Solemn Ceremony of the 17th Annual General Assembly Inter-parliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy Held in the RA National Assembly

Solemn Ceremony of the 17th Annual General Assembly Inter-parliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy Held in the RA National Assembly

In the Gilded Hall of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia the solemn ceremony of the 17th Annual General Assembly Inter-parliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy was held, which attended RA NA President Hovik Abrahamyan, the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II, NKR NA President Ashot Ghulyan, NA deputies, ambassadors, representatives of international organizations. About 70 delegates from 16 countries will take part in the works of the Assembly.

Before the opening ceremony of the Assembly the participants laid flowers at the memorial perpetuating the memory of the October 27, 1999 crime victims.

The Chairman of the General Assembly Inter-parliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy, the deputy of the State Duma of Russia Sergey Popov opened the 17th Annual General Assembly Interparliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy.

The representative of RA President in RA NA Garnik Isaghulyan conveyed the message of RA President Serzh Sargsyan to the participants.

RA NA President Hovik Abrahamyan gave a speech at the opening of the Assembly.

In his welcoming speech NKR NA President Ashot Ghulyan thanked the organizers of the Assembly and RA NA leadership for the given opportunity. In Mr. Ghulyan’s word our country has professed Christianity for more than 1700 years, which has been our ancestors’ choice, and the truthfulness of which has proved the history. “Our region is historically a stage of clash of hard dialogue and civilizations, but we permanently succeeded to preserve the national uniqueness, faith, language, the institutes of self-organization,” Mr. Ghulyan noted in his speech.

He expressed concern in connection with the conservation of the historical-cultural heritage of the Armenian people, being on the territory of the former Azerbaijan. The Armenian Christian monuments are destroyed in Azerbaijan. The striving of Azerbaijan for distorting the history at state level, according to Ashot Ghulyan, is unacceptable. Such policy is of continuous nature and gets new revelations. In his word, the people of Nagorno Karabakh preserve the cultural values of other peoples with warmth. He noted that recently in the capital of NKR, Stepanakert, a celebration dedicated to the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church was held, and in Shushi a mosque is being restored. He also touched upon the tragic incident, which occurred 10 days ago in the contact line of Azerbaijan and Karabakh, which caused casualties and once again made obvious our neighbours’ goals: to use the negotiation as a veil for the settlement of the problem through military. “My country has reached a level of state organization, which if is not high, in any case is not low from the post-Soviet region states,” Mr. Ghulyan noted.

The Secretary General of the General Assembly Interparliamentary Assembly on the Orthodoxy, the deputy of the Greek Parliament Anastasios Nerantzis welcomed the participants of the Assembly.

The Head of the Secretariat of Moscow Patriarchate Archbishop Mark Yegorevsky read the message of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia His Holiness Kiril I. The Speaker of the State Duma of Russia Boris Gryzlov, the Speaker of the Greek Parliament Phillip Petsalnikos, Speaker of the Supreme Rada of Ukraine Vladimir Litvin, Universal Patriarch His Holiness Varfolomey also sent messages. The deputy of the Georgian Parliament Giorgi Goguadze gave speech in the name of PABSEC.