Anna Hakobyan, the wife of Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan has launched a "women for peace" initiative, and spoke about the human cost of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict at a meeting in Moscow with Russian women.
The semi-official Armenpress news agency reported that Anna Hakobyan said that the main mission of the initiative is to contribute to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. "It isn't important how this conflict originated. What matters is the loss of human lives, young human lives, that are the cost of this conflict".
Hakobyan recalled that during the 2016 April War, she was an executive at a news media company and followed the coverage of the war in both the Armenian and Azerbaijani media. "Believe me, when looking at Azerbaijani soldiers, at their faces, I was noting that these children aren't any different from our soldiers. The expression in their eyes was the same - fearful and anxious," she said.
"However, we have what we have, and it does not matter what each of the states has gained from that war, who is satisfied, who is dissatisfied. The important thing is that young and bright lives have been extinguished, families have become orphaned, and new armies of widowed mothers have been formed in both countries".
Hakobyan called on political decision-makers of all sides to do their best to put aside the guns, and asked the participants of the meeting to join her campaign which aims at establishing peace, for the sake of preserving the young lives on both sides of the border.
Hakobyan invited participants of the meeting to visit Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, and to repeat this appeal from there. She also asked the women present to use every opportunity to make this appeal from the Azerbaijan side as well.
sopurce: commonspace.eu with agencies
photo: Anna Hakobyan launching her "Womern for peace" initiative in Moscow on 24 July 2018
