Condemns Azerbaijan's Genocidal Occupation, Deplores Armenia's Democratic Decline

Yerevan—Meeting in the Republic’s capital yesterday, the Heritage Party convened its nationwide political council for the first time this year.

Chaired by Armenia’s first minister of foreign affairs and Party co-founder Raffi K. Hovannisian, the council’s 55 delegates from across the country opened with a moment of silence for the thousands who fell, and those who continue to lose their lives, during the Azerbaijani-Turkish invasion and occupation of Artsakh and parts of Armenia proper.

Hearing a variety of reports, and reviewing a comprehensive accounting, from the Party’s executive board and its chairman Andranik Grigoryan, the political council deliberated in depth on the current state of affairs in the homeland and the region together with possible scenarios of their development.  Hovannisian reported on his representational activity with the European People's Party and the Centrist Democrat International.

Armenia’s international standing, its vital national interests, and the imperative of civic harmony were the benchmarks for the domestic and foreign policy analyses that followed.

Against this backdrop, the Heritage political council:

1)  expressed deep concern over the recent outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war and called for an immediate ceasefire and diplomatic solution;

2) condemned Azerbaijan and Turkey for their recent ratification of the occupationist pan-Turkic "Shushi Declaration," their continuing occupation and cultural genocide on both sides of the border, and their refusal to return all prisoners of war;

3) expressed alarm at the steady decline in democracy and human rights benchmarks within Armenia and its marked move toward autocracy, including more recent measures aimed against freedom of speech and judicial independence;

4) criticized the polarizing domestic policies and rhetoric of the ruling regime and its incumbent leader;

5) deplored his ceaseless and unfounded appeasement of the Republic's neighboring occupiers, surrendering to them, in unprecedented fashion, Armenian sovereign lands and Artsakh legal grounds; and

6) called on him, for the sake of the nation's future, to have the dignity to tender his resignation.