“It is my first visit to the Middle East and North Africa in my capacity as Foreign Minister of Armenia, and it starts from Egypt. A country, which was the first among the Arab countries to recognize the independence of Armenia and back in 1992 host the first diplomatic mission of Armenia in the Middle East.
Relations between our countries, our nations are not assessed exclusively through the prism of these past 28 years. We are privileged to share time-honored relations with Egypt and with the Arab world. It is a relationship of trust and friendship between our peoples. In various parts of history and today as well Armenians have been a part of Egypt, part of its civilization, integral part of the Middle East.
In the very difficult part of our history when the survival of the Armenian people was at stake, Egypt along with other Arab countries received thousands of Armenians fleeing from the horrors of the Genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
Our compatriots made an important contribution to the establishment and development of the state institutions of Egypt and we take great pride in that. Armenians, my compatriots, are provided with all the opportunities to maintain their national identity, their language and traditions. They are proud citizens of Egypt, they are proud Egyptians, and they are provided with every opportunity to also manifest and celebrate their national identity as Armenians and of course, we are deeply grateful to the Government and the people of Egypt for these efforts and the protection of our people.
It is a community of about ten thousand people here, and they are, of course, the bridge through genuine deeply-rooted friendship between our nations.
With Egypt we have very firmly established friendship and very practical relations and this visit is also an opportunity in manifesting, assessing our present state of play in our relations and also we share similar interests in peace, security and development. We know that we have been doing best when we were working together and closely cooperating with each other.
We had a very good discussion in our bilateral agenda, and here we see a good and interesting potential; we are keen to take practical steps in this direction. We have enhanced political dialogue with Egypt, we have trade-economic, cultural relations between our countries. We believe that in the IT sector, in e-governance, in pharmaceuticals, in tourism and education we have interesting potential to further expand, and we will certainly continue doing that.
We have the respective platforms for that: we have the platform of political consultations, the Intergovernmental Commission, and of course the dialogue between the leaders. We do absolutely look forward to welcoming the President of Egypt in Armenia, and I personally also look forward to welcoming my good friend Sameh in Armenia. The visit of the President, that we have in mind and look forward to working very closely together, is an important deadline in our mind to work to consolidate all those important issues of bilateral cooperation.
Within the context of bilateral cooperation, we also value the interest of Egypt in working closely with the Eurasian Economic Union. There is an ongoing negotiating process to sign the free trade agreement and Armenia is very interested to have this process successfully concluded and to have this agreement signed. We will work...
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