Pashinyan’s advisor: the scapegoat or the one responsible for losses in April war?

On December 17, 2018 the acting Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan appointed Arshak Karapetyan to be his advisor. The latter became Pashinyan’s 14th advisor.

Major General Arshak Karapetyan is the former head of the Intelligence Department Head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia. He was dismissed by Serzh Sargsyan on April 26, 2016. No official explanation was given about that dismissal at that time; however, the intelligence department was accused of not promptly informing the armed forces about the Azerbaijani aggression during the April war.

Karapetyan’s name was again circulated in the press in February 2018 when he was appointed military attaché of the Armenian Embassy in Russia.

According to Hetk chief editor Edik Baghdasaryan, Karapetyan is the number one officer responsible for the losses in the April war, while former Defense Minister Andranik Kocharyan mentioned in February that because of the absence of a transparent process, it is difficult to definitely say why Karapetyan was dismissed. There is an opinion that Karapetyan and other officers of the Armed Forces who were dismissed after the April war could have been just scapegoats for the former Armenian authorities.

However, it should be noted, that Pashinyan’s wife, Anna Hakobyan, in an article published in “Haykakan Zhamanak” on April 28, 2016, considered the dismissal of Karapetyan “a concrete answer” to the question why the Armenian army was not properly informed about the planned attack on the night of April 2, 2016, and thus had great human losses.

Hakobyan had made a reference to the Russian “Kommersant“, according the sources of which Karapetyan was “removed due to the mistakes of his subordinates who failed to inform the highest leadership about the deployment of heavy weapons (in particular TOS-1A heavy flamethrowers) on the line of contact by Azerbaijani forces.”

Meanwhile, in the video shot during Pashinyan’s march, acting Minister of Education and Science Arayik Harutyunyan considers Karapetyan’s appointment as a military attaché very strange and notes that no official is convicted for failure of intelligence during the April war.

Hovhannes Nazaretyan