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Minister Oskanian Addresses UN Assembly on Interfaith and Intercultural
Dialogue

Minister Vartan Oskanian addressed the UN High-Level Session on
Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue. Sponsored by the Phillipines and
Pakistan, the session was dedicated to the need to promote dialog between
cultures and religions for the purpose of securing peace.

Armenia’s Foreign Minister joined several dozen ministers and high-level
government officials to address the session.

REMARKS BY
H.E. VARTAN OSKANIAN
MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA
UN INTERFAITH AND INTERCULTURAL HIGH LEVEL DIALOGUE
NEW YORK
Oct 4. 2007

Dear Colleagues,

As an ancient people, serving as the perennial buffer between empires, on
the most trampled path on earth, Armenians have become living witnesses of
the benefit of dialogue between and within cultures. We have been engaged in
that international exchange for ages. Today, we in Armenia are among its
greatest promoters, especially in our neighborhood.

Our geography has compelled us to seek bridges with peoples and cultures
different from our own. If we have an independent state today, it is because
we succeeded in perpetuating our identity even as we interacted and
exchanged with societies around us.

It is because of our experience that we feel compelled to continually search
for non-traditional ways to approach the overarching issue of our time:
living at peace in a pluralist world.

Not only have we lived in a pluralist neighborhood, we have, because of
genocide and dispersion, had to set up homes and shops in nearly every
country on earth. This began when Armenian genocide survivors were welcomed
and happily integrated into the fabric of the Arab Middle East. Religious
differences did not preclude inclusion. Our Diaspora, living as it did
across borders became both the means and the beneficiary of international
exchange and dialogue.

We are living witnesses then to the fact that religious and linguistic
differences need not translate to enmity and exclusion. It is intolerance —
from its simplest form to its most complex — a rejection of individuals¹
human dignity, that causes ruptures in and between societies.

To build a peace atop pain and destruction, it is clear that solutions can
only be found through the genuine and universal acceptance and application
of basic, fundamental individual and collective human rights.

Those rights include the right to determine one¹s destiny, to live free of
security and oppression. The struggle of our brothers and sisters in Nagorno
Karabakh is exactly that – a struggle for the most basic human right, the
right to live free. It is not a struggle against anyone¹s religion or
culture. The effort to seek support against their struggle by relying on
ethnic and religious solidarity belies the universality of their claim –
that people everywhere – whether Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh,
Palestinians, or the people of Darfur – all deserve to live freely and in
dignity.

As societies which had experienced pain and suffering at the hands of
oppressors, we must teach and rely on the moral, ethical, social and
political benefits of tolerance and cooperation, and not feed the fears of
otherness and exclusion.

The frustrations, the resentments and the hostilities of victims of
xenophobia and racism, should not be underestimated or dismissed. The
Security implications of pent-up anger, of daily humiliations and
hopelessness cannot be exaggerated. These must concern us all, for reasons
of principle as well as enlightened self-interest.

Our objective is a country and a world where the rights of individuals and
groups are respected, where each neighborhood and each community, each city
and country, each region and continent, are safe havens for all who live or
travel there. Religion is used to tear people apart, as are economic
disparities, language and ideology. But the frustrating and fascinating
contradiction is that it is faith and humanity that also bind people
together.