Human right activist exposes problems of Armenian army Humiliation of soldiers and criminal subculture

Nazeli Movsisyan, a human rights activist, coordinator of the Civilian Control Division of the Defense and Security Sector of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly Office has unveiled the problems of the Armenian Armed Forces.

"Unfortunately, I do not see reforms in the Armenian armed forces. The reforms that have been announced in the army by the authorities have not yielded results, and there is really no consistent schedule of work in this direction," Movsisyan said during an interview with Armenian media, commenting on the recent developments in the Armenian army, Caliber.Az reports.

"Especially in the area where we are now talking about the deaths of soldiers in the armed forces, it is not appropriate to talk about reforms. Because last year and starting from this year we have cases of deaths of servicemen in non-combat conditions. It should be noted that last year we had quite a large number of deaths of servicemen. There are also facts of results of non-statutory relations of servicemen and numerous other cases, as a result of which servicemen are not killed, but there is criminal behaviour in the army. This proves that there is still a lot of work to be done in this system to solve the accumulated problems.

In addition to that, the Armenian Armed Forces also record the most frequent cases of humiliation of soldiers and facts of imposition of criminal subculture. It should be noted that there were also many incidents in 2023. Details of the events were published by the Investigative Committee or became known from other sources. From these data it became known about numerous incidents, there was a bad attitude of commanders to servicemen, torture, degrading treatment, beatings. It means that those criminal acts, which the Armenian Ministry of Defense initially prioritized to eradicate as a rule in the army, have not been eliminated and continue.

In many cases, this is aggravated by inadequate investigation, when the perpetrators are not punished, which additionally causes impunity, and such cases, of course, cannot be reduced under these conditions," the human rights activist believes.