On their own initiative, members of Sasna Tsrer Pan-Armenian Party Zhirayr Sefilyan and Garegin Chugaszyan have held a meeting with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, the party said in a statement.
The meeting held at the PM’s residence on Thursday addressed the current political situation, the statement added.
However, the prime minister’s official website has released no news on the meeting.
The US is not pressuring Armenia to curtail its relations with neighbouring Iran in connection with the sanctions regime imposed on Tehran by the Trump administration, according to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, as related by a published interview with French-Armenian magazine Nouvelles d’Armenie.
Pashinian was asked whether the sanctions are causing small, impoverished Armenia serious problems. “I don’t want to make grandiose statements but our diplomats have succeeded in scoring a very important victory in this regard,” he replied. “Our American partners seem to have gotten a good grasp of the issue. They have started to understand that Iran is one thing for Washington and another for Armenia.”
“I can say that at the moment we are not subjected to any pressure [from the US],” added Pashinian.
Parliament speaker Ararat Mirzoyan, a close associate of Pashinian, made similar comments when he visited Washington and spoke at the Atlantic Council think-tank in July.
“We don’t want the United States to put pressure on Armenia to join in its Iran sanctions agenda,” Mirzoyan said.
He argued that Iran, an economy with 82mn compared to Armenia’s 2.9mn, serves as one of his landlocked country’s two conduits to the outside world due to closed borders with the two other Muslim neighbours, Azerbaijan and Turkey, given the dispute over breakaway territory Nagorno-Karabakh.
Arch-hawk and US national security advisor John Bolton discussed the US sanctions with Pashinian during his trip to Armenia in October last year. Bolton said traffic through the Armenian-Iranian border will become a “significant issue” because Washington would be enforcing the sanctions “very vigorously,” according to The Armenian Mirror Spectator.
Pashinian subsequently remarked that his government would “deepen not only economic but also political relations” with Tehran. He paid an official visit to the Islamic Republic in February.
Pashinian reaffirmed Yerevan’s strong interest in moving forward with Iranian-Armenian energy projects in an interview with leading Iranian media outlets cited by Armenpress news agency on September 2. He noted the ongoing construction of a third transmission line connecting the Armenian and Iranian power grids.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has been invited by Armenia to a summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) to be held in Yerevan in October. Iran and the Russian-led trade bloc signed a preferential trade agreement last year that should be activated by November.
MINSK, 6 September (BelTA) – Belarus and Armenia have reaffirmed commitment to cooperation within international parliamentary organizations. This matter was discussed at a meeting of the commission on cooperation between the Belarusian National Assembly and the Armenian National Assembly which was held in Yerevan on 5 September, BelTA learned from the press service of the House of Representatives of Belarus’ National Assembly.
The Belarusian delegation was led by Vice Speaker of the House of Representatives Boleslav Pirshtuk. “Participants of the meeting reaffirmed the commitment of the two countries to cooperation within international parliamentary organizations, discussed important matters in this area and in bilateral trade and economic cooperation,” the press service noted.
The MPs outlined certain measures to enhance Belarus-Armenia business cooperation, which include setting up joint enterprises to produce equipment, machines, and vehicles and searching for mutually beneficial financial instruments, the press service of the House of Representatives added.
The next meeting of the interparliamentary commission is scheduled to take place in Minsk in 2020.
Photo courtesy of the House of Representatives of Belarus’ National Assembly
At the initiative of Sasna Tsrer party, Zhirayr Sefilyan and Garegin Chugaszyan met with Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on September 5 to discuss the domestic political situation in the country.
Party’s political board member Garegin Chugaszyan said that the meeting is not an extraordinary one and in near future they will be much more intensive.
Party’s press service reports that the party representatives briefed on their concerns to the PM which particularly referred to the Artsakh conflict, environment, judicial-legal reforms.
Chugaszyan said they also referred to the counter-revolutionary revenge.
“We see revenge forces which are yet small but trying to consolidate under a new flag putting in front of them ideological issue. It makes us worry, They may use the dissatisfaction of the people not satisfied with the results registered after the revolution and lead to counter-revolutionary revenge,” Chugaszyan said.
Turkish Armenian MP of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Garo Paylan has called for investigation into the pogroms of September 6/7 in 1955, Ermenihaber reported.
“The Pogrom of September 6/7, 1955 is one of the gravest incidents that took place in the Republic of Turkey and has still not been confronted. According to the official figures, in Istanbul only, 73 churches, 8 sacred springs, 2 monasteries, 5 thousand and 538 houses and shops, 3 thousand and 584 of which belonged to the Greeks from Turkey, were destroyed, vandalized and plundered,” Paylan said in a statement, adding: “It will be an important step for the Republic of Turkey to confront its past by finding the perpetrators of the Pogrom on September 6/7, 1955, identifying the losses of life and property and compensating the material and non-material losses of the victims and/or their families.”
To note, the Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or September events were organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul’s Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The events were triggered by the false news that the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881—had been bombed the day before. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press, conveying the news in Turkey, was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.