YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) — Armenia has arrested a second prominent cleric on charges of plotting against the government, the latest escalation in a clampdown on outspoken critics of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
A court in Yerevan on Saturday ordered Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan to be held in pre-trial detention for two months, his lawyer Ara Zohrabyan said. He said the decision was “obviously illegal and unfounded” saying his client will appeal.
State prosecutors accuse Ajapahyan of publicly calling for an armed ouster of the government.
On Friday, security forces faced off with crowds at the headquarters of the Armenian Apostolic Church outside Yerevan as they tried to arrest Ajapahyan. Videos circulating on social media showed clergymen jostling with police, while bells of a nearby cathedral rang out.
After Armenia’s National Security Service urged Ajapahyan to appear before authorities, local media showed him entering the building of Armenia’s Investigative Committee in his gray robes.
“I have never hidden and I am not going to hide now,” Ajapahyan told reporters on Friday. “I say that what is happening now is lawlessness. I have never been and am not a threat to this country, the main threat is in the government.”
Last year, tens of thousands of demonstrators called for Pashinyan’s ouster after Armenia agreed to hand over control of several border villages to Azerbaijan and to normalize relations between the neighbors and bitter rivals.
On Wednesday, authorities arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who leads the Sacred Struggle opposition movement. He was accused of plotting a sabotage campaign to overthrow Pashinyan, charges that his lawyer rejected as “fiction.”
Members of Sacred Struggle, which has bitterly opposed the handover of the border villages, accused the government of cracking down on political rights.
Although the territorial concession was the movement’s core issue, it has expanded to a wide array of complaints about Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018.
Another vocal critic of Pashinyan, Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, was arrested last week on charges of calling for the government’s overthrow, which he denied.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been 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 lightning military campaign in September 2023 saw Azerbaijan fully reclaim control of Karabakh, and Armenia later handed over the border villages.
Pashinyan has recently sought to normalize relations with Azerbaijan. Last week, he also visited Azerbaijan’s top ally, Turkey, to mend a historic rift.
Turkey and Armenia have a more than century-old dispute over the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in massacres, deportations and forced marches that began in 1915 in Ottoman Turkey. Historians widely view the event as genocide. Turkey vehemently rejects the label, conceding that many died in that era but insisting the death toll is inflated and resulted from civil unrest.
Attempts to impeach Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018, were unsuccessful.
Although territorial concessions were a core issue for Sacred Struggle, it has expanded to a wide array of complaints about Pashinyan as the Apostolic Church’s relationship with the government deteriorated.
On June 8, Pashinyan called for church leader Karekin II to resign after accusing him of fathering a child despite a vow of celibacy. The church released a statement at the time accusing Pashinyan of undermining Armenia’s “spiritual unity” but did not address the claim about the child.
