Healthcare concerns in the ranks: Two conscripts hospitalized in separate cases, one dies
10:14, January 16, 2014 | News, Other news | Right to Life, Rights of Soldiers/Recruits | Armed Forces
A soldier has died as a result of a disease last week, and another conscript has been hospitalized in critical condition, with the incidents having created another occasion to raise concern about issues in the army in Armenia.
Wednesday, Nagorno Karabakh’s Defense Army press service informed that at early hours of January 15, conscript Hayk Makaryan, 20, died of a disease (not specified) at one of northern military units. Details are being investigated.
On January 13 another conscript, 18-year-old Mher Khlghatyan was transferred to the Central Clinical Military Hospital in Yerevan from the Vardenis military unit, Armenia.
Khlghatyan’s family told the press that they had sent a healthy son to the army and now have received a physically abused son with numerous traces of cigarette burns on his body and acute pneumonia. They claim officers have used force against Khlghatyan.
ArmeniaNow inquiry from Yerevan’s Central Clinical Military Hospital has shown that the young man is in the intensive care unit and that for a few days his commander has visited him; they refused to reveal any other details.
The Defense Ministry’s (DM) investigative body has filed a criminal case with charges of an official’s careless approach to his service, whose negligence has yielded grave results and violence against a subordinate related to the fulfillment of military service duties.
Chief Military Officer of the DM investigative body’s press service Meri Sargsyan told ArmeniaNow that the forensic examination and the preliminary investigation are ongoing. Later she told media that two persons, of whom one is an officer, had been arrested on suspicion of beating Khlghatyan.
On Tuesday, Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan paid a visit to the Vardenis unit as part of his field trip. He looked into the case details, gave instructions to hold an administrative investigation and said he would take the situation under his personal supervision.
Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor office leader Artur Sakunts says this is a consequence of incompetent medical assistance, adding that their research has shown a growing tendency of lethal outcomes in the army as a result of poor medical assistance.
According to the Assembly’s research four out of the 31 deaths in the army were caused by lack of proper medical assistance.
Sakunts says despite DM representatives’ claims that there are no recruitment issues in the army, that issue does exist and it is done at any cost, including conscription of young men with health problems.
“The country is facing a situation when military issues are being solved at any cost even at the expense of using any available resource, which becomes problematic, because the sphere of defense is unable to solve all the issues alone. It is conditioned by the authorities’ policy which hits right back at the very vulnerable defense sphere,” says Sakunts.