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景迈山 各民族共生共融的幸福家园_腾讯新闻
Published: 14:35 BST, 22 September 2023 | Updated: 14:48 BST, 22 September 2023
Vladimir Putin has lost one of his top nuclear submarine force commanders after his vehicle was hit by heavy machine gun fire while he was on a peacekeeping mission in Azerbaijan.
Captain Ivan Kovgan, 52, was gunned down in the disputed Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, where he was seconded as deputy commander of a peacekeeping force.
The 52-year-old military leader was also deputy commander of Russia‘s Northern Fleet submarine force based in the Arctic.
He died alongside Colonel Tagir-Murod Karaev, from Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defence Forces, along with four other Russian servicemen, when their UAZ Patriot vehicle was riddled with bullets by the Azerbaijani army.
‘Their vehicle came under fire. Everyone was killed,’ a source said.
Captain Ivan Kovgan (pictured) was killed by machine gun fire in Azerbaijan
His 4×4 vehicle was riddled with machine gun bullets
He and five other Russian servicemen were killed in the attack
Photos of the 4×4 vehicle that held the military figures show it was riddled with bullets.
Those responsible for the shooting of the submarine commander and other peacekeepers have been detained, and are expected to face criminal action.
Their commander has been suspended.
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev personally apologised to Putin for the killing of Kovgan and the other peacekeepers, and promised financial compensation for their families.
‘In order to investigate all the causes of the incident, the investigative authorities of Azerbaijan and Russia are working on the spot,’ said the defence ministry in Baku.
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev has personally apologised for the killings
Kovgan (pictured left) was deputy commander of Russia’s Northern Fleet submarine force based in the Arctic
It called for ‘patience’ during the probe and expressed condolences to the Russian military and the soldiers’ relatives.
The killings came as ceasefire between Azerbaijan and ethnic Armenians in the region was declared, just 24 hours after Azerbaijan launched a military operation to gain full control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenia province.
The area lies in the mountains of the South Caucasus region of eastern Europe and Asia, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and has been at the centre of one of the world’s longest running conflicts.
Russian peacekeepers were sent to the region after thousands of people were reportedly killed in six weeks of fighting between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the self-declared breakaway region of Artsakh.
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We will be removing other discussion posts (posts without actual content) to cut down on the clutter. This is the official place to discuss Season 3, Episode 11! Any serious discussion related to the episode goes in here. Have fun! See a good candidate for a ponymoticon in the new episode? Suggest it here!
I’m not a lawyer. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the majority of the Metropolitan’s readers are also not lawyers. And while there are a few exceptions, I know most of my Facebook followers aren’t lawyers.
And yet, there are many people who seem to be so sure of their understanding about how a grand jury works, that they’re willing to take any decision made at face value — as proof of innocence or guilt.
That’s not actually how a grand jury works. In a grand jury hearing, the prosecution (usually only the prosecution) presents evidence in a relaxed setting to the grand jury, who decide whether to issue an indictment — whether there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime. Since, traditionally, the defense doesn’t get a say, it’s pretty easy to get a grand jury to indict someone in most cases.
In fact, it’s so easy in most cases that a former New York state chief judge, Sol Wachtler, famously remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”
On a federal level (different than the state level, like in Ferguson, Missouri, where most cases are brought before judges for an indictment rather then grand juries), in 2010 (the last year for which we have statistics), grand juries returned just 11 out of 162,000 violent crime cases without an indictment, according to the FBI’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
There is one exception, and we saw it frequently in 2014: when a police officer is charged with a crime, a grand jury only rarely returns an indictment.
We saw this in action when a grand jury failed to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, even on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. We saw it in New York, when a grand jury failed to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death of unarmed Eric Garner (an indictment was, however, handed out for the man who videotaped Garner’s death, with about as much difficulty as it would take to indict a ham sandwich).
According to research by Philip Stinson , an assistant professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, only 41 officers in the United States were charged with murder or manslaughter between 2005 and 2011. Total numbers of officer-related shootings are unclear, as the FBI’s report of 2,718 “justified homicides” by officers over the same period is considered a low estimate, as police organizations aren’t required to submit their records to this report.
So why the discrepancy? If it’s so easy to indict for violent crime, why are so few officers indicted?
There’s a few theories. The first is that we’ve trained the public to trust police officers. That trust can be necessary for those officers to do their jobs, but it may be given too blindly: as the military intelligence community put it when I was in the Air Force, “trust, but verify.”
