to oversee the truce.
The pact was seen in Armenia as a national humiliation and sparked weeks of anti-government protests, leading Pashinyan to call snap parliamentary polls which his party, Civil Contract, won last September.
Ethnic Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. About 30,000 people were killed in the ensuing conflicts.
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Key findings of Jenkins report
- Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
- Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
- Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
- Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."
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Analysis
Members of Syria's Alawite minority community face threat in their heartland after one of the deadliest days in country’s recent history. Read more
Zayed Sustainability Prize
More from Neighbourhood Watch:
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
EA Sports FC 26
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Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
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The biog
Date of birth: 27 May, 1995
Place of birth: Dubai, UAE
Status: Single
School: Al Ittihad private school in Al Mamzar
University: University of Sharjah
Degree: Renewable and Sustainable Energy
Hobby: I enjoy travelling a lot, not just for fun, but I like to cross things off my bucket list and the map and do something there like a 'green project'.
French business
France has organised a delegation of leading businesses to travel to Syria. The group was led by French shipping giant CMA CGM, which struck a 30-year contract in May with the Syrian government to develop and run Latakia port. Also present were water and waste management company Suez, defence multinational Thales, and Ellipse Group, which is currently looking into rehabilitating Syrian hospitals.
Results
Women finals: 48kg - Urantsetseg Munkhbat (MGL) bt Distria Krasniqi (KOS); 52kg - Odette Guiffrida (ITA) bt Majlinda Kelmendi (KOS); 57kg - Nora Gjakova (KOS) bt Anastasiia Konkina (Rus)
Men’s finals: 60kg - Amiran Papinashvili (GEO) bt Francisco Garrigos (ESP); 66kg - Vazha Margvelashvili (Geo) bt Yerlan Serikzhanov (KAZ)
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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China
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UAE
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Norway
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Canada
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Farage on Muslim Brotherhood
Nigel Farage told Reform's annual conference that the party will proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood if he becomes Prime Minister.
"We will stop dangerous organisations with links to terrorism operating in our country," he said. "Quite why we've been so gutless about this – both Labour and Conservative – I don't know.
“All across the Middle East, countries have banned and proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous organisation. We will do the very same.”
It is 10 years since a ground-breaking report into the Muslim Brotherhood by Sir John Jenkins.
Among the former diplomat's findings was an assessment that “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” has “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, who commissioned the report, said membership or association with the Muslim Brotherhood was a "possible indicator of extremism" but it would not be banned.
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