“ARF was founded in order to help Armenians live and develop”, – announced Hrant Margaryan yesterday during the opening of the meeting dedicated to the 115th anniversary of ARF in the hall of American University of Armenia. “If we don’t take into account our activities of the past 100 years, our activities of these last 15 years are enough to be proud of what we have done”, – said H.Margaryan during the opening of the meeting. According to him they are not going to eat the bread of the past. “We want to eat the bread that we are making now”, -said Mr.Margaryan. As for the bread, we have made this bread in Karabakh, in Yerevan, we are making it in Javakhk, and now we are making it in Armenia by supporting the Constitutional Draft. H. Margaryan thinks that the Constitutional Draft is the most important thing for them now. After this speech eight historians made speeches and they were trying to present the history that “had been willingly violated against ARF” as it really was. They started their meeting with human principles in order to not let anyone think that they were trying to justify themselves and also some of them pronounced sentences that criticized the past activities of their party. The most interesting speech was probably the speech of Doctor of Historical Sciences Ararat Hakobyan on “ARF parliamentary activities in 1918-20”. “In that period the goal of independent Armenia could be realized. But I don’t know whether it was due to ourour destiny or other things, but we fell into such a situation. In a word our goal is to develop as an independent country and be a unified Armenia not depending on what is needed to make that a reality”, -said A. Hakobyan in his speech. Then he started to speak about the aims and goals of the leaders of this party in that period, but later he said that the situation changed and everything was failed. Hamlet Harutyunyan (Doctor of Historical Sciences) spoke about the genesis of the Karabakh conflict. He said that it was way back in 1918-1920 when Karabakh became a territory for conflict. At the end of the meeting the head of ARF parliamentary group, candidate for doctor of Historical Sciences Levon Mkrtchyan made a concluding speech and spoke about their activities of these last 15 years. He said that it was too late to evaluate their activities because they hadn’t finished their mission yet and they still didn’t know where those processes led them to. According to him the political powers in Diaspora knew that those quiet meetings of 1988 were going to lead to a war.
“But people were not ready; people didn’t expect these kinds of developments. They didn’t have weapons. And they couldn’t imagine that there could be a war like this in the territory of the Soviet Union. From the point of view of time this could be very dangerous both for Armenia and for Karabakh. This is the reason that serious political powers did their best not to hurry and to get familiar with the situation at hand”, -said L. Mkrtchyan.
NA vice-speaker and member of ARF answered to the questions of journalists. He said that ARF didn’t have to justify itself, because it existed and was going to develop. “Please don’t forget that our goal is to provide fairness and development for Armenians”, -said Mr. Hovhannisyan. He also said that this meant to “recover the historical rights” of Armenians in Armenia. He also spoke about the recent announcement of the prime-minister stating national ideology doesn’t mean to insist on making Istanbul bloody or join Javakhk with Armenia. According to the prime-minister these kinds of announcements are not made because of nationalism, but because of nationalistic emotions. “There were politicians who spoke like this concerning Karabakh. They said that ARF wanted to get Karabakh back due to their nationalistic emotions. But did you see what happened?”, -said the NA vice-speaker, thus contradicting the prime-minister. “I think he also said that during many centuries we lost our lands and territories because of nationalistic emotions too. These kind of losses for Armenians were not generally a result of nationalistic emotions, but a result of the activities of those politicians, in which activities people didn’t believe”, -said V. Hovhannisyan. According to him in order to understand this you don’t have to be a philosopher, but you have to read the history of Armenia. And V. Hovhannisyan can also give poems and songs about their party to those people who are interested in such kinds of things. “These kinds of announcements are complicated, since people didn’t write songs and poems for all political parties”, -said V. Hovhannisyan when speaking about the announcement of the prime-minister.