YEREVAN — Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has said that the chief of the military’s General Staff, Onik Gasparian, had been relieved of his duties as of March 10 as opposition demonstrators continued to demand the prime minister’s resignation.
The announcement, posted on the government’s website, said that Gasparian’s dismissal automatically came into force after President Armen Sarkisian failed to sign the dismissal decree submitted by Pashinian and did not appeal it at the Constitutional Court within the legal time frame.
Pashinian, in power since 2018, is facing a crisis after the army last month demanded he step down, prompting him to claim a coup attempt and try to dismiss the Armenian military’s top general.
He has also faced mounting protests and calls from the opposition for his resignation following a six-week conflict between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenian forces over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh last year that resulted in territorial losses for the Armenian side.
On March 9, thousands of opposition supporters blockaded the parliament building in Yerevan demanding Pashinian’s resignation.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian
The demonstrators surrounded the building and engaged in occasional scuffles with police, as several opposition lawmakers stood between the two sides to prevent violent clashes.
Police officers clad in riot gear did not attempt to disperse the crowd.
At the heart of the turmoil is the Russian-brokered deal Pashinian signed in November that brought an end to the fighting after Armenian forces suffered territorial and battlefield losses from Azerbaijan’s Turkish-backed military.
Under the deal, Armenia ceded control over parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and all seven surrounding districts of Azerbaijan that had been occupied by Armenian forces since the early 1990s.
Political tensions escalated last month when Pashinian on February 25 dismissed Gasparian, accusing him and other high-ranking military officers of attempting a coup by calling on him to resign.
Supporters of Pashinian and the opposition have been staging competing rallies in the capital amid the crisis.
In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Pashinian has offered to hold snap parliamentary elections later this year but rejected the opposition’s demand to step down before the vote.
Pashinian has defended the November deal as the only way to prevent the Azerbaijani military from overrunning the entire Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Russia has deployed about 2,000 peacekeepers to monitor the agreement.
With reporting by Reuters, AP, Interfax, and TASS
