We appreciate this opportunity to come to the Council of Europe. We consider this a significant forum in which questions dealing with democratisation, security and stability in Europe can be discussed. Ever since our independence we have tried to communicate our interest to become part of Europe, to participate in its evolution, to contribute to and to benefit from its values practices, as well as its institutions. In that sense, we are all very well aware that we have to continue to make conscious efforts to fulfil our engagements. We have no doubt that Armenia has been the first beneficiary of its own efforts trying to meet the standards of democratisation. We have taken seriously the human and the civil rights' components of the values embodied by the European Council because we believe that long-term European security and stability will be based in the application and implementation of these values.

However, it would be on our part, as well as on the part of anybody else, disingenuous to claim that all the regions of emergent Europe, the old and the new, pre and post the collapse of the Berlin Wall, or to pretend that things were uniform and uniformly progressive everywhere. We recognise that our region, the region of Transcaucasus, while very much eager to move towards closer relations with Europe, suffers at this moment from problems associated with transitional adjustments.

We, as a country, and the region, as a whole, are trying to adjust to the multiple stresses of post-Soviet economic, cultural, and political transformation. Clearly, these conflicts can stress relations as much within states, as among them. Armenia does not see either itself or the region as being permanently condemned to marginalization. But rather it believes that with the help of European institutions whether parliamentary, economic or security based, these will be ways to bring lasting stability and co-operation that are based on solid and shared emergent values.

We need and welcome Europe's role not as a policeman, but as a guardian, not so much as supervision, but as a guide and a raw-model. We need Europe, and in this case, the institutions of European Council to provide the inspiration that comes with its own historic achievements in overcoming centenary conflicts. We want its moral authority to stem from its pursuit of principles of fairness, equitableness, the renunciation of violence and upholding of human rights.

Our region, we recognise, must find ways to deal with its conflicts ultimately on its own terms, and through the actions and the accommodations of its own peoples and its political leaders. What Armenia wishes for Europe to do is to provide not only the support and the potential incentives for this process of transformation, but it wants Europe to provide the intellectual, conceptual models for exploring appropriate and suitable arrangements in the resolution of seemingly intractable conflicts. We believe that in designing appropriate frameworks within which hostile parties can find a common language and reassurances may have to be flexible designs, designs that must be specifically geared at addressing specific types of conflicts. If you could allow me the truism, we should think along the lines of form follows function. The function of the probable solutions that must emerge and the broad outline of an eventual peace agreement must rely, we believe, on devices or principles that are tailor-made, highly specific, and perhaps even unique. Without that kind of a customisation, we believe that generic, standard-issue formulas will not be well-suited for the resolution of the conflict in which we find ourselves at this moment deeply evolved, and whose long-term outcome is of great concern to us.

For those who need to be reminded, this may be the right forum in which we want to reiterate our conviction, that is the conviction of my government, as well as of our people, that we see our long-term welfare in the fullest expression of our national interests in the region characterised by stability, security and a very high degree of economic co-operation and harmonisation. Our size, our history, our geographic location and our rational assessment of global evolutionary forces lead us to believe that we have every reason to seek peace and stability as conditions for the welfare and economic development of our population. That is why we want to make whatever solutions are being proposed to be solutions that are not superficial, short-term and tend to relieve momentarily some nagging frictions. We want those solutions to be realistic, fare, but most of all, appropriate to address the fundamental questions.

At this point, may I be presumptuous enough to draw your attention to an interesting phenomenon. I would like to draw your attention to a metaphor of a seismic fault-line that seems to occasionally criss-cross the geopolitical landscape of Europe. Allow me to say that in the last century there were times when one would have thought of Strasbourg sitting squarely on a geopolitical fault-line. At the very least, the residents of this city know very well the times when the earth shook, so to speak, and it shook with the force of guns under the feet of soldiers, and with the deafening noise of competing languages. And yet, here we are, meeting together within an institutional framework, the Council of Europe, that seems to have at last found a way to build a resilient structure, an institution, if you will, the optimists might even use the term supranational, as a way of coping with the equivalent of seismic political activity. Please think the same way of similar political fault-lines criss-crossing our region, our entire region, and think of us all together in need of building similarly resilient structure. It is our conviction that just as in Strasbourg, ultimately there were new visions, flexible visions, adaptive visions that had to take shape to essentially perform a shock-absorber function between traditionally inimical neighbours We would like to believe that the Caucasus needs also that kind of courageous vision.

Those of us here, who may have had in our previous lives a passing acquaintance of engineering, are well aware of the fact that heavy and rigid structures are not always well suited to withstand tremors. Instead, structures that resist shock require built into them flexibility, some rule for give and take, formulas that create space, a political architecture that recognises the need to adapt to the particularities of specific stresses. It is in that sense that we find very encouraging the thinking and the proposals of all those who seek novel ways to construct frameworks within which competing people and competing interests can coexist. We equally find not so helpful attempts at falling back on generic formulas that would like to adopt as dogma concepts and principles when they are clearly not functionally adaptive to all conflicts of all times.

In conclusion, may I simply invite the Council of Europe to reflect on a related issue in a region characterised by multiple forms of uneven development at places, fragmentation and an unequal distribution of resources? The role of the outsiders should be one of helping create and maintain equilibrium. European institutions should be careful through their own actions and often inadvertently to provoke further disequilibrium and a perception of inequity. It is in this spirit that my government looks forward to Europe's constructive role through all its institutions and to particularly Council of Europe that seems to be more concerned than any other institution with upholding of democratic norms and civilised values.