Raffi K. Hovannisian (born November 20, 1959, Fresno, California, United States) is an American-born Armenian politician and former Foreign Minister of Armenia. He is the leader of the Heritage party.
Raffi Hovannisian is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, the Georgetown University Law Center and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the eldest son of Richard Hovannisian, emeritus professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Vartiter Hovannisian, MD. He is married and has five children.[1]
He is the founding director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies in Yerevan, leads the Heritage political party, and founded the Armenian Bar Association, in addition to having served in many other professional capacities in Armenia and the diaspora.
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Hovannisian has spearheaded the campaign to get Armenia to recognize the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. On August 28, 2007, he introduced to the parliament a bill on a formal recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.[2]
In 2011, Hovannisian encouraged a more assertive Armenian foreign policy, calling for the restitution of territories from both Azerbaijan and Turkey, and support for the rights of the Armenian minority in Georgia, [3] a position that was called "revanchist". [4]
After regional unrest spurred Armenian merchants to demonstrate in Yerevan against a ban on street trading, Heritage and other political parties began to organize more ambitious rallies aimed at forcing broad governmental changes.[5] On 15 March 2011, hoping to draw attention to his party's cause, Hovannisian began a public hunger strike in a small protest camp in Yerevan's Freedom Square. The unity of the opposition was strained when Levon Ter-Petrossian, leader of the Armenian National Congress, led demonstrators into Freedom Square two nights later and allegedly ignored Hovannisian and his supporters. Hovannisian ended his hunger strike on 30 March, but has remained active in protests against President Serzh Sargsyan and his government.[6][7][8]