PR and propaganda fail in the face of reality in Armenia army

Yes, tragic incidents in the army happened in the past too. Yes, we may not have realised their full extend in the past due to lack of publicity. There might be some truth in such statements, but they cannot be used to justify the appalling reality of violence and abuse in the Armenian army that tend to turn into routine statistics of non-combat deaths as part of daily news headlines.

3 deaths + “incidents” in 5 days... Plus all those soldiers who were killed or ‘suicided’ over the past year or so... This is an indication of endemic problems of violence and bullying in our army and lawlessness on all the levels of military management and beyond that, without addressing properly and comprehensively, unsurprisingly getting worse and worse... And a reflection of complacency towards violence in our society where machismo still rules.

Ironically, even now state propaganda machine tries blaming “foreign sponsored NGOs” and human rights activists for damaging army’s reputation and its military and psychological capabilities with their criticism, publicity and demands. So it’s not murders or ‘suicides’ of soldiers but publicity surrounding those incidents and demand for answers and responsibilities that damage Armenia’s security and defense?!

We may do the most impressive breathtaking military parades for propaganda purposes. But any propaganda or PR exercise fail spectacularly when facing such realities.

Armenia police chief Alik Sargsyan’s esprit de corps

Although RFE/RL presents his statement as “unprecedented public apology”, I am afraid, I can’t see “sorry” here. Armenia police chief Alik Sargsyan simply uses this no-sorry-but-let-me-make-an-impression-of-being-sorry statement, yes, to make an impression and damage limitation to his career. Too late for “sorry”, Mr. Alik Sargsyan. Way too late. Especially when it is NOT “sorry”. And btw, where is his “sorry” and condolences to Khalafyan’s family?

He misguided public in what looks like an attempt at cover up the alleged murder in a police department by portraying it as a “suicide case” and adamantly denying any violence or torture from the police side. However, few days ago, this ‘idyllic’ picture of the “purest” police force in the world got crashed when the head of the criminal investigations unit has been charged with using violence against Khalafyan.

I do agree with the human rights activist Artur Sakunts who argues that police chief should at the very least resign in such circumstances. I disagree with a senior member of the ruling Republican party that his position would be untenable if another similar incident happens. Do we need more deaths to act?

It’s not that violence could not happen in police. It must not, but in real life you can’t be guaranteed from such incidents even in the most democratic countries. It’s an attempt at cover up the incident and protect the esprit de corps (‘честь мундира’) that is inexcusable.

There is now a special page set up by some activists in Armenian sector of Facebook demanding resignation of Alik Sargsyan. Last time I checked, it had more than 500 supporters.

While the title of that page may be considered a bit rude, frankly, that’s not important right now. The essence is clear. Violence and brutalities in Armenian police departments must stop. All responsible for human rights abuses must be held accountable before the law. Armenia police chief must go.

Human Rights Watch to Armenia Prosecutor General: "profound concern" and calls for independent investigation re death of Khalafyan in the police custody

Copy of the original letter (click to enlarge)

*My previous post on the topic: Likbez for armenia police chief: "Forced suicide" = Murder

Likbez for Armenia police chief: "Forced suicide" = Murder

Armenia police chief might think that re-defining last week's suspicious death in a police custody of Armenian citizen Khalafyan will help him & co escape responsibility for what increasingly looks as an attempt at cover up of police violence and abuse. Time to remind Mr Alik Sargsyan the definition of "forced suicide".

Wikipedia: "Forced suicide is a method of execution"

Even if for a second we believe this 'updated' version, still a murder, Mr Sargsyan. Still, a murder.

In fact, as @tzitzernak tweeted: "Not sure which is worse - if it was murder or forced suicide.Both are pathological, but latter seems somehow sicker."

My previous posts on the topic:

Armenian police: shoot to kill?

Interview with mother of Khalafyan (video). It was not "suicide", it was a murder, insist relatives

*thanks to @tzitzernak for Wikipedia link.

Interview with mother of Khalafyan (video). It was not "suicide", it was a murder, insist relatives

No, it was not "suicide", as Armenia police chief Alik Sargsyan tries (unsuccessfully!) to convince the public. It was a murder, insist relatives.

For background of this story - Armenian police: shoot to kill?

