Armenia’s opposition stages a protest in Yerevan’s French Square on June 14.

YEREVAN — More than six weeks after the start of their “resistance movement,” Armenia’s main opposition groups have announced they will scale back almost daily demonstrations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and instead focus on weekly rallies to build larger crowds of protesters upset over the government’s handling of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute with Azerbaijan.
Ishkhan Saghatelian, one of the opposition leaders, said late on June 14 that many Armenians who were unhappy with Pashinian’s government have avoided participating in the protests, so a change of tactics was needed.
“We have not yet managed to get all those people to the streets and bring them to this square. There are still people who think this is a fight for power, for the return of former rulers to power,” Saghatelian told thousands of supporters rallying in Yerevan’s France Square, the site of the opposition tent camp.
The two opposition alliances represented in the Armenian parliament launched their campaign to oust the prime minister on May 1, two weeks after Pashinian signaled his readiness to recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and “lower the bar” on the status of Nagorno-Karabakh acceptable to the Armenian side.

They accused Pashinian of helping Baku regain full control of Nagorno-Karabakh after Armenia lost control over parts of the Azerbaijani breakaway region in a 2020 war that ended with a Moscow-brokered cease-fire monitored by Russian troops.
Opposition supporters have since regularly marched through the city center, blocking access to roads and the entrances to government buildings while repeatedly clashing with riot police.
The most serious of those clashes, which broke out on June 3, left dozens of protesters and police officers seriously injured.
Pashinian and his political allies have dismissed the opposition demands for his resignation saying the opposition has failed to attract popular support for regime change.

Saghatelian, who has been the main speaker at the protests, said that while the goal of unseating the prime minister has yet to be reached, the opposition has managed to “awaken society” and scuttle a “new capitulation agreement” with Azerbaijan. The protests have shown Pashinian lacks a popular “mandate to lead Armenia to vital concessions” to Baku, he said.
“We will definitely oust Nikol, but we will do that bloodlessly,” Saghatelian told the crowd.
The opposition, he added, has to “change the structure and tactic of our resistance movement in a way that will allow us to give it new impetus.”
They will now hold major rallies on a weekly basis and set up, in the meantime, new structures inside and outside Yerevan, he said.
Saghatelian said they will also keep fighting for the release of more than three dozen opposition activists and supporters arrested during the protest movement.
The vast majority of them were charged with assaulting police officers or government loyalists. Opposition leaders reject the accusations as politically motivated.
Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been under ethnic Armenian control for nearly three decades, is internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan.
Pashinian, who said he had agreed to the 2020 cease-fire to avoid further losses, said he would not sign any peace deal with Azerbaijan without consulting ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

National Guard units in other post-Soviet states, like Russia, have been used to squelch protests. And critics see it as a means for the government to protect its power.

Ani Mejlumyan Aug 2, 2022

Armenia’s Internal Troops in 2014. (photo: police.am)

As part of a broad security sector reform, Armenia is planning to set up a new National Guard force aimed at protecting high-ranking officials and state facilities. 
The reforms also include establishing an Interior Ministry for the first time since 2002. They are part of a draft bill that was first introduced in January 2021 but has been revised since then and now is scheduled for a parliament vote in September.
Government officials have singled out the creation of the National Guard – a structure common to many post-Soviet countries that focuses on protecting state officials and facilities – as the most significant piece of the reform package.
The National Guard “will be responsible for maintaining public order and public safety,” said Ara Fidanyan, the deputy chief of the Armenian police, in July 12 testimony to parliament about the bill. “In particular, we are ensuring the security of various state agencies, organizations, important facilities, high-ranking officials, and foreign delegations.”
Analysts suggested that the move was motivated by the government’s decreasing popularity in the wake of the 2020 defeat in the war against Azerbaijan. Since then it has faced open rebellion from senior military officers and a sustained protest movement organized by the political opposition.
“The realities have changed for the government, they don’t have the support and sense of security they had back in 2018” when they came to power, said independent military expert Leonid Nersisyan. “Creating a department like this [the National Guard] can guarantee that they can gather loyal people around them.”
The National Guard that Fidanyan described resembles that set up by Russia in 2016, and officials have said that the security reform package has been discussed with Moscow, Armenia’s military ally.
Russia’s National Guard, known as Rosgvardiya, has played a key role in cracking down on protests in that country and has deployed to Ukraine to keep order in the areas that Russia has captured in this year’s war.
“Rosgvardiya didn’t do well in Ukraine but it sure did well in shutting down demonstrations,” Nersisyan told Eurasianet. It is against Armenian law to use the military domestically, which could be part of the government’s calculation, he said. “As for Armenia’s national guard, you can get loyal people, equip and pay them better. And also, if you ever need to break up a protest, you can use them instead of the military since the use of the military is illegal.”
Some saw the move as a means of enforcing the increasingly authoritarian turn the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has been taking.
“The creation of a structure like this is characteristic of autocratic states, and it’s usually done by the leaders of personalist regimes who restructure state institutions in such a way that they serve their personal interests, protect their personal power, and have people loyal to them personally,” military expert Karen Vrtanesyan told Eurasianet.
The new National Guard units will be formed by police forces now known as Internal Troops. Under current law, those forces are subordinated to the armed forces in time of war; the new law would keep them under the Interior Ministry, as is the case in Russia.
Armenia had an Interior Ministry until 2002, when it was dissolved and the police became an independent structure that reports directly to the prime minister.
“By establishing the Interior Ministry, we will not only make the structure more controllable but also increase its transparency and accountability,” said Andranik Kocharyan, the chairman of the National Assembly’s Defense and Security Affairs Committee, during the July 12 hearing.
But some analysts argue that the new structure could in fact do the opposite.
“Ideally having all these security and armed forces structures under a single ministry means not only centralized control over them but also more people to bear responsibility,” Nersisyan said. “But in reality, because there are more people responsible like heads of departments, ministers, the prime minister and then parliament, accountability gets diluted. Now there’s not one person to blame if things go south.”

