Armenian lawmakers brawl as the government cracks down on its political opponents

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — A brawl broke out Tuesday in Armenia’s National Assembly involving an opposition lawmaker who later was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and faces prosecution for calling for ousting President Nikol Pashinyan as political tensions flared in the South Caucasus country.

Artur Sargsyan, who represents the opposition bloc Armenia, had finished a speech in which he said the case against him had been decided ahead of time and tried to leave the chamber. Other lawmakers then moved to stop him, and security guards flooded in, according to video from news outlets.

In his speech, Sargsyan said Armenia had become “a bastion of dictatorship” where “everything is decided in advance, written down, approved.”

Lawmakers later voted to strip Sargsyan of his parliamentary immunity, opening him up to prosecution. He turned himself in to Armenia’s Investigative Committee, which had accused him and 15 others of plotting to overthrow the government.

Pashinyan’s government has been cracking down on political opponents he has said are trying to engineer a coup.

Various members of the opposition, including the influential Armenian Apostolic Church, have been leading demonstrations urging Pashinyan’s ouster after he agreed to territorial concessions in the country’s decades-long battle with neighboring Azerbaijan for control of disputed regions.

Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan and Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, both senior church leaders, are in pre-trial detention after being accused of taking part in the alleged plot.

On June 28, crowds of supporters gathered at church headquarters outside the capital of Yerevan to prevent Ajapahyan’s arrest. He later turned himself in to the authorities.

The Investigative Committee said conspirators planned to carry out bombings and arson to disrupt power supplies and stage accidents on major roads to paralyze traffic. Both men rejected the charges against them.

Ajapahyan and Galstanyan are members of the opposition group Sacred Struggle, which took a central role in anti-Pashinyan demonstrations last year.

Although the territorial concessions were the movement’s core issue, it has expanded to a wide array of complaints about Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018. It has also sparked increasing friction between the president and the church in recent weeks.

In a social media post Monday, Pashinyan said he would liberate the Armenian Apostolic Church from its “anti-Christian, adulterous, anti-national, anti-state” leadership.

Police on Monday raided one of the country’s major energy providers, which is owned by another Pashinyan critic, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan. Parliament adopted a law allowing for nationalizing the company on July 3, days after Karapetyan was arrested for calling for the ouster of the government.

The raid began in the morning and it was unclear which branch of the government or security services was carrying it out, said company spokesperson Natalya Sarjanyan.

“We do not know which department these people are from, but we are not allowed into the office,” she said.

Armenia and Azerbaijan were locked in territorial disputes since the early 1990s, as various parts of the Soviet Union pressed for independence from Moscow. After the USSR collapsed in 1991, ethnic Armenian separatist forces backed by the Armenian military won control of Azerbaijan’s region of Karabakh and nearby territories.

In 2020, Azerbaijan recaptured broad swaths of territory that were held for nearly three decades by Armenian forces. A swift military campaign in September 2023 saw Azerbaijan gain full control of Karabakh, and Armenia later handed over the border villages.