American envoy says April fights showed scale of corruption in Armenia
By Rashid Shirinov
The armed provocation, staged by the Armenian Armed Forces on the front line in April 2016, showed that the aggressor country is not capable to withstand the power of Azerbaijani Army. The state-level corruption in Armenia and horrifying thievery in the military sphere were among the reasons for Armenian soldiers’ retreat.
The April events, also dubbed as the Four-Day War, saw heavy casualties by Armenian side and liberation of some Armenia-held territory for the first time since the 1994 ceasefire signed between the two countries.
This loss also revealed the poor state of the Armenian army, where soldiers were left without elementary means of protection, including bullet-proof vests, helmets and night vision devices. Moreover, it turned out that most of the military equipment of the Armenian army was unusable as the armored vehicles had no fuel, ammunition was sold or “lost”, and money allocated for the personnel was embezzled.
These facts also drew the attention of U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Richard Mills.
“Corruption threat to national security in Armenia became all too evident after the clashes in Karabakh in April 2016,” he said in his speech at the American Chamber of Commerce in Armenia (AmCham).
The diplomat added that since then, sense of corruption as an evil which erodes state security has been the subject of public discourse in Armenia.
A much-touted anti-corruption drive in Armenia was launched in 2015, but the campaign was doomed to failure from its early state as leading government members of the committee – including its chair, the prime minister, were accused of corruption.
The Anti-Corruption Council was supposed to have opposition and civil society members along with government officials on its ranks, no one from the opposition or non-governmental organizations joined it largely because of skepticism about its credibility.
Mills further expressed regret that the lack of settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict suspends economic potential of Armenia as the closed because of the conflict boundaries stimulate corruption in the country.
The ambassador believes that the Armenian government should empower state institutions and send a clear message that corruption should not be tolerated, and that no one is above the law. “Absent this message, no truly transformative change can occur,” he said.
However, the fact that the Armenian economy fades year by year shows that the government of the country is not interested in stopping or cannot stop the awful corruption that spreads like a plague in Armenia.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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