“A soldier who fakes illness is a cheater… ”
The above statement was made by an audience member during a discussion following a forum theatre performance entitled Incident in the Army, which was presented by Peace Dialogue at the Helsinki Group’s office in Spitak. The event was attended by around 15 young people from the town. This first small performance dealt with issues of ill-treatment during military service and the drafting of soldiers who should be entitled to a medical exemption.
During the skit the audience saw a soldier suffering from a heart condition, who was confronted with the indifference and negligence of the commander and nurse. A rather animated discussion followed the performance, with the only male audience member, who had recently completed his military service, confirming that this situation was true-to-life.
One of the spectators described how improper treatment compounded her brother’s medical condition to the point where had to be operated on. However, the participants in the discussion all felt that the soldier would be better off if he kept quiet and didn’t complain so as not to compromise the treatment he might need from medical staff in the future. As one of the actors stated “there is an impression that most of the participants are afraid to speak out about the injustice.”
According to statistics, a large number of the reported fatalities among soldiers in Armenia are related to circumstances like those mentioned above. Only this year three such cases were recorded, involving either of inappropriate or delayed medical treatment.
Peace Dialogue organized the event to raise awareness about the issue and to provide an opportunity to consider and prevent such cases, and also to analyze and understand society’s perception of the problem. Because it is important for forum theatre to target problems that are relevant to the audience, a second performance held the same day dealt with gender issues existing in our society. This sketch portrayed the conflict between a father harboring a stereotypical outlook about women and a daughter whose views are more modern. The participants felt that the issue was relevant to their experience and expressed various opinions about it. But as the organizers noted, the number of people who felt motivated to change the situation was surprisingly small and the opinion that “the girl had better marry” may give us pause for thought…
Forum theatre belongs to a methodology known as “Theatre of the Oppressed” which is a tool to raise issues such as the ones mentioned above and others. Although spectators at these two performances expressed the opinions that “complaints never get resolved” and “it’s impossible to change the country,” in their evaluation audience members said they thought that this method makes the issues known and that by informing people makes them less tolerant of injustice and motivates them to change the situation.
This article was made with material provided by Tatev Hovhannisyan.
The Project’s German Partner - OWEN - Mobile Akademie für Geschlechterdemokratie und Friedensförderung e.V.
The project "Let’s See… Let’s Choose… Let’s Change…" is supported by the zivik(Civil Conflict Resolution) programme of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) with means from the German Federal Foreign Office.
Posted 30 October, 2012
