Armenian public demand investigation into officers' violence applied to soldiers

On September 11, the YouTube placed a video "True face of our army", where young men dressed in uniform of the Armed Forces of Armenia are beaten by a person stripped to the waist, supposedly, an officer. The video has stirred up the country's public, which now demands to investigate the circumstances of the incident. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) does not exclude that the video could be forged.

The "Caucasian Knot" correspondent reports that the video shows a supposed military clapping ears and faces of two younger guys, supposedly, his subordinates, pours water on them, then beats them again, and thus - many times. Now, this video is no longer available at the resource.

The Armenian National Congress (ANC) has set a deadline of one week for country's authorities to find the person guilty of the mockery over soldiers and severely punish him. The inquiry should be run in cooperation with civil society representatives, runs the statement of the ANC.

The Congress urges the authorities to publicly guarantee safety and immunity of the two pictured soldiers and the author of the video.

On September 12, the Department for Information and PR of the Armenian MoD promulgated a statement, which runs the Ministry has taken respective steps towards verifying the authenticity of the video and identifying the persons filmed, the authors, and punishing those who had applied violence. "The MoD is resolutely condemning production and conscious dissemination of similar materials, directed to discredit and undermine the prestige of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia," runs the statement.

In the opinion of Ruben Pogosyan, chief expert of the "Aig" Centre of Psychological Services, the main point is to set up the proper moral and psychological atmosphere, where a person could feel protected.

The concern of rights defender Arthur Sakunts, head of the Vanadzor office of the Helsinki Civil Assembly, is caused not by absence of the real civil control over the armed forces, but by the existing attitude of the law enforcement bodies to crimes committed in the army. "Law enforcers try not to solve but conceal such crimes," he believes.