Epress.am News from Armenia
“I will fight to discover the truth until my very last breath,” Irina Ghazaryan, the mother of conscript Artur Ghazaryan who died while serving in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2010, said during a solo protest outside the Government building on Thursday.
The parents of several Armenian soldiers, including Ghazaryan, have for over 8 years been regularly holding protest demonstrations outside state institutions demanding thorough and fair investigations into their sons’ non-combat deaths. Today the woman however came to the Government building alone, since most of the other parents have been sick in bed for days.
Over the past 8 years, Ghazaryan has managed to meet with every possible state official: “They have all been replaced over this period – the prime minister, the defense minister, the general prosecutor…”
The woman has met with current defense minister Vigen Sargsyan, too: “He said he was not ‘authorized’ to help me. I replied that if he had served in the army and knew the ins and outs of it, if he knew what a combat position or a trench was, he wouldn’t have told me such a thing. He got angry and red in the face and said I had to apologize to him. It’s them who have to come to get on their knees and apologize to these soldiers’ parents. They say Sargsyan is smart and all that, but he is ignorant when it comes to being a defense minister… He knows nothing about the army.”
The last official Ghazaryan met was deputy defense minister Artak Zakaryan; the latter promised to look into the case: “We were standing outside the Government a few weeks ago when Zakaryan approached me and said he had found out something about my son’s case. He saw me another they and said they had phoned me but I had not picked up. I told him to stop lying… Then one day he asked why I was there again… What? Who is he to tell me whether I should protest or not?”