Armenia Begins Probe of 2016 War

Members of the former government have complained that they are being unfairly targeted. “Pashinyan will try to corner the [former ruling] Republican Party, Serzh Sargsyan and Bako Sahakyan, in general all those people who can falsely be prosecuted for this,” said Armen Ashotyan, a senior official in the Republican Party, in an interview with the TV station 5th Channel.

The involvement by parliament in military oversight “offers a degree of promise and potential that the Armenian parliament will adopt a more active and assertive role as an institutional counterweight to the executive branch,” Richard Giragosian, head of the Yerevan think tank Regional Studies Center, told Eurasianet. The commission also could determine “critical lessons learned” that could drive future reforms, he said.

But he cautioned that the makeup of the commission was cause for concern. “Although the process of the investigation is reasonable, the parliamentary committee in charge of the investigation does not have the military experience or even the resources to conduct a comprehensive and impartial investigation,” Giragosian said. He warned against the investigation being used as a “vendetta” against the former authorities. “If that were to happen, it would not only damage the current Defense Ministry but would also diminish trust and confidence in both the military and would weaken parliament itself,” he said.

By showing a willingness to air its dirty laundry, “there might be an indirect message to Azerbaijan, that in post-revolutionary Armenia sensitive issues pertaining to the military and security sector – usually a taboo in countries at war – can be scrutinized,” said Anahit Shirinyan, a political analyst. It also showed, she told Eurasianet, that “issues of good governance are now of higher priority to Armenia than military-patriotic rhetoric which is often used to conceal mismanagement and corruption.”

Several Defense Ministry officials were fired shortly after the fighting on charges of corruption.

This is not the first time Pashinyan has addressed the need to investigate the April 2016 fighting. During an October 2017 hearing, when he was an opposition MP, he called for a commission to look into the event. But then he appeared to try to implicate Russia.

“After joining [in 2014] the Eurasian Economic Union [a Russia-led trade bloc], Armenia lost a significant portion of territory,” Pashinyan said then. He accused the then-ruling Republicans of justifying membership in the EAEU, which Pashinyan’s bloc opposed, by tying it to Russia’s security guarantees for Armenia. “You say there is a security issue involved, then how did it happen that an EAEU member was fighting with weapons from the 1980s?” he asked.

(Ani Mejlumyan is a reporter based in Yerevan. This piece was originally written for Eurasianet.)