Epress.am News from Armenia
After the article published in the Hraparak newspaper criticizing the Armenian Armed Forces, the Public Television of Armenia dedicated a large segment of one of its main news programs to denigrating the article and criticizing the women who spoke “badly” of the army in the article. What’s more, the guest of the program, Defense Ministry spokesperson Artsrun Hovhannisyan, called one of the women “mentally ill.”
“The myth about freedom of speech is so fictitious that the whole state machine was involved in silencing media which are beyond their control. Hraparak entered an forbidden territory, where there is such lawlessness the disclosure of which is prohibited,” the paper writes in a follow up article.
In the piece which the authorities found so outrageous, Hraparak had published the stories of a soldier’s mother and a female soldier about the life in the Armenian army. The mother had said military authorities had diagnosed her son with neurasthenia before drafting him to the army. “Either free him from service or take back this diagnosis. My son is a normal person, he has no mental issues. Why would they both draft him and give him such a label?” the woman had complained.
The servicewoman, for her part, had talked about the situation inside the army, saying that anyone who criticized the army could either be fired or labeled mentally ill. The woman had also subjected defense minister Vigen Sargsyan to particularly sharp criticism.
“And because of this, Artsrun Hovhannisyan, who is not a psychiatrist and whose duties are completely different, handed down a diagnosis and announced that the woman who had come to us was mentally ill,” Hraparak writes, stressing that Hovhannisyan should have at least been sacked for these words or apologized to the servicewoman. The paper adds that the defense ministry has not demanded that Hraparak publish a refutation.