I missed this story when it came out last Thursday, but it came up in discussion with RFE/RL’s Emil Danielyan last night and I did see that Blogrel posted something on this rather concerning story. As most parents will tell you, the last place they want their sons to end up is in the Armenian military, and not least because more end up dead as a result of hazing than from the enemy.

Factor in a normal “salary” of $3 a month for a conscript and apalling food, and you can perhaps understand why many pay thousands of dollars in bribes to get out of serving their country. However, this story surpasses all of that.

Three Armenian army soldiers are facing a life in prison, accused of a double murder which they say they did not commit and which their lawyers believe was the work of their military commander in Nagorno-Karabakh.

An appeals court in Yerevan convicted this week Razmik Sargsian, Musa Serobian and Arayik Zalian of killing two fellow conscripts in December 2003, in a trial denounced by Armenian human rights organizations as a parody of justice.

The high-profile case has cast a rare media spotlight on dozens of out-of-combat deaths that occur in Armenia’s Armed Forces each year. Official figures show that Armenian servicemen are at much greater risk of dying at the hands of their commanders and comrades than from enemy fire.

[…]

Several soldiers of their unit were promptly arrested by military prosecutors on suspicion of involvement in the crime. One of them effectively testified that the killings were committed by none other than Captain Ivan Grigorian, the Karabakh Armenian commander of their battalion.

The investigators, however, dismissed the testimony, releasing the suspects and arresting three other soldiers that were subsequently given life sentences. The conviction was based on a videotaped “confession” made by one of them, Razmik Sargsian, after fours days of interrogation in April 2004. Sargsian and a team of lawyers representing the three men insists that the confession was extracted under sadistic duress and threats of rape. The 20-year-old has alleged that Armenia’s chief military prosecutor, Gagik Jahangirian, personally punched him in the face.

Although Sargsian’s face was clearly swollen and bruised in video of the interrogation shown during a court session in Yerevan last year, the investigators have strongly denied torturing him. A court in the Karabakh capital Stepanakert, which has a legally questionable status of an Armenian district court contradicting Armenia’s constitution, refused to investigate the torture allegations before sentencing the three servicemen to 15 years in prison one year ago.

[…]

Larisa Alaverdian, Armenia’s former human rights ombudsperson who has personally dealt with the case, likewise decried “blatant violations” of due process which she believes were committed during the pre-trial investigation and the court hearings in Stepanakert and Yerevan.

[…]

The three young men may now spend the rest of their lives behind bars because of what another human rights campaigner, Mikael Danielian, regards as yet another high-level cover-up of army deaths. “This case is not unprecedented,” he told RFE/RL. “There have been numerous such cases. It’s just that they did not have so much resonance.”

[…]

The Armenian military insists that the number of deaths within its ranks has steadily declined since the late 1990s. However, even the official death statistics shows that it is still far from eliminating the problem. According to the Military Prosecutor’s Office, 89 soldiers died in the course of last year and only 15 of them were shot dead in skirmishes with Azerbaijani forces on the Karabakh frontline and the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

Ishkhanian estimated that at least 1,000 Armenian conscripts aged between 18 and 20 have lost their lives in out-of-combat incidents since the 1994 truce. He could not recall any instances of senior or mid-ranking army officers prosecuted in connection with those deaths.

Great stuff, and something for the Diaspora to bear in mind when they consider applying for citizenship of the Republic of Armenia, or before they condemn the rest of us for decrying the lack of the rule of law and blatant human rights violations in the country. The full news item is here.