Azernews.Az

By Abdul Kerimkhanov

Over the past 30 years, 170,000 boys aged five to 19 have left Armenia, deputy head of the Armenian National Congress Aram Manukyan has said.

Manukyan made the remarks during the parliamentary hearings on "Education Reforms, Upcoming Strategic Challenges". He raised an alarm over Armenia’s shrinking population and the migration of the country’s potential soldiers and taxpayers.

"And now these people are gone. They have disappeared from our country. This problem - the migration problem must be solved, otherwise we will never solve anything," Manukyan stated.

Explaining the reason for the migration, Manukyan unequivocally stated that young men want to avoid military service in the country, which is at a war. He considers that most of the existing problems will be solved only after the solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan.

It is noteworthy that in August 1990, Manukyan read out a declaration of independence of Armenia. Now, 29 years later, he sums up terrible results for his country. Manukyan’s appeal sounds like a voice crying in the wilderness. It seems that Manukyan proposes to solve the problem by closing the borders for potential conscripts.

The fact that 170,000 Armenian men have left the country is an important indicator for Armenia, the country with the population of 2,957,500 people.

Migration of young men is not the only problem facing Armenia. The country’s army is also in a dire condition.

For instance, on December 19, the 911 Service of Armenia’s Emergency Situations Ministry received an alarm about collapse in the two-story building of Military Registration Office N 1 in Yerevan.

It turned out that nearly 30 square meter floor in one of the rooms of the first floor of the mentioned building collapsed. Fourteen people were hospitalized due to the incident.

As a result of the incident, the floor in the waiting room collapsed. The fall was quite deep.

One of the conscripts reasonably assumed that the floor had failed because the military registration and enlistment office building was rather old, and at that moment there were too many people in the collapsed room.

Judging by the appearance of the building, it was built in the early 1970s. The walls inside this building look renovated and clean, but it turned out to be rotten from the inside. Apparently, the money was allocated for major repairs, but only superficial ones were made, and the remaining money was successfully stolen by the officers.

Interestingly, Armenia spends vast amount of money on its military. According to the plans announced by the Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, at the end of October 2018, it was planned to increase defense spending by 25.3 percent by 2020 compared to the same indicator in 2018.

It is remarkable that a few days prior to the embarrassing incident, Pashinyan had boasted that “over the past year and a half, an unprecedented amount of weapons has been acquired for the Armenian armed forces.”

Pashinyan also stated the importance of “the work done to improve the conditions of service of the Armed Forces, increase social guarantees and increase efficiency”.

It should be note that the winter conscription in Armenia began much earlier in the fourth quarter of 2019. Instead of January 1-January 31, this time the Armenian government decided to start this unpopular event with the Armenian youth earlier, namely on December 16.

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Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

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