Armenian Officials’ Children Should Serve in Army, Unpaid Education System Should be Abolished: Bleyan

The system of call to military service is the greatest violation of human rights in Armenia, said Mkhitar Sebastatsy educational complex principal, Armenia’s former education minister Ashot Bleyan.

According to him, it is clearly defined in the RA Constitution that each male citizen in the Republic of Armenia is subject to military service and, under the law on conscription, must fulfill his obligations. If there is mandatory military service for men in the country, then that is for all men, without exception. According to Bleyan, what sort of privilege is post-secondary education for a man not to fulfill his constitutional obligation?

The former education minister proposes a clear legal definition: all healthy male citizens, once they reach the age of 18, shall serve in Armenia’s armed forces.

In Bleyan’s opinion, this is not currently the case because a group of individuals in power, members of parliament, ministers, and so on, have created a way for their children to avoid military service.

“As for cutbacks in state-sponsored (i.e. scholarship) spots [in post-secondary institutions], if they are cut by half, it turns out that the average Armenian citizen, who could’ve appeared on that list of privileged individuals not serving [in the army], is left out. The aforementioned elite are Armenian citizens who live in other countries, are subject to other laws, and corrupt the entire system from top to bottom. 

“Today, post-secondary institutions are encouraged by the state to produce unemployed diplomats. There are a dozen faculties training psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, historians, in which 9 out of 10 students will be unemployed in the future. The priority in the issue of training personnel should be the social order. If today all post-secondary institutions in Armenia shut down for 20 years, it would turn out that we wouldn’t need any new professionals for 20 years. The existing educational establishments are occupied with ensuring jobs exclusively for their own employees. They don’t provide professional training and perform only a social service. There are certain quantity of lecturers who shouldn’t be idle. To not allow that, there must be a certain quantity of lecturers who must be paid for. To put it this way, a new form of taxation has emerged for parents. Why a form of taxation? Because that cost cannot be called an investment in education.

“In my opinion, the unpaid education system can be entirely eliminated. But parallel to that, respective social systems must be operational, which will provide children in financial need the opportunity to study,” he said.