Epress.am News from Armenia
The Armenian government’s initiative to abolish military draft deferments is a manifestation of the concept of “nation-army;” the bottom line is that everything in this country – science, industry, education – should serve the interests of the army, ethnologist Hranush Kharatyan stated on Tuesday during a discussion on the topic.
“We should plant potatoes if we know that the army will buy it; if not, we do not need to plant potatoes. The industry has to sew clothes for the army; if it’s unable to, then it must provide the army with something else, and so on and so forth. Everything leads to the fact that whatever happens in this country, it has to somehow serve the interests of the army,” Kharatyan said.
Hovsep Khurshudyan, chairman of the Yerevan-based “Free Citizen” Civic Initiatives Support Centre, also criticized the “nation-army” concept, saying that the authorities proposal “is not militarization, but monetization.”
“They offer to pay anyone who is willing to make a self-sacrifice. That’s the basis of the concept. They see everything solely from a financial perspective. They also say that a 19-year-old should not go and die on the border, but a 30-year-old should. What is that supposed to mean – ‘he already has three children, let him die, and we’ll provide for his kids’? This is a typical example of monetization,” Khurshudyan concluded.
Mikayel Hovhannisyan, a member of the 2004 For the Development of Science initiative, argued that the militarization is carried out by the Armenian authorities under the guise of pseudo-patriotism so that people do not object or rebel, “because no one can speak out against patriotism out of fear of being labeled a traitor and a deserter.”
“We need to do our best to abolish the ‘nation-army’ concept in Armenia. Armenia should be developing, combat-ready and so on, but it should not be possessed with the terrible idea of turning its nation into an army. This, among other things, would perpetuate the power of the ruling Republican Party,” he stated.
Hovsep Khurshudyan further commented on the protest movement around the draft deferment abolishment initiative; according to the speaker, exempting scientists from military service “is elitism.”
“This is a different kind of elitism. The elite are currently the only ones who can afford to evade military service with money. Let’s be frank, the discussion against the abolishment of draft deferments is a discussion about not going into the army at all; about exempting a certain group from military service since they are more important, they are scientists. Who decides who is more important? What’s more, [the opposers] do not solely argue for the value of time, but also life. We know that military service in Armenia carries with it a threat to life,” Khurshudyan added.