Minister of Defense Seyran Ohanyan, talking about the British Oxford Analytica research center’s analysis on the Armenian army during the meeting with journalists at the Administrative Complex of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Armenia, said that it didn’t correspond to our reality at all what had been written in that analysis and they had carried out defense reforms concerning all areas since 2007.
Let us remind that the analysis read, “Non-combat deaths continue to plague the army and a related pattern of ‘hazing’ (the bullying or humiliation of conscripts), abuse and other unacceptable behavior has sparked concern over a breakdown in military discipline and proper command conduct.”
The question of the Radio Liberty journalist was related to the concerns of dead servicemen’s parents over the preliminary investigation and solving the cases. In this regard the minister of defense said, “Regardless of how well our law-enforcement bodies work, the parents are always dissatisfied, they want maximum, they want the truth to be revealed, they see that the circle of people punished is narrow, they want more people to be punished. Much work is done to make different kinds of examinations in time, the data of both the parents and the councilors are taken into account, I think that we are doing our best to be just and honest with the parents. But no matter how hard we try, the parent has lost his child.”
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Referring to the cases with deadly outcome that took place at the beginning of this year, Seyran Ohanyan considered that a drawback of their institution and noted that they had been taking respective steps already. He stressed at the same time that as long as the humanity existed, there would always be violations of interpersonal relationships, particularly in the institution, where the majority were men and there were issues of self-affirmation.
