MOSCOW – Armenia, which lost a bloody war with its neighbor Azerbaijan last fall, fell on Thursday in a political crisis after what its prime minister called an “attempted military coup”.
The instability has gone beyond what was already a harsh winter for Armenia, a tiny nation in the southern Caucasus squeezed between countries it considers its enemies.
The crash of the economy and a severe outbreak of coronavirus have further obscured the mood of a nation that is still teeming with the humiliating loss of lives and territories in the six-week war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian ethnic area within the borders of the Azerbaijan.
Much defeated by the Azerbaijani military, Armenia was forced to accept a settlement that gave up strategic and historically esteemed territory that it had conquered in a previous war almost three decades ago.
In a statement released on Thursday, the Armed Forces staff called for the resignation of the country’s civilian leadership, blaming Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who negotiated the deal, for trying to deflect the blame for the military.
“For a long time, the Armenian armed forces have patiently endured the current government’s discredit attacks, but everything has its limits,” the statement said. “Armenia’s armed forces honorably did their duty.”
In a speech broadcast live on Facebook, Pashinyan said he would fire the chief of staff, Onik Gasparyan, and that a military coup had begun. He then called on his supporters to meet in a central square in the capital.
As a crowd circled, fighter jets flew two low sorties over the city, its engines screaming. But there was no sign of tanks, deployment of troops or any other sign that a military coup was really underway.
And it was not clear whether the warplanes were Russian or Armenian. Russia has a defense pact with Armenia and maintains an air base there.
“The most important problem we have today is the preservation of civilian power,” said Pashinyan, calling his supporters to the square. “What is happening I evaluate as an attempted military coup.”
Shortly thereafter, however, Pashinyan seemed to back down on that assessment, saying that “my statement about the threat of a military coup was emotional”. He asked his supporters to avoid conflict with soldiers, if any appeared.
“The threat of a coup is largely manageable, it was an emotional reaction and we should not be strict with our brothers,” he said of the generals.
Pashinyan’s conflict with the generals has been simmering since the beginning of this week. He was criticized by a political opponent for not launching Russian-made Iskander medium-range missiles, one of the country’s most expensive weapon systems, which may have changed the country’s fortunes during the war.
Pashinyan replied that he actually ordered the missiles to be fired, but that some did not work well – an indication of poor Russian equipment or military management. After a deputy chief of staff general publicly contradicted Pashinyan about the missiles, Pashinyan dismissed the deputy chief of staff. Things got worse from there, with the general staff siding with the general.
It was a worrying breakdown in the military’s civilian command, Richard Giragosian, director of the Center for Regional Studies, an analytical group in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, said in a telephone interview. The generals’ defiant statement showed “the military entering the political arena” and at least appearing to support Pashinyan’s political opponents.
Early Thursday evening, the generals issued a new statement saying that they had made the previous statement of their own free will, not in alignment with any opposition political party. In the deepening twilight, crowds supporting Pashinyan and the opposition flocked to the streets of Yerevan, they showed videos.