Last week the active part of the society, which, as we know, is the overwhelming minority in Armenia, continued dealing with Harsnakar. It is good that people are consistent in that issue – the anger of that movement’s activists is honest and absolutely justified. Although it is clear that parties will try to use that for achieving their goals, convincing that the very next day after the change of power, oligarchs and their bodyguards will behave like Eton College alumni. Nonetheless, it doesn’t discredit the wave of social activity against Vahe Avetyan’s death in any way.
Last week, another incident took place, which, I think, was also terrifying – I mean the death of Zhora Atoyan, a freedom fighter from Gyumri, who was basically killed too. What I say is, certainly, not a legal assessment, but on the other hand, how can one call a trial and a verdict, according to which, Atoyan had falsified his documentation and it turns out that he didn’t have the right to military pension as a participant in the war? How was the prosecution able to prove that this person had not been contused during the war and had made it up? Moreover, our law-enforcement system is convinced that not only was he not injured during the war, but now it was also “simulation,” when he sometimes couldn’t attend the court sessions and was in the hospital. And the climax of all that is that since the freedom fighter’s pension was ostensibly “illegal,” he had no right to free medications either and our “humane” investigators attached his medications and he couldn’t afford them. I am convinced that in the developed countries the prosecution would have inquired whether there was any causal connection between all these facts and Zhora Atoyan’s death and people guilty of inflicting deadly harm on a person’s health would have stood trial.
In the past, in the 1990s, to cook up a case against an unpleasant person they used to put narcotics in his pocket. Now the methods are more “civilized” – they say to a freedom fighter whose health was already damaged on the battlefield that he is not a freedom fighter, he has made up his biography, his service to the country equals zero. In reality, this method is crueler – it can really, as you see, kill a person.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