Armenian police: shoot to kill?

...And here is the latest from our “purest” police where only “real men” work. (copyright - Armenia police chief Alik Sargsyan)

“The purest”? Remind me, when was the last time we heard of “the purest”? Oh, it was in another country, and some decades back, and ended up with the World War.

And this is against the backdrop of the very latest reports of alleged murder in Armenian police department of an Armenian citizen who was unfortunate enough to be taken to the police department for interrogation. You think people are safe in police departments? Think again. Only couple of days ago, head of police Alik Sargsyan were attempting at what increasingly looks like a cover up by presenting this case (below) as a ”suicide” and rejecting any possibility of police killing the citizen.

Now let’s read the latest links mentioning the ‘very pure’ Armenian police.

A murder in police
The citizen killed at the Police department of Charentsavan is Vahan Khalafyan, an inhabitant of Charentsavan, born in 1986. The information received to date comes to testify that the incident at the police station yesterday constitutes murder. The 24-year old detained young man was stabbed to death and murdered under unknown circumstances. Yet the Police try to cover up the incident and, no less than at the level of RA Police Chief Alik Sargsyan. As expected, the police are trying to present the case as suicide.

Prosecutors Probe Another Death In Armenian Police Custody
The Armenian police chief, Alik Sargsian, stood by this version of events at a news conference held on Wednesday. He dismissed claims, made by the dead man’s relative and backed by some Armenian newspapers, that Khalafian was tortured to death. [...]

Artur Sakunts, a prominent human rights campaigner investigating the affair, openly accused the Charentsavan police of brutally ill-treating Khalafian during the interrogation. He claimed that the three other local residents suspected of theft were also beaten up in police custody.

Ill-treatment of criminal suspects has long been regarded as the most frequent form of human rights violations in Armenia. Local and international human rights groups continue to accused the police and other law-enforcement bodies of extracting confessions by force and intimidation.

“Witnesses continued to report that police beat citizens during arrest and interrogation while in detention,” the U.S. State Department said in its annual report on human rights practices in Armenia released last month. It said “most cases of police mistreatment continued to go unreported because of fear of retribution.” Armenian courts usually dismiss torture claims made by suspects, added the report.

The Charentsavan incident is bound to prompt parallels with the May 2007 death in police custody of Levon Gulian, a 31-year-old resident of Yerevan. Gulian was questioned at the police Directorate General of Criminal Investigations as a presumed witness of a deadly shooting that took place outside a restaurant belonging to him.

The police claimed that Gulian fell to his death while attempting to escape from a second-floor interrogation room of the police building in downtown Yerevan. Gulian’s relatives, backed by human rights groups, vehemently disputed the claim, saying that he was apparently tortured before being thrown out of the window.

An Armenian Journalist Notes
Meanwhile Armenian blogger artakevn quotes his Vartan nephew’s and his colleague’s version on how it happened.

They Also Beat Him Up
The autopsy of 24 year-old Vahan Khalafyan, who had been taken to Charentsavan’s police department and later hospitalized with fatal wounds, was performed yesterday.
Two stab wounds and lacerations were found in the area of Vahan Khalafyan’s abdomen along with traces of violence on his legs. However, the examination of his clothing revealed no tears made by knife. This means that the young man’s abdomen was bared when he was stabbed.
***
Poster

When I first saw this poster (via Haykakan Zhamanak, via Nazarian), I thought it must be a photoshop. But as per above reports, it’s an actual poster put on display in Yerevan to mark Police Day, and on the same street where 1 March 08 bloodshed happened. I can imagine how staisfied Alik Sargsyan must have felt when looking at this poster. Now I understand what Armenia police chief meant by referring to “real men” that serve in police forces. Is this a new mission for our “real men”: shoot to kill “internal enemies”, or anyone perceived as such? A very different word comes to my mind instantly, and it does not include “police”.

*pictures - via Haykakan Zhamanak daily

The rise of Russia's neo-nazi

Luke Harding of San Francisco Sentinel details the rise of Russia's neo-nazi movement, providing (among others) a chilling account of the murder of ethnic Armenian by one of those groups in Moscow.


