“The state is sick”: Artur Sakunts reacts to Vigen Sargsyan’s suggestion
18:36, May 22, 2017 | News, Other news
Starting from this year, each school must refer at least 1 of its graduates to a military educational institution. RA Defense Minister Vigen Sargsyan stated this at the ‘Nation-Army’ conference. He mentioned that headmasters might consider this a recommendation.
“If a school has over 100 graduates, 2 or 3 of them must apply to military educational institutions. Please, focus on it right now as you will get soon some promotional materials, namely posters to hang in the school and booklets for students; this means relevant campaign activity should be carried out. And in our turn, we will work with the regional (marz) government offices. Now we are at the stage of accepting applications and we must see this effect”, Sargsyan said.
Human rights activist Artur Sakunts finds the motives behind such a decision non-understandable: “Honestly, I have no idea what mechanism will be used to realize all this. Also, this program in itself blatantly contradicts the Constitution stating that everybody has a choice. I see that every person is under constitutional obligation to take part in protection of the country and that we have a law on liability to military service, but the obligation to study at military educational institutions falls beyond any reasonable logic. And their yesterday’s program suggestions are all aimed at placing the whole burden of protection of the country again on the poor and disadvantaged citizens as due to their poverty and lack of any other alternatives in earning a living, they will have to take that option”, Artur Sakunts said noting that citizens found themselves in such a social situation due to the mistakes of the ruling elite.
Artur Sakunts has noted that this step leads the country to militarization. “The current situation, when the economy is monopolized, the situation of one-party political framework leads us towards a military-feudal state where everything will be in the hands of the junta. And this is a junta. In fact, the classic Armenian military junta is replaced with a seemingly democratic but actually military-feudal dictatorship. And in this case, the economy, science and culture become marginal. This is a direct path to destruction. It turns out that instead of reviewing their vicious policy, the authorities take a parasitic approach: they destroy the existing resources without creating any new ones”, Sakunts said in his interview to Politik.am .
The human rights activist notes that even Israel facing various military conflicts for years takes no such steps. “Actually, they use the material values of the country to get rich and use the poor groups of the population to protect the country. It is clear that the sons of no state official or businessman will go to the border for 5 million AMD, isn’t it? On monthly basis, it makes about 140 thousand AMD”, our interlocutor said.
As for the persons supporting the program, Artur Sakunts said that their support was quite expected in atmosphere we currently have in our country. “In other words, people appreciate not the practice as such, but rather the money. This simply results from poor thinking. Over years, such thinking was instilled into people. People do not even understand what they support. If such a program is supported, this means that the state is seriously sick. The fact that the program of easier death is welcome speaks of a very serious disease”, the human rights activist said adding that the authorities were not brave enough to speak out about the demographic problems in the country. “They are not brave enough to speak out about the current shameful situation. If they introduce a program, it means there is a problem. Why don’t they speak out about this problem?” said Artur Sakunts.