The authorities put the topic of Shushi on the agenda because it is a political issue, not a legal one, former First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, Tiran Khachatryan told journalists at the September 2 rally of the Resistance Movement in France Square in Yerevan.
According to him, the legal field in Armenia is not and cannot be independent; if politics chooses its own vision, then the legal field is guided.
Asked if the government seems to be trying to dump the blame for the defeat in the 44-day war on the command staff, Khachatryan said that after Nikol Pashinyan's statement that he was number one responsible but not the number one culprit, this continuation was expected.
"There was no other option in this situation, we had to decide who was responsible – ordinary people, volunteers or lower-level commanders who, to put it mildly, were not responsible," Khachatryan said.
Asked whether Jalal Harutyunyan and Mikayel Arzumanyan could have omitted anything in their actions, he replied, "That is wrong."
As for the legislative initiative of the Defense Ministry, which proposes to exempt from compulsory military service by paying 24 million AMD, Khachatryan said that there are corruption risks in this proposal.
"It turns out that people who have money will be able to be exempt from the army, while those who don't have money won't be able to. What does it mean to be exempt from serving the homeland in exchange for money? If a person realizes what the Motherland is, he must serve," concluded the former first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces.