Russian Army hazing: 3,000 deaths per year

[hoosier]

3,000 Russian recruits die of army hazing every year
02/22/2005 18:07

Military officials are not willing to talk to parents, who lost their sons in the army_

According to the information from Mother's Right public foundation, about 3,000 servicemen die in the Russian army every year. "The statistics of the Defense Ministry is not trustworthy. Military officials say that 1,100 young men died during their army service in 2004. This information is not true. We are certain that the real figure is three times as much - about three thousand soldiers die in the army on a yearly basis," the chairwoman of the foundation, Veronica Marchenko was quoted by Interfax as saying.

According to Marchenko, about 28 percent of deaths in the army occur in the Moscow region. The Northern Caucasus ranks second with 14 percent. "About 35 percent of parents that come to our organization say that their sons commit suicide in the army," the chairwoman of the organization said.

About 16 percent of Russian recruits commit suicide or die as a result of brutal army hazing. Young men's parents do not believe official versions that explain their children's deaths, because "military officials are not willing to answer their questions," Marchenko stated.

"We have recently had an absolutely outstanding incident, when parents received a call from a military unit. They were told that their son jumped out of a window after he decorated a Christmas tree. Other parents were told that their son committed suicide because he was reading Chekhov," Veronica Marchenko said.

"We have managed to legally prove numerous incidents when young men committed suicide because they had been either driven to suicide or simply murdered," lawyer Ludmila Golikova said. It often happens that military authorities do not inform parents of their child's death for months. Furthermore, if parents suffer a severe shock and become disabled people as a result of the loss, they do not receive any financial help from the state (the rule applies to parents under 50 years of age).

The Office of the Military Prosecutor rejects the fund's information about three thousand military men who died in the Russian army in 2004. "This number is absolutely not true to fact. Three thousand deaths are out of the question," an official spokesman for the Office told Interfax on Monday.

"As far as army hazing is concerned, 44 people died last year in all troops and army units of the Russian Armed Forces. All the guilty people have been called into criminal account and convicted on every of those cases. It touched upon the facts of driving servicemen to suicide too," an official spokesperson for the Office of the Military Prosecutor said.

[DeltAlum]

They're a disgrace to military fraternities all over the world. Let's pull their charter!

[BSUPhiSig'92]

I've read some stories that when the Cold War was still on and the Russians were in Afgahnistan, that the suicide rate was 10x that. Obviously there are lots of problems in Russia, and their army is just part of it.

[Private I]

That's horrifying! I personally spent time with 5 or 6 soldiers last year in Moscow, even went to their military graduation in a town hours away. They had a very strong bond with each other and cried when they found out where they were all to be located after 5 years of being together 24/7 (some in Moscow, one on a ship in Murmansk, a couple in Chechenya). I couldn't imagine any of them committing suicide. Perhaps things changed afterwards-they're not allowede to communicate via email, although a friend still talks to them on the phone, and they seem to be alright.

[Firehouse]

Folks, please don't buy into any of this. Think for just a moment: does it make sense to you at all that the Russians would allow 3,000 soldiers to die from hazing each year? Of course not. Look at the source: the Mothers Right Foundation. During the Afgan War, many mothers in the Soviet Union united to protest and demand that their sons be sent home. This sounds like some sort of advocacy group that grew out of that movement. As in America, these advocacy groups tend to take on lives of their own, and extrapolate into fundrasinig machines long after the initial problem has ben either solved or shown to be bogus. remember the "missing children crisis" in the 1980s with pictures of missing kids on milk cartons? Turned out to be largely overblown; the kids hadn't been kidnapped - they were mostly the victoms of child-custody disputes. Remember the "3 million homeless in America"? Turned out that the advocate deliberately inflated the figures ten times over, justifying it by saying that "we'', we needed to call attention to the problem." In an American population of 270 million there were never more than 300,000 homeless, and many of them were the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts and other lost souls. Remember the feminist proposition that emergency rooms saw more battered women on SuperBowl Sunday than any other day of the year? That was shown to be a complete and deliberate fabrication, and yet lazy or agenda-driven journalists still publish the lie. Gender feminists do NOT like big time football and they do NOT like fraternities, and all of us who are Greek better recognize the dangerous "advocacy group mentality" (anything you say is justified as long as it advances our cause) because we are in their sights. Remember back when MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) was a group of mothers trying to prevent drunken drivers from killing people on the highways? Well, now it appears that MADD has morphed into an advocacy group for whom "drunken" is no longer an issue. They seem determined to stop ALL drinking on the part of ANY vehicle driver, and they seem determined to punish anyone who enjoys a cocktail and then drives. For the advocacy groups, there is never a satisfactory solution. No matter what it is never enough, because the end of the problem means the end of fundrasinig opportunities.
So...please don't for a moment buy into the advocate fiction that 3,000 Russian boys are killed annually by HAZING, or for that matter any other reason absent a time of war. Beware of ALL advocacy groups, including the ones coming after fraternities.