MOSCOW – Armenia, which lost a bloody war with its neighbor Azerbaijan last autumn, plunged into a political crisis on Thursday after what its prime minister called a “military coup attempt”.
The instability comes on top of what has already been a bitter winter for Armenia, a small South Caucasus nation that is squeezed between countries it considers its enemies.
A dormant economy and a serious outbreak of the coronavirus have put the state of mind of a nation still raging over its humiliating loss of life and territory in the six-week war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic-Armenian territory inside the borders of Azerbaijan, obscured. .
Armenia was badly overrun by the Azerbaijani army and was forced to accept a settlement that gave up strategic and historically nurtured territory that it had seized in an earlier war almost three decades ago.
In a statement issued on Thursday, General Staff of the Armed Forces called on the country’s civilian leadership to resign, while Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who negotiated the settlement, blamed the blame on the military trying to divert.
“The Armenian army has long patiently twisted the attacks of the current government, but everything has its limits,” the statement said. “The Armenian army has respectfully done its duty.”
In a speech broadcast live on Facebook, Mr. Pashinyan said he would fire the chief of staff, Onik Gasparyan, and that a military coup would begin. He then appealed to supporters to gather in a central square in the capital.
As a crowd crashed, fighter jets flew two low exits over the city, their engines screaming. But there was no sign of tanks, the deployment of troops or any other signal that a military coup was actually underway.
And it was unclear whether the warplanes were Russian or Armenian. Russia has a defense agreement with Armenia and maintains an air base in the country.
“The most important problem we have today is the preservation of civil power,” he said. Pashinyan said as he called supporters to the square. “What’s happening, I see as an attempt at a military coup.”
A short while later, however, it seemed that Mr. Pashinyan relied on this assessment, saying “my statement about the threat of a military coup was emotional.” He asked his supporters to prevent conflict with soldiers, should there appear.
“The threat of a coup is largely manageable, it was an emotional response, and we should not be strict with our brothers,” he said of the generals.
Mr. Pashinyan’s conflict with the generals has been simmering since early this week. He was criticized by a political opponent for failing to deploy the Russian-made Iskander medium-range missiles, one of the country’s most expensive weapons systems, that could potentially turn the country’s fortunes during the war.
Mr. Pashinyan replied that he had in fact ordered the missiles to be fired, but that some were malfunctioning – a hint of sloppy Russian equipment or mismanagement in the military. After a deputy chief of the general staff mr. Pashinyan contradicted on the missiles, Mr. Pashinyan fired the deputy chief of staff. Things increased from there, with the general staff siding with the general.
Richard Giragosian, director of the Regional Studies Center, an analytical group in the Armenian capital Yerevan, said in a telephone interview that it was a worrying breakdown of the civilian hosts. The defiant statement of the generals showed that ‘the army is invading the political arena’ and at least seems to be the political opponents of mr. To support Pashinyan.
Early Thursday night, the generals issued a new statement saying they had made the previous statement of their own free will, not in line with any political opposition party. In the depths of twilight, crowds that both Mr. Pashinyan and the opposition support, milled in the streets of Yerevan, showed videos.