The arrest of Gen Manvel Grigoryan ("General Manvel") [on 16 June] and a heightened emotional follow-up of the act without any more or less appropriate assessment of what is happening has become an informational trend in Armenia over the past few days.
The government and the state-run and private media that serve them have done a lot to make the public perceive this issue only within the emotional sphere. However, this act is far from comprising an emotional component alone. The Armenian government are quite pragmatic in their objective of getting rid of the remaining vestiges of the war that ended back 24 Years ago and transferring certain powers back to the state.
On the one hand, Grigoryan's arrest is a demonstrative punishment for those, who continue to live and become rich in Armenia and [Azerbaijan's breakaway Nagorno-]Karabakh at the expense of the past war. Grigoryan is a classical representative of the class, paramilitary bourgeois, who rose due to the war and were becoming rich for decades at the expense of ancient glory [Grigoryan was awarded the title of hero of Karabakh for his contribution to the victory of the Armenian forces in the Karabakh war]. The Yerkrapah Union of Volunteers public organisation that he headed was in high demand in the 1990s. The regular army of the country was only being formed at that time and it was volunteers organised in various formats, who replaced the state institutions that were inexistent or inefficient due to the lack of experience. After the war, such organisations helped veterans and families of the deceased and defended volunteers' rights, often interpreting these rights in a peculiar manner.
Later, as the army and state institutions came into being, the formal need in organisations like Yerkrapah started decreasing. However, changing their aims and aspirations, they joined politics. Yerkrapah became involved in politics back during the Karabakh war in 1992-1994. At the beginning, they resorted to petty criminal activities (for example, taking cars and real property allegedly for the needs of the army) and by the elections of 1996, they were already an influential force in politics, their methods remaining within the frames of the definitions of the Criminal Code. This is not a specifically Armenian phenomenon. It is called "Vietnam syndrome" and it emerges in societies effectively after any war. This is how historian Karen Ghazaryan described the phenomenon for the Regnum news agency:
[Passage omitted: description of the Vietnam syndrome by Ghazaryan]
Up until now, Grigoryan has efficiently combined complexes (psychological traumas) with the political purposes of his clan. He and his Yerkrapah that had effectively turned into a militarised structure have always been necessary to the government – [former presidents] Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, and Serzh Sargsyan. Local feudal lords used to suppress dissent during elections and ensure votes in favour of the government not only within the frames of their dominions – the area of Ejmiatsin, but also in other regions, where Yerkrapah members were present. Due to this, the government was ready to forgive them anything. Moreover, the government delegated to General Manvel the exclusive right of the state to use force. In the meantime, duplication of absolute and exclusive rights of the state weakens the latter and, among others, reduces the standing of the state even in the eyes of those, who are part of the state machine.
It is obvious that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan does not need Yerkrapah's support at the forthcoming early parliamentary elections. The denial of rumours that Pashinyan's companion Sasun Mikayelyan intended to head Yerkrapah also confirms this. It is obvious that the organisation will be dissolved as something that turned into an atavism on the body of the state long ago. I would like to repeat that the essence of what is happening cannot be reduced to the new government's struggle against corruption. A couple of KamAz trucks full of tinned meat and a couple of offroaders stolen from the army are just an insignificant part of the top of the iceberg of corruption.
Police shake-ups of the representatives of the "thieves'" and criminal world are in the same line with the case of "General Manvel". Pashinyan is depriving individual groups the right to violence government has granted them over 25 years, obviously concentrating it in the hands of the state, which is how it should be. It is another issue, how the government will use the right of the state to use force, when it becomes exclusive.