LYNC-ARMENIA HELD A LOCAL SEMINAR AND A DEBATES DAY

     On 26th of January the young liberals of Yerevan had a chance to listen to Mrs Yasemin Pamuk’s lecture on the following subject - “What is Liberalism and How it Works”. On that day the Armenian team of Liberal Youth Network of the South Caucasus joined Friedrich Naumann Foundation in organizing the seminar at Aviatrans Hotel in Yerevan and eventually we had a chance to present LYNC to the newcomers of the youth liberal world. 

The first presentation of Mrs Pamuk gave to the participants of the seminar a chance to get more acquainted to the goals and activities of Friedrich Naumann Foundation. It was presented what phenomenas FNF stands for and what it rejects. These liberal aspects of life, including freedom of choice, human rights, etc. appeared to be quite interesting, as they caused an active discussion in the conference hall among the participants. The young activists had a chance to express their point of view on the limits of individual freedom on an example of a person, who wished to appear in the society with a strange look. And this was just one of many examples that gave an opportunity to express youngsters’ individual opinions which varied quite a lot. There was an attempt to find the relation between education and progress, as well as the differences between modernization and westernization. Here also, with the facilitation of Mrs Yasemin Pamuk, the participants talked about the importance of education in the formation of the true path of the progress. 

Afterwards, the vice-president of Political Legal Economic Research and Forecast Center (PLERF) Vahagn Khachatryan switched the attention of the auditorium to the economic aspects of liberalism. He talked about the differences of political regimes that Armenia had gone through and about the situation  in the country nowadays. 

The final point of the program of the seminar was the presentation of LYNC to the participants. The Armenian members of LYNC were pleasantly surprised by the interest of the Armenian young activists in this kind of youth initiative in our country. Despite the fact, that the seminar was planned to last three hours, in fact it took much more time to interpret, discuss, summarize and make conclusions on the chosen liberal subjects.