Ani Mejlumyan is a reporter based in Yerevan.

By Ilham Karimli August 15, 2022
URL: https://caspiannews.com/news-detail/azerbaijan-commemorates-mass-killing-of-servicemen-by-armenian-troops-in-karabakh-region-2022-8-15-9/
Caspiannews.com

The Dashbashi strategic height located between the Jabrayil and Khojavand regions of Azerbaijan / Courtesy

Twenty-nine years have passed since the mass killing of Azerbaijani servicemen by the Armenian military at the Dashbashi military post in the Karabakh region. 
The incident, which took place on August 15, 1993, saw an Armenian armed group launch a sudden offensive on the Dashbashi checkpoint where 23 Azerbaijani servicemen were stationed. None of the targeted servicemen survived the attack as Armenia had twice the number of troops as Azerbaijan at the time.
Following the incident, the Armenian troops desecrated the corpses of Azerbaijani servicemen.
“My aunt’s son also died here. It was very strange. The post was surrounded, 23 soldiers were brutally killed and tortured. Some had their heads, arms and eyes removed from their bodies. They went over the corpses with a chain tractor,” said Farzali Hasanov, a resident of Jabrayil.
According to Jeyhun Mammadov, a member of the Azerbaijani parliament from Jabrayil, the Dashbashi military post was created to provide air defense support to Azerbaijani forces deployed in the area.
“In order to defend the Dashbashi position itself, an additional artillery guard post consisting of five people was created on Mulkadara Height, located on the other side of the highland. A total of 28 young servicemen were stationed at both posts,” Mammadov said. The post of Dashbashi was one of the most important posts for Jabrayil. That’s why Armenians attacked it massively in a pre-planned offensive at around 4-5 AM on the night from August 14 to 15 and captured the height.”
The mass killing of Azerbaijani servicemen in Dashbashi occurred during the First Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, Armenia launched a full-blown military aggression against Azerbaijan, with the latter’s Karabakh (Garabagh) region being a key focus. The longest and deadliest war in the South Caucasus region ended with a ceasefire in 1994 and saw Armenia forcibly occupying 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized territories. Over 30,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and one million were expelled from those lands in a brutal ethnic cleansing policy conducted by Armenia.
The Khojaly genocide is considered the pinnacle of the massacres committed by Armenia against ethnic Azerbaijanis in the First Karabakh War. On the night from August 25 to 26, Armenia’s forces, backed by the Infantry Guard Regiment No. 366 from a then-collapsed Soviet army, assaulted the town of Khojaly, located in the Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. As a result of the attack, the Armenian armed forces killed 613 ethnic Azerbaijanis, including 106 women, 63 children and 70 elderly people, and took another 1,275 as hostages. Another 150 Azerbaijani nationals went missing, and their fates remain unknown to this day. A total of 487 people were injured, including 76 children.
Meanwhile, according to data compiled by the Azerbaijani government, 3,890 Azerbaijani citizens, including 71 children, 267 women, and 326 older adults, went missing during the same war. Baku has been demanding that Armenia assist in investigating the fate of those people, a request that remains unfulfilled.
On September 27, 2020, the decades-old conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan took a violent turn after Armenia’s forces deployed in the occupied Azerbaijani lands shelled military positions and civilian settlements of Azerbaijan. During the counter-attack operations that lasted 44 days, Azerbaijani forces liberated over 300 settlements, including the cities of Jabrayil, Fuzuli, Zangilan, Gubadli, and Shusha, from a nearly 30-year-long illegal Armenian occupation. The war ended with the signing of a tripartite statement on November 10, 2020, by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Under the statement, Armenia also returned the occupied Aghdam, Kalbajar and Lachin districts to Azerbaijan.
The post of Dashbashi and the village of the same name were liberated from the Armenian occupation on October 20, 2020.