Epress.am News from Armenia
In Nagorno-Karabakh's Kashatagh region people are mobilized and taken not to combat positions to defend their country, but to other border areas “to protect the Prime Minister's wheat fields from Azerbaijani fire,” a Kashatagh woman told Hraparak newspaper reporter Syuzan Simonyan. The ordinary people of Karabakh, according to the woman, talk about this among themselves; however, no one dares to raise the issue on the spot for fear of retribution.
“They use military police to scare people into going to positions. There is a community of Ishkhanadzor in Kashatagh where our villagers are forced to work for meager pay,” the woman said.
Artak Beglaryan, a spokesperson for NKR Prime Minister Ara Harutyunyan, denied these rumours in conversation with Hraparak. “The story about people protecting the PM's fields is nothing but slander; the Prime Minister's company does not own lands in Kashatagh, and nowhere do villagers defend his lands for free,” Beglaryan insisted. The official alleged that villagers must have mistaken the lands cultivated by the “Support Fund of Village and Agriculture” for lands owned by Harutyunyan's company.
“Arayik Harutyunyan, as the head of government, pays frequent visits to the fund, and sometimes there are people who, deliberately or by mistake, speculate his name to their own advantage,” Beglaryan added.
Nevertheless, the paper continues, residents of Kashatagh are convinced that the lands do indeed belong to the Prime Minister; “We are well aware of that fund: if they sell [cheaper] flour here claiming that it's the 'fund's flour,' we'll buy it; but his name is everywhere, everyone knows the Prime Minister owns stores.”