The incident occurred on the parliament floor amid a continuing scandal over conditions in which the remains of some of those soldiers were kept at a morgue in Abovian, a town just north of Yerevan.
Photographs publicized earlier this week showed them stuffed into plastic bags lying on the ground in the morgue’s basement, which was not refrigerated to prevent their decomposition. They caused outrage in Armenia, with many accusing the authorities of dishonoring the fallen soldiers who have still not been definitively identified.
Health Minister Anahit Avanesian apologized to the soldiers’ families before the morgue’s director and two other employees were fired on Wednesday.
Opposition deputies joined in the chorus of condemnation during a session of the National Assembly chaired by deputy speaker Lena Nazarian. They claimed that the degrading conditions were indicative of the authorities’ attitude toward the war victims.
“What message is the state sending to soldiers in this explosive situation? That they will end up being corpses stuffed into bags and thrown into some room?” said Taguhi Tovmasian, a lawmaker who left Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s My Step bloc following Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war.
“This is the worst possible thing that could have happened, and I believe apologies are not enough in this case,” she added.
“Idiot,” Nazarian muttered right after Tovmasian’s speech. She did not switch off her microphone before uttering the insult, meaning that it was heard by deputies and journalists present in the chamber.
Tovmasian rushed back to the parliament rostrum to condemn Nazarian and demand an apology.
“Instead of apologizing for the fact that your government desecrated corpses … you are responding to criticism with an insult. You should be ashamed of yourself,” said the former newspaper editor.
Nazarian, who is a senior member of My Step, refused to apologize both during and after the session.
“Mrs. Tovmasian must herself apologize for the fact that while being a member of the My Step parliamentary group she acted not as a team member but as a correspondent for her newspaper and attended the group’s meetings only for that purpose,” the vice-speaker told reporters.
She said Tovmasian must also apologize for defecting from the ruling bloc, blaming Armenia’s leadership for the outcome of the Karabakh war and joining a recently formed opposition bloc running in the snap parliamentary elections slated for June 20.
Pashinian commented on the scandal at the start of a weekly meeting of his cabinet held on Thursday. He said he too was shocked by the images taken at the Abovian morgue but insisted that they do not reflect the current government’s “treatment of fallen soldiers and deceased persons in general.”
Pashinian and his health minister argued that the government has upgraded Armenian mortuaries and forensic medicine facilities since taking office three years ago. “We are changing the system but changing people is not that easy,” the prime minister said, putting the blame on the fired morgue personnel.