A few days ago, well-known opposition figure Avetik Chalabyan was released. This happened by force of law because the court did not make a decision to keep him in pre-trial detention for another two months. There was no explanation regarding the state of health in this case, but it can be seen from the footage of Chalabyan leaving the isolation cell that his health was not brilliant.
Recently, supporters of the government have started to express doubts, and maybe those people who have different beliefs from them and are in prison, maybe those “negative characters” are engaged in simulation? Let me remind you that there were similar suspicions in the case of Manvel Grigoryan, but the subsequent course of events showed that the general “didn’t pretend.” Now the same circles are calling not to particularly believe the alarms about the health conditions of Mamikon Aslanyan and Aghvan Hovsepyan.
Two weeks ago, after the death of producer Armen Grigoryan, I noticed that pro-government citizens enthusiastically accepted the news, and the main reaction of that mass was expressed in one word, which, if we try to stay within the framework of the normative vocabulary, can be deciphered as follows: “It’s not bad at all that something like this happened.” Since there are hundreds of thousands of such citizens in Armenia, this attitude indicates a serious disease of our society.
And do you want an example of a healthy society? In 2011, Norwegian Anders Breivik committed a terrorist attack that killed 79 people. Now he is serving his 21-year sentence in a “solitary cell,” which consists of three rooms: an office, a bedroom, and a sports hall. But in Norway, there aren’t hundreds of thousands of people complaining about why Breivik is being held in such good conditions, and even more so, there is no public calling for this criminal to be put to death.
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Although most of the Armenian society is sick, there are people who are more responsible for this disease than the rest. After the same 2011 terrorist attack, then Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg declared that no one could divert his country from its democratic values. If he called to “spread the asphalt” and “plaster the walls,” then, I think, it would be an orientation for many Norwegians.
Of course, it is no less important that those who can at least to some extent influence public opinion, should not be afraid of “public opinion” and should not follow the crowd, should not try to please it. On the contrary, they should call for valuing any human life. No matter what crimes the person is accused of.
Aram Abrahamyan
