YEREVAN. – Ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) MP Arpine Hovhannisyan, who is also a member in Armenia’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), explained why the delegation did not pose any questions to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev after his address on Tuesday at PACE.

“PACE delegation membership also suggests diplomatic work, [and] therefore diplomatic approaches, too. If you have only a few seconds for the right to [pose a] question, whereas the respondent has an unlimited time to voice his ‘counterarguments’ [and] without expecting a response, it is indispensable to calculate the usefulness, or the harmfulness factor of [posing] such a question. A question cannot and shall not be an end unto itself.        

“The Armenian delegation’s silence was a calculated and, as the case showed, a justified silence. [It was] a silence which was unexpected for President Aliyev, and it became the basis for his extremely unbalanced and reactionary response to and conduct toward the questions posed by our European colleagues, in fact discrediting Azerbaijan’s chairmanship [at the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe] from the very beginning.

“There is silence which is more powerful than many words. The Armenian delegation’s silence was a calculated, justified and an effective silence. And this silence should be appreciated,” Hovhannisyan specifically wrote in her Facebook account.