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Paruyr Hayrikyan
Paruyr Hayrikyan was born on July 5, 1949, in Yerevan. While in school, Hayrikyan established the Union of Armenian Youth (UAY). Hayrikyan established contacts with the leaders of ...view moreParuyr Hayrikyan was born on July 5, 1949, in Yerevan. While in school, Hayrikyan established the Union of Armenian Youth (UAY). Hayrikyan established contacts with the leaders of the National United Party, which was founded in April 1966. In July 1968, the KGB uncovered the National United Party and arrested its founder, H. Khachatrian, and his close friends Haroutiunian and Zatikian (the latter was directing Hayrikyan’s activities). Hayrikyan became a leader of the NUP and launched an active campaign aimed at restoring the organization and recruiting new members to the party. As a leader of the organization, Hayrikyan was sentenced to four years in prison. Hayrikyan served his term in a special camp for political prisoners in Mordovia. After returning from prison in 1973, Hayrikyan updated the party’s program by focusing on respect for human rights and the process of popular referendum as the road to democracy and independence. On February 12, 1974, he was again arrested.
In 1984, after 14 years of imprisonment (which included 6 years and 7 months in prisons, another 6 years and 7 months in camps, and 304 days in solitary confinement), Hayrikyan was exiled to Ust-Kut in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, where he lived until the beginning of 1987. In the fall of 1987, Hayrikyan returned to Yerevan and, together with his friends, established the Union for National Self-Determination (UNSD). UNSD’s major objective was to achieve Armenia’s independence through the peaceful declaration of self-determination in a nationwide referendum.
In 1988, under the decree of the Presidium of the USSR’s Supreme Council, Hayrikyan was stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled to Ethiopia. The US State Department immediately offered him political asylum. With the assistance of the Armenian community of Ethiopia, Hayrikyan went to Italy and then to France and Germany.
The USA was the last stop in his long travels. In the fall of 1988, Hayrikyan’s wife and three children joined him in the United States. The next year, Hayrikyan’s mother (his father, Arshavir Hayrikyan, died in the fall of 1987) and his sister (the widow of Stepan Zatikian, who was sentenced to death by firing squad) and her children also joined him.
During his stay abroad, Hayrikyan acquired wide popularity. He was elected as chairman of the international organization Democracy and Independence. In July 1990, Hayrikyan was nominated in absentia for the post of the Supreme Council chairman but lost, however, to Levon Ter-Petrossian. In August 1990, Senator Bob Dole led forty US senators in pressuring Gorbachev to restore Paruyr Hayrikyan’s Soviet citizenship. Further pressured by the Armenian Parliament, the Kremlin restored Hayrikyan’s citizenship in November 1990 and allowed him to return to Armenia. He returned to Armenia, while his wife chose to stay in the USA with the couple’s three children. In October 1991, Hayrikyan stood for the office of president. Judging by election returns, Hayrikyan ranked second after Levon Ter-Petrossian, but his supporters claimed that there were multiple violations during the campaign, including an act of violence committed against him and his supporters in the village of Paravakar (Tavoush District). These charges were subsequently judged to be true by the decision of the Armenian courts.
Since then, Paruyr Hayrikyan has been a member of the parliament for nine years, has held positions as chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission and ombudsman of the Republic of Armenia. He earned a degree in constitutional law from the Yerevan State University in 1998. Hayrikyan has also authored numerous patriotic and lyric songs and poems, as well as political and constitutional-theory pieces, such as “Formula of a State’s Democraticity” and “Complete Democracy.” On a Quest of the Light was published in Armenian in 2004 by UNSD Publishing House (ISBN 99930-980-5-1).
He concluded his research on complete democracy in 2012 by publishing a manual called Toward Absolute Democracy in English, Armenian, Italian, and Russian (see www.demos.am). He got nominated to run for president of Armenia particularly to bring this theory to life. Toward the middle of the election on January 31, 2013, there was an assassination attempt on his life by a group that was sponsored by Russia. After three surgeries, he’s recovering and actively participating in Armenia’s constitutional reforms. He’s also currently writing a three-volume book series on his jail memoirs that is mostly based on miraculously saved papers and documents (as of April 2015, the first book is complete).view less