Defense Ministry should clarify the death circumstances of all the 92 casualties
10:56, April 18, 2016 | News, Other news | Rights of Soldiers/Recruits, The Rights of Conflict Victims | Armed Forces
The past few days have shown a tendency on the part of the Defense Ministry representatives to seek to correct by their statements the stories told by the servicemen. Human rights defender Artur Sakunts, Chairman of Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor, made such an observation in his interview to Lragir.am.
“Of course, it is obvious that the hostilities were initiated by Azerbaijan. However, it is very essential that the Ministry of Defense seems to make statements in an attempt to correct all the testimonies provided by servicemen and published in the mass media. This concerns even possession of proper information on the movement of the Azerbaijani armed forces and preparatory activities to confront it,” Sakunts said.
According to him, the other issue concerns the quality of the armaments, and they try to convert the phrase uttered by Serzh Sargsyan during his meeting with German Chancellor Merkel that we fight with arms dating back to the 1980s, and make statements that our soldiers are provided with modern armament.
According to A. Sakunts, the next issue concerns the quantity of the armaments. Nowadays, servicemen say that they were not provided with proper armaments and they even had to fight with spades. The opposing side fired many shots, but since our soldiers had few shells left, they spared them.
“These are the testimonies of the servicemen who participated in the hostilities. This fact can attest to the state of unpreparedness, since if one is informed of an attack prepared, they should have provided the combat positions with proper armament. In other words, on the one hand we face the issue of inadequate quantity of armaments, and on the other, the improper state of intelligence information. This concerns improper military management, since if on the one hand, they say that we possessed the information, after receiving such information relevant protective measures should have been taken, which we have not seen,” noted the human rights defender.
According to him, the Ministry of Defense and particularly the General Staff should present to the public a clear analysis of the death circumstances of all the 92 casualties. According to Sakunts, the problem lies in the circumstances of the death of soldiers, since these are the data that can make it possible for the public to issue its final opinion identifying the gaps that took human lives.
“In the absence of such information, instead of trying to make propaganda statements and analyses, one should provide precise information; the circumstances of the death of the servicemen are no military secret,” he noted.
According to Sakunts, if during the hostilities there was a clear tendency of the need to provide information, nowadays they do not want to provide the public with information on the causes. Moreover, they try to conceal such causes and provide a completely different picture instead.
“Obviously, the behavior of the political and military leaders is uncoordinated to some extent, and the information provided by the 2 sources above differs. Essentially, the Ministry of Defense also attempts to use such analyzes to resolve the issues of the political leadership, which I consider inappropriate since the circumstances of the death of 92 people are much more important for the public to form adequate opinions on changing the situation, than the attempts to settle political issues at the expense of human lives. In other words, the responsibility before soldiers should be primary, the only one,” he said.
Artur Sakunts observes that on the days of the hostilities, there were also some death cases in the army not caused by the shooting by the enemy; some death cases of servicemen were caused by a car accident. This means that even at the peak of hostilities, we had death cases related to military discipline. In other words, the maladies peculiar to the system continued to be demonstrated even in such an escalated situation; and someone must be held responsible for this situation and this situation must be analyzed.
“The political leadership is also directly responsible for the RA military security concept, and I think that the political leadership should have issued its position on the situation. They should touch upon both the domestic issues caused by their omission and the gaps in the foreign policy. They are right in criticizing Russia for promoting the arms race, but they should have the courage to admit that if they had stood against the arms race at due time, that might have yielded quite positive results to mitigate or prevent the recent military adventurism. And starting to voice through some channels the issue that Russia sells arms to Azerbaijan, after the war has been unleashed, is not effective; it should have been stated well before that Russian Federation considered it a business”, he said.
According to Sakunts, as of today, the military and political leaderships have not come to adequate conclusions and do not share the thinking that the evaluation and analyzes should be performed in view of responsibility rather than in view of concealing it.