01 December 2019, 11:00
Armenian rights defenders stress need for measures to reduce army suicides
The suicide statistics in the Armenian Army indicates an unresolved discipline problem; however, tougher sanctions for driving to suicide are not enough to reduce the figures, Arthur Sakunts and Zhanna Aleksanyan, rights defenders, believe. Khachatur Gasparyan, a psychologist, has urged to pay attention to the relationships of soldiers with officers.
Arthur Sakunts, the head of the Vanadzor office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent that complex measures are needed to prevent incidents in the army, namely, psychological, educational and social efforts.
Zhanna Aleksanyan, the head of the NGO "Journalists for Human Rights", believes that hazing in the army is pushing soldiers to the verge of suicides.
According to the Vanadzor office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly, from 2010 to November 11, 2019, 630 soldiers of Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) perished; 249 of them died as a result of ceasefire violations; while non-combat losses amounted to 381 cases, of which 88 ones were suicides.
Ms Aleksanyan said that the NGO is now dealing with five criminal cases, which are qualified by investigators as suicides, while "there are proofs that they were murders." "A soldier died on July 24, 2019; investigators assert that the senior combat officer slapped the soldier; and the latter opened submachine gun fire, but failed to hit anyone, and then committed suicide," she has explained, while insisting that "the soldier was tortured and shot dead by staging suicide."
This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on November 30, 2019 at 10:45 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.
Author: Tigran Petrosyan Source: CK correspondent
