Onik Gasparyan, former chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Armenia (RA), has issued a statement addressing the National Assembly (NA) speaker, the heads of the three NA factions, as well as the chairman of the NA Standing Committee on Defense and Security, ArmLur.am reports.
"More than five months have passed since the end of the war unleashed by the Azerbaijani-Turkish coalition against the Artsakh [(Nagorno-Karabakh)] Republic on September 27, 2020. During all this time, many questions have accumulated among various segments of our society about the many events (…) that took place before the war, during it, as well as after the signing of the ceasefire.
The [Armenian] public media is flooded with various information, assessments, disclosures, conspiracy theories.
Information that has been partially declassified and made public by some state bodies (…) has been added to it in recent times.
All this has become a real threat to our national security, undermines our public solidarity, demoralizes our armed forces and, as a result, makes our state vulnerable to further possible encroachments by the enemy.
During all this time, the RA General Staff of the Armed Forces has shown maximum restraint in this matter, (…). But the recently increasing speculations (…) make it necessary to legally regulate the process of state investigation of all circumstances related to the past war (…).
Therefore, I petition to you to immediately initiate, within the framework of the powers vested in you by Article 108, Clause 4 of the RA Constitution, the establishment of an NA inquiry committee in the circumstances of the 44-day war in 2020. (…). I express my readiness to provide maximum assistance to the work of the future committee of inquiry," Gasparyan’s statement reads in particular.