Since, in officer-involved shootings, the events are often the word of a police officer carrying a public trust versus a victim, who are often busy being dead and unable to defend themselves, grand juries may not give as much credence to evidence against police officers than they do to ordinary citizens.
Another possibility is that prosecutors, on whom much of the burden of securing an indictment in a grand jury falls, are naturally reluctant to push for the prosecution of the officers they have to work with, every day, to enforce the law. This isn’t necessarily something that happens consciously, but prosecutorial bias could easily be a factor, especially if combined with juror bias.
Finally, a misunderstanding in the general public of the lower standards of evidence needed to secure indictment, rather than the “beyond reasonable doubt” required for a conviction, could result in confusion on a jury — and certainly does in the court of public opinion.
Is there a way to fix this? Possibly, require a special prosecutor for all grand jury investigations or indictment hearings involving a police officer, to relieve prosecutors of the inherent conflict of interest in attempting to indict their co-workers. Another would be to do away with grand juries altogether, as a majority of the world has done, and bring charges against officers to a full trial, where guilt or innocence can be determined “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Until we fix the problems with indictment in this country, justice won’t be done. Innocence, or guilt, is not determined in a grand jury.
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NPR News: 09-22-2023 2PM EDT
With the ceasefire in Nagorno-Karabakh falling apart, and no deal between local leaders and the central government in Azerbaijan, the future of Armenians in the region remains precarious.
While the vast majority of Armenian society, the Armenian foreign minister, as well as international observers are gravely concerned for their security, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan says otherwise.
“At this moment, our assessment is that there is no direct threat to the civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh,” Pashinyan said in a live address on September 21.
In a complete contradiction, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan told a UN Security Council meeting on the same day that “Azerbaijan’s intention is to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.”
Since March 2021, access to Armenian-administered Nagorno-Karabakh has been tightly controlled by the Russian peacekeepers, making information difficult to verify. But three days after the beginning of Azerbaijan’s 2023 offensive, credible reports are starting to emerge of civilian casualties and war crimes. The prime minister’s statement triggered widespread outrage and led his critics to repeat their accusations of treason.
“I believe the PM was talking to the domestic audience and trying to avoid panic in Armenian society, while fighting against Russian state attempts to weaponize the suffering of the Armenians of Artsakh to bring down democratic governance in Armenia. He failed in doing so and even angered many of his own supporters,” analyst Eric Hacopian told Eurasianet.
The timing of the statement, right before the UN Security Council meeting, couldn’t have come at a worse time, according to human rights attorney Sheila Paylan. “The statement is puzzling, and also obviously untrue.”
“Perhaps in trying to calm people down, the prime minister thought he needed to make that statement,” she told Eurasianet, noting the angry protests on the streets of Yerevan.
As of September 20, the de facto Karabakh authorities were counting 200 people killed and over 400 wounded. The streets of Stepanakert are filled with “displaced people, hungry, scared, and in uncertainty,” said Karabakh Human Rights Ombudsman Gegham Stepanyan.
According to Stepanyan, his office has received more than 600 cases of people missing in the region, as of September 22nd.
“Lack of communication made it almost impossible to find them or find out whether they were killed or not. Residential areas are cut off from each other, people’s fates are unknown,” former Armenian human rights defender Arman Tatoyan said. There have been reports of a bounty of $500 being placed on the head of a particular Karabakhi Armenian woman on an Azerbaijani Telegram channel. She is to be given to a man named “Murad” as a birthday present, the alleged Telegram post reads.
Some Armenians on social media recalled video evidence of atrocities by Azerbaijani troops against female Armenian soldiers during Baku’s incursions into Armenian territory in September 2022.
Against this backdrop, many found the prime minister’s comment about Armenians not being under threat in Karabakh inexplicably tone-deaf.
He did say in the same remarks, however, that his government was prepared to handle an influx of 40,000 families from Karabakh (which should roughly cover the region’s entire population that Armenian sources estimate at 120,000).
So far there has been no sign of Karabakh Armenians leaving through the Lachin corridor, the only route connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia. Azerbaijan has been tightly restricting and at times completely closing the corridor in one form or another for the past nine months, resulting in acute shortages of food and supplies.
“It’s not opening anytime soon,” said journalist Shant Khatcherian, who is standing by on the Armenian side of the border alongside other journalists, NGO representatives and Armenians who have relatives in Karabakh.
Meanwhile in Armenia, today marks the fourth straight day of protests. Roads have been blocked and dozens of people have been arrested. While the anger against Russia, the European Union, and other international institutions has been palpable, many Armenians are looking closer to home for someone to blame.
Fin DePencier is a journalist based in Yerevan