Stepan Safaryan: "Public Dialogues" give Armenian and Azerbaijani journalists real picture of situation in neighbouring region

The project "Public Dialogue", implemented on the Internet, will contribute to better understanding and breaking down false stereotypes, gained by the media workers of Armenia and Azerbaijan and the readers. This was told by the initiators of the project and journalists to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Under the project "Public Dialogues", experts are interviewed at the same time by journalists of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Besides, the project organizes online discussions and online conferences with experts from the countries of the South Caucasus. The project exists since 2005. At the first stage, only interviews were conducted and published in the media of the two countries with the support of the British organization "Conciliation Resources".

This year, with the financial support of the British Embassy in Armenia, the website was created to publish materials not only of the current stage of the project, but also of the past stages.

Laura Bagdasaryan, Director of the Centre "Region", has noted that the purpose of the "Public Dialogues" is to allow representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani societies getting first-hand information, enabling them to carry out correct communication and discuss together the issues "on a civilized level".

"Our resource is of particular interest for those persons, who are interested in the realities of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Very often, there can be opinions that differ from those that are normally distributed in our two societies," Laura Bagdasaryan has emphasized.

According to her, the "publicdialogues" is the only synchronous joint Armenian-Azerbaijani website, and experts from Armenia and Azerbaijan respond to the same questions and give an overview of the situation in both countries.

Stepan Safaryan, a Board member of the "Heritage" Party, believes that the projects like the "publicdialogues" "contribute to sobering" and give a chance to look at the situation with a real point of view.

Stepan Safaryan treats the conflict around Nagorno-Karabakh as the most urgent issue for the Armenian-Azerbaijani communication and dialogues. He recalls that "in theory of negotiations, communication is a must." Stepan Safaryan believes that both nations have to learn to dialogue, even if they do not share the view points of each other.