By LUKE HARDING

San Francisco Sentinel

It was 9.10pm and Karen Abramian was returning home to his flat in southwest Moscow. Abramian had been visiting his parents in a nearby tower block. His journey back took five minutes - past a series of grey high-rise buildings soaring into Moscow’s packed skyline and a children’s playground, and up a modest flight of steps. As he punched in the entrance code, two young men, one wearing a baseball cap and one a bandana, approached him from behind. And then they stabbed him. They stabbed him again - methodically slashing his head, neck, back and stomach. Abramian pleaded with his attackers. “Don’t do this. Please take my money,” he begged them. His assailants - two slight, boyish, almost nerdish figures - ignored him, stabbing him 56 times. At this moment, Abramian’s wife Marta peered out of their ninth-floor apartment window and spotted two boys beating a dark shape lying on the ground. The couple’s 14-year-old son Georgy, who had been playing nearby, found his father in the entrance, bleeding profusely. Georgy took off his T-shirt (it was April, still winter in Russia, and bitterly cold), wrapped it around his father and ran upstairs. Abramian was conscious when Georgy came back with a blanket and pillow. Georgy wrapped his father in it and they waited in the gloom for an ambulance. Abramian told his son simply: “They were skinheads.” Four hours later, in the early hours of 17 April 2007, Abramian was dead. Doctors had been unable to stem the colossal loss of blood.

The names of Abramian’s killers are Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, both 17. Their motive for murdering Abramian, the 46-year-old boss of a Moscow insurance company, was ideological. As they saw it, Abramian’s violent death was part of a national liberation movement - an ambitious, quasi-mystical struggle to get rid of Russia’s foreigners, in which they played the role of hero-warriors. The boys had picked Abramian because he was an ethnic Armenian. But his murder was an act of random racist violence: Ryno and Skachevsky spotted him on the street and decided impulsively to kill him. They were apprehended by a neighbour who witnessed the attack and ran after them. They insouciantly escaped on the number 26 tram, but the neighbour, a former investigator, flagged down a passing police Lada and gave chase. Police officers halted the tram and arrested both boys. Ryno and Skachevsky had turned their blood-soaked overcoats inside out; their victim, however, had managed to grab one of them by the arm, leaving behind a bloody print. They made no attempt to disguise their crime; on the contrary, they were proud of it. In their rucksack, detectives discovered 10in knives. In custody, investigators asked Ryno and Skachevsky whether they had committed other murders. To their surprise, the teenagers said they had. In a period of nine months, from August 2006 to April 2007, when they stabbed Abramian, they had killed 20 people and attacked at least 12 others, who had survived. Initially, the police were highly sceptical, assuming that the boys were delusional. Gradually, however, investigators began to confirm Ryno and Skachevsky’s fantastic claims. Prosecutors established that the diminutive pair had indeed killed 20 people.

Ryno and Skachevsky are among the worst mass murderers in Russia’s modern history. Three hours before Abramian’s murder the pair stabbed to death Kyril Sadikov, a Tajik. They ate some food, then set off in search of their next victim. The 45-page court indictment against them shows a disturbing pattern, with the skinheads lying in wait next to different suburban metro stations and stabbing their victims 15 to 60 times. The victims had one thing in common: they weren’t Slavs. Most were guest workers toiling in Moscow’s building industry or as cleaners in the capital’s communal courtyards and urban parks. Nobody knows how many low-wage gastarbeiter are currently resident in Moscow, a teeming metropolis of 12 million people - estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million. Typically, Ryno and Skachevsky’s targets had fled poverty and the impoverished former Soviet republics of Central Asia - Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Others were from China. A few were “of Caucasian appearance”, as the charge sheet puts it, from Russia’s troubled southern provinces of Chechnya or Dagestan.

Like all warriors involved in a holy war, as they perceived it, the boys sometimes made mistakes: several of their dark-skinned victims were actually ethnic Russians. […]

I later discover that most Russian skinheads revere the Führer, believing that his only mistake was to attack Russia. The average age here is about 15 or 16; the style is baseball caps, Burberry scarves and Lonsdale - the uniform of the British far-right. One skinhead even has a Union Flag jacket. There are several girls. The skinheads adhere to two ultra-nationalist groups - the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and the Slavic Union. […]

In December 2008, Ryno and Skachevsky were sentenced to 10 years in jail, the maximum sentence for a juvenile. Five other members of their gang were jailed for between six and 20 years. […] Ryno made a final speech to the jury. In a rambling address, he explained that he committed the murders for the “tsar, country, and monarchy”. Later he revealed that after prison he intends to embark on a new career. He wants to be a politician.

