Epress.am News from Armenia
Members of the Heritage Party’s parliamentary faction, during the time set aside for making announcements in the National Assembly, yesterday made their statements from Liberty Square, where party leader Raffi Hovannisian has been on a hunger strike since Mar. 15.
The statement by MP Larisa Alaverdyan was called “Vox populi vox Dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God:
“The most frequently heard question lately has been what is Heritage Party leader Raffi Hovannisian trying to say with his ‘Fast for Freedom.’ The answer is obvious: One of the demands of both the Heritage Party and its leader, both the police and the National Security Service employees, who at the bottom of their heart, we’re convinced, understand the meaning of the protest, and the citizens openly supporting us is that human beings of our homeland and our people are worthy of living.”
Continuing, Alaverdyan said the foreign policy adopted by the ruling authorities ignores Armenia’s sovereignty national interests, while domestic policy deepens inequality, unlawfulness and injustice and the emigration that follows.
MP Anahit Bakhshyan also addressed Hovannisian’s hunger strike, noting that “the RA citizen who has chosen this form of protest through international and RA laws must be provided with basic conditions of health and rest.”
“That is, there has to be an environment where he is sheltered from sun and rain. That place, as is accepted in the whole world, is a tent, but see, in our country the tent is prohibited by police, who on different sides of Liberty Square, in uniforms or civilian clothing, wait in ambush for the the slightest movement of the poles of a tent or canopy, to attack this inanimate object without realizing that due to this civic movement, they too will be liberated from the regime that subjugates them and deprives them of their dignity,” she said.
According to the Heritage Party MP, the party has sent numerous letters regarding this matter to state bodies which have remained unanswered. The only response they received was from the RA Human Rights Defender.
MP Zaruhi Postanjyan, in turn, said during that the last hundred years of Eastern Armenia’s history, an opportunity to create a just nation-state and a ‘nation-together’ didn’t happen for the Armenian people.
“But at the same time, we can say that this government, being in a panic, is afraid of the people’s threat. It’s obvious that the fear has overcome the president, the National Assembly, state officials, the courts and the penitentiaries. History, it seems, is repeating itself. In 1901, [Armenian national hero] Zoravar Andranik, making a sacrifice, going with his soldiers to besiege Arakelots [St. Apostles] Monastery [of Mush], not settling with the Turkish autocratic state, raising the Armenian people’s spirit, showed that the Armenian people are prepared and are able to fight to live in freedom and dignity. Andranik presented their demands to the Turkish government delegation that entered Arakelots Monastery, the first of which was to release political prisoners. Of the presented demands it’s this that was carried out,” she said.
Postanjyan added that the time has come, “in the small part of the large homeland, to keep in our hands our native land.”