The President of the Republic, Vahagn Khachaturyan had a meeting with the Acting Prime Minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, within the framework of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
While welcoming President Khachaturian, the Prime Minister emphasized that Armenian-Lebanese relations have the best traditions from both political and trade-economic perspectives. President Khachaturyan noted that Lebanon is one of Armenia's long-standing friends in the Arab world, with whom contacts and cooperation always have vast opportunities for rapprochement and development.
During the conversation, Vahagn Khachaturyan drew the attention of his Lebanese colleague to the speech of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the recently held 31st Arab League summit, in which the latter tries to present the Karabakh conflict as a manifestation of religious intolerance, mentioning the destroyed mosques.
President Khachaturyan emphasized that the statements of the President of Azerbaijan have nothing to do with reality. Armenia has many friends in the Muslim world, and the mentioned destroyed mosques refer to the period of the Soviet Union when the state policy was equally antagonistic towards all religions. There were also many destroyed churches in the same period.
The Prime Minister of Lebanon emphasized that he was personally present at the summit and expressed his opinion that to avoid such misunderstandings, Armenia should intensify its efforts toward closer relations with the states of the Arab world.