Marta Abramian shows off a photo of her husband, taken a month before his murder. As well as their son Georgy, the couple have two strikingly pretty dark-haired daughters, Meline and Karine, now 20 and 21. The photos show Karen dancing with his girls at a party; other snaps show the family relaxing on holiday in Egypt, next to a camel; there are black and white photos of Karen’s happy boyhood in Baku, Azerbaijan. The couple met and courted in Baku, but in the late 80s they moved to Moscow when war erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Karen studied at Moscow University and then joined an insurance firm, rising to become its general director. He wrote poems and composed songs. “He was a wonderful father, a wonderful son and wonderful husband,” Marta says. “I never thought this could happen to my husband. We considered ourselves real citizens of Russia. We work here. We pay taxes. This is our country.”

We meet in the apartment of Karen’s parents, Asya, 75, and Georgy, 76. They sit together on the sofa holding their son’s framed photo; his murder outrages them still. After an hour punctuated by phone calls from the court - the skinheads’ trial is just ending - Marta takes us to the spot where Karen was murdered. Next to the entrance, she has planted a small fir tree; she and the kids still live upstairs on the ninth floor. “It’s so we can remember Daddy,” she says. “It’s very difficult without him. There is just an empty shape. Nothing can fill the emptiness.”

*photo - via San Francisco Sentinel

Breaking news: Armenia deputy police chief murdered

RFE/RL: Colonel Gevorg Mherian, a deputy chief of the Armenian police, was gunned down outside his Yerevan home late on Tuesday.

Police sources said Mherian, 33, was repeatedly shot in the head by unknown gunmen as he left an apartment building in the capital where lived with his family. A senior medical official told local Kentron television that he was dead by the time an ambulance arrived at the scene.

Dozens of police and other law-enforcement officials, including Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian, rushed there shortly after the murder. The police did not immediately issue any statements.

Mherian was appointed as deputy police chief in July as part of a reshuffle of the higher echelon of Armenia’s security apparatus initiated by President Serzh Sarkisian. He had previously served as an adviser to former President Robert Kocharian monitoring the implementation of the Armenian government’s strategy of combating corruption.
***

As per Armenia Today, he was a close associate of Armenia's ex-president Robert Kocharyan.
***

A1+: Այսօր ժամը 20. 20 -ի սահմաններում Կիեւյան փողոցի վրա գտնվող իր բնակարանի մոտ, հրազենով սպանվել է ՀՀ փոխոստիկանապետ, գնդապետ, 1975թ. ծնված Գեւորգ Մհերյանը: Նա մահացել է գլխին ստացած հրազենային կրակոցից: Մեր տեղեկությունների համաձայն` Մհերյանի վրա արձակվել է 6 կրակոց: Դեպքի վայրից հայտնաբերվել են պարկուճներ, հանցագործության առարկան` զենքը դեպքի վայրում չի հայտնաբերվել:

Դեպքի վայր են ժամանել ՀՀ Ոստիկանության բարձրաստիճան պաշտոնյաներ, ինչպես նաեւ ՀՀ Գլխավոր դատախազ Աղվան Հովսեփյանը, ԱԱԾ պետ Գորիկ Հակոբյանը: Մանրամասները ճշտվում են: Դեպքի առթիվ հարուցվել է քրեական գործ: Քննությունը վարում է Հատուկ քննչական ծառայությունը, որը կոչված է բարձրաստիճան պաշտոնյաների դեմ եւ նրանց կողմից կատարված հանցագործությունների ուսումնասիրմանը եւ բացահայտմանը: Գեւորգ Մհերյանը ՀՀ փոխոստիկանպետի պաշտոնում նշանակվել է 2008թ. հունիսի 2-ին` Սերժ Սար•սյանի հրամանով: Մինչ այդ նա եղել Ռոբերտ Քոչարյանի օգնականը` իրավական գծով:

*photos - Photolur, via A1+