YEREVAN, June 5. /TASS/. A rally by the opposition Tavush for Motherland movement has ended in the village of Sotq in Armenia's Gegharkunik Region with a call from the movement’s leader, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, for participation in a large protest demonstration on June 9. The rally was streamed on local news portals.
"I know that teachers, contract army servicemen and families from Artsakh (unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic - TASS) received threat calls today. The callers tried to intimidate them and to persuade them not to come to the rally. Why shouldn't they come? Don’t they want to live in dignity? Don’t they want to get rid of your disgraceful presence and the disgraceful life you have imposed? June 9 is a very important day of preparations for our next and hopefully last victorious step," Galstanyan said.
The protest demonstrations, led by Archbishop Bagrat, who governs the Tavush Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, began after the reports Baku and Yerevan had agreed on the delimitation of the border in the Tavush Region. In fact, Yerevan agreed to hand over to Baku four villages that had been part of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic and remained under Armenian control since the 1990s. The Tavush for Motherland movement demands the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, whom it holds responsible for unilaterally ceding the territory to Azerbaijan.