Armenia: Displaced by a Prestige Project

Dozens of families who have lost their homes as part of the Armenian government’s ambitious project to build a new avenue in the capital Yerevan say their rights have been trampled on.

Now they are fighting to win compensation.

The multi-million dollar Northern Avenue begun three years ago is a prestige project championed by the government. It will run through the centre of Yerevan from the opera house to Republic Square.

The road is due to be finished next year, but only in the last few months has the construction programme started to hit large numbers of local people.

While the government is taking pride in the new avenue, residents and opposition politicians have accused the government of destroying the old city of Yerevan and forcing people onto the street.

“The process of growing stratification in society that began over ten years ago is continuing,” opposition parliamentary deputy Shavarsh Kocharian told IWPR.

“And that polarisation now has a geographical form. The face of central Yerevan is changing year in, year out, as its inhabitants are forced by economic hardship to sell their homes and move to the outskirts.”

Another contentious issue is the threat the road construction could pose to the Dalma Gardens, one of the largest green zones in the city. The gardens are an ancient feature of the city and have their own irrigation system.

They also have 1,800 tenants, who tend allotments to grow grapes, peaches, apricots and vegetables. For many of them the gardens are their main source of livelihood.

But under a government decree from March last year, about half the area of the Dalma Gardens is to be put up for auction and then used for real-estate development.

“Yes, on 50 per cent of the gardens’ territory they will build elite apartment blocks,” Suren Melikian, one of the tenants, told IWPR. “Those who took that decision care nothing for the social position of the people or their sources of subsistence,”

Another allotment holder, Ambartsum Khachatrian, said, “Not one of those who conquered Armenia touched or damaged the Dalma, and we don’t understand why the authorities want to destroy these gardens.

“We’re not only fighting for our own rights, we are also concerned about the fate of the Dalma Gardens, which are effectively the lungs of Yerevan.”

The government has made a concession by allowing 580 plot-holders to renew their contracts. However more than a thousand other tenants are still awaiting their fate.

Parliamentary deputy Viktor Dallakian said that by law, anyone who has farmed a plot of land for ten years must be given priority rights to rent or privatise that land.

A number of people have lost their homes to the Northern Avenue project, saying they were forced under duress to sign contracts selling their property.

Vachagan Akopian, one of the evicted residents, claims that the government-created Office to Implement the Northern Avenue Programme, OIP, put unfair pressure on residents. “OIP representatives offered us agreements which completely failed to take our interests into consideration.

“We were told: if you don’t sign the agreements and leave your houses in five days, we will take you to court, after which a forced eviction will follow.”

Mariam Gishian, a disabled person who refused to sign the agreement, said she was forcibly evicted from her home by the court along with her five children. “My children and I are sleeping in the open air,” she told IWPR.

“The money they gave me for selling my home is not enough even to buy a garage,” Karine Palian, who has had to rent accommodation with her family for eight months now, told IWPR.

Another resident, Gohar Sarkisian, told IWPR that her neighbour Shavarsh Grigorian tried to kill himself when he saw an excavator demolishing his house.

Vagram Abrahamian, an official in the presidential monitoring office, denied that pressure had been applied to get people to leave, saying, “Everything happened by people’s free will. Who could make someone sign the agreement?”

The OIP’s director Karen Davtian, who has been in the post for three month now, also assured IWPR that the agreements were signed voluntarily.

Davtian said some homeowners had been paid as much as 280,000 US dollars, while others who did not actually own their properties had received payments of 3,500 dollars. He conceded that the latter group “really suffered” and said he was investigating their complaints, as well as those of people who had refused to sign contracts and were evicted from their homes.

Many residents said that their houses were protected by the state and could not be subject to demolition.

However, Narek Sarkisian, a former chief architect of Yerevan who was until recently the manager of the Northern Avenue project, said, “The problems to be solved by town-planning change with time. There are some ulcers in the centre of Yerevan – old barrack-like houses – and this is why we are doing this project. Instead of these barracks, high-rise apartment blocks that meet European standards will be built, and their ