Today, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan attended the opening ceremony of a reconstructed memorial to Great Patriotic War and Artsakh War victims in Hrazdan.

The Premier laid a wreath at the memorial and bowed flowers to the graves of perished freedom-fighters, paying tribute to their memory

In his speech, Nikol Pashinyan stated in part, “The readiness to die for the homeland is the highest point of human consciousness; there is no consciousness higher than it. I wonder why our soldiers sacrificed their lives: for simply dying? No way, they did so for the sake of living: along with every killed soldier each living person’s responsibility increases; it is getting increasingly stronger.

Why do we keep building such high monuments: for the dead? I think not, I think that we build those monuments for ourselves in order to feel the responsibility that we bear on our shoulders every day so that every time we have a killed soldier, every time we look at these high monuments we could regain the sense of shame, recover our conscience, see reason; should it suddenly turn out that we have done something wrong, we could realize and admit our mistakes; if we get weaker for a moment, we could smile because these people have not died for death, but for life; they did not die for the sake of misfortune, these people were killed for the sake of happiness, and they did their best to bring us happiness, and we must do what we need to bring happiness. And today’s reality is about that because today in the Republic of Armenia we can say that we have taken our share of responsibility, we have gone halfway to complete what was left unfinished after each killed person.

And there is no doubt that we are just erecting these high monuments in order to feel our responsibility before the future, and there is no doubt that this responsibility is always before us because these monuments are not only in sight, but also in our heart.

And every morning as we bow down to these monuments, every night we have to answer these monuments, every evening, every morning we must stand before these monuments and answer for what we have done and what we do. And today’s event implies that we should do more every other day, every week and every month.

Why do we live? We live because we have a responsibility before our past, our future, we live because today we are proud and confident in that responsibility and we are here today because we know that we will bear that responsibility on the highest level and will be proud of all our victims we will pass proudly to our future generations before all our martyrs and to the free, happy and powerful Armenia relay.

So, long live the Republic of Armenia! Long live our children, who are living and will live in a free and happy Armenia.”

The memorial was reconstructed on the initiative of National Assembly member Sasun Mikayelyan who is the commander of Sasun volunteer squad.