Raffi Hovhannisyan addressed EPP Congress

Raffi K. Hovannisian, leader of the Heritage Party and founding director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies, was in the Irish capital between March 5 and 7 to attend the 2014 Elections Congress of the European People’s Party. Heritage party press service informs about this. 

According to the source, Raffi Hovannisian addressed the plenary session of the Congress, attended by several heads of state and government and more than 1000 delegates, on the EPP Action Program for 2014-2019. Greeted warmly as last year’s unprecedented presidential contender, he expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people’s democratic choice and called for a peaceful, principled resolution of the current crisis.

Hovannisian also urged the EPP to restore confidence in Europe by correcting past mistakes, by respecting its own standards of liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, and by never again validating fraudulent elections and accepting those who do not bear the de jure trust of the people. Against this background, not only Russia but also the EPP itself and most particularly Armenia’s authorities are responsible for the country’s unacceptable domestic situation and foreign policy choices.

Raffi Hovannisian called on the EPP and its member parties to recognize the sovereignty of the Mountainous Karabagh Republic (Artsakh), which parallel with the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the dissolution of the Soviet Union and shares virtually nothing in common with other conflicts often considered as protracted or frozen.

He concluded his speech with a challenge to the European People’s Party to treasure its own heritage and values by preparing formally to recognize and condemn the Armenian Genocide and Great National Dispossession on its centennial anniversary due next year. The Genocide entailed not only the loss of more than a million lives, but constituted the decimation of an ancestral homeland and an ancient civilization.

Hovannisian spoke separately and in detail on these and other relevant matters at the regular session of the EPP Political Assembly and during the policy seminar, organized by the Center for European Studies, on the crisis in Ukraine and its implications upon the relaunching of the Eastern Partnership.

In the margins of the Congress, Raffi Hovannisian conferred with scores of officials and delegates from across Europe, including EPP President Joseph Daul, Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Chairman Charlie Flanagan of the Irish Fine Gael Party, Ukrainian leaders Vitalii Klitschko and Yuliya Tymoshenko, former President Hans-Gert Pottering of the European Parliament, Chairman Mark Green of the International Republican Institute, and President Mikulas Dzurinda of the Brussels-based Center for European Studies. He also exchanged views with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Greek Prime Minister Adonis Samaras who had been Hovannisian’s counterpart as minister of foreign affairs.