New Border Posts Installed in Tavush as Armenia Starts Land Handover to Azerbaijan

YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—The Armenian government began handing over border areas to Azerbaijan on Tuesday amid continuing protests staged by residents of adjacent communities in Armenia’s northern Tavush province concerned about their security.

“On the basis of geodetic measurements at the border of the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, the first border post was installed within the framework of coordinate adjustment works. The work of expert groups of the two countries is continuing,” the government said in a statement issued late in the afternoon.

It also released photographs of the post apparently placed near Baghanis, one of the four Tavush villages that will be seriously affected by Yerevan’s latest territorial concessions to Baku.

Early in the morning, the Armenian military started de-mining the area which was due to be placed under Azerbaijani control. Road police closed a nearby section of a highway leading to the three other affected villages as well as Tavush’s capital, Ijevan. The National Security Service essentially acknowledged that this was done to prevent locals from trying to disrupt the mine clearance.

The de-mining operation sparked an angry demonstration in the nearby town of Noyemberian, which forms a single community with Baghanis and another affected village, Voskepar. A large group of local residents blocked for a few hours the same highway passing through the town. They reopened it after a standoff with riot police.

The protesters were joined by several leaders of a continuing protest at another section of the highway running from the Georgian border to Yerevan. It is located just outside the Tavush village of Kirants. That key road section is also due to be handed over Azerbaijan under the terms of a controversial border delimitation deal announced by Baku and Yerevan last Friday.

The deal calls for Armenian withdrawal from a total of four border areas that were controlled by Azerbaijan in Soviet times and occupied by Armenian forces in 1991-1992. For its part, Azerbaijan seized at the time large swathes of agricultural land belonging to several Tavush villages. Baku has refused to give any of that land back to Armenia.

Many residents of the Tavush villages close to the contested border areas are strongly opposed to the unilateral handover, saying that they would lose access to their existing agricultural land, have trouble communicating with the rest of the country and be far more vulnerable to Azerbaijani armed attacks. Hundreds of them have been blocking traffic through the Kirants road section in protest since Saturday. The blockade continued on Tuesday.

The nonstop protest was joined by people from other parts of Armenia, among them Yerevan-based opposition activists. Also, small groups of other Armenians have briefly blocked other national highways in recent days in a show of support for the Tavush protesters.

Local government officials have also spoken out against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s decision to make yet another significant concession to Baku. It emerged on Tuesday that seven of them pulled out of a 11-member “working group” formed by Pashinyan’s government at the weekend to deal with practical modalities of the land handover.

In a statement, the Noyemberian community administration said that it will not be involved in the border delimitation efforts because it believes they “carry extremely dangerous risks.”

“In particular, the new border would make important parts of the community’s territory vulnerable and thus pose a significant danger to the community’s population,” it said.l

The mayors of the two Noyemberian villages as well as Kirtans and Berkaber discussed the matter with Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigorian the previous evening at a meeting in Yerevan that lasted for several hours. They came away from the meeting dissatisfied.

“I am very upset with all this,” the Kirants mayor, Kamo Shahinian, told fellow villagers on Tuesday morning.

Not surprisingly, the villagers continued to oppose the border “delimitation” announced by Pashinyan. As one of them put it, “Our school would be just 10-20 meters from the Azeris. How can you send your kids to the school after that?”