Comic situation in Armenian army or officers’ fault in majority of crimes
By Abdul Kerimkhanov
Reforms in the Armenian army may well be the subject of many speeches of humorists and satirists.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Defence Minister David Tonoyan regularly promise to purchase new, modern weapons for Armenian army. At the same time, they manage to complain that Azerbaijan continues to equip its army with the most modern weapons of the defence industry of Israel, Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Pakistan and other countries of the world.
Besides, Pashinyan and Tonoyan managed to voice new territorial claims against Azerbaijan, and by contrast, they are trying to pretend to be fighters for peace in the region.
The statement of the Armenian Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan is remarkable in its content. He said that for the most part the number of crimes in the army is connected with officers, according to statistics. Davtyan noted that they develop mechanisms to change the punishment for officers who have committed crimes.
It is amazing, how much time Davtyan spent on acknowledging these obvious facts. The Armenian media, the parents of the soldiers who suffered from “bullying” in the Armenian army, for a long time specifically pointed out that they were raped, humiliated, forced to pay bribes by Armenian officers. The numbers of the military units in which all this happened were also named, as well as the names of these officers who mocked their subordinates.
However, Davtyan was unaware of the above problems. He believed that the Armenian soldiers were raped, humiliated, demanding bribes from their officers. However, hopes of the Prosecutor General did not come true, as the statistics evidences.
Davtyan made a new statement after statistics publication. He proudly stated that a number of cases aged 10-20 years old are currently under investigation.
It means, those who committed crimes in the Armenian army in the last century, have not yet received punishment. It turns out that those who committed crimes during the presidency of Robert Kocharyan and Serzh Sargsyan did not receive punishment until now.
Davtyan seems to have forgotten that any crime should have a statute of limitations. It is obvious that an adequate Prosecutor General cannot be proud of such a speed of decision making on the accused. But, people in Armenia have long been accustomed to be proud of the fact that they cannot, in reality, be a source of pride.
Another recognition by Davtyan turned out to be amusing. As he said, the punishment will be changed for the Armenian army officers who committed crimes. He noted that there are some problems in the implementation of strict punishment by judicial authorities. It means that the Armenian officers not always found guilty of crimes receive a well-deserved punishment in the courts.
Thus, investigation of cases is delayed for decades, and there are also big problems in the matter of fair punishment of the guilty. Although this is a problem of Armenian soldiers’ parents who became victims of the lawlessness perpetrated by the officers. In turn, for the officers themselves, everything continues to be fine.
This is how post-revolutionary Armenia conducts reforms in the army.
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Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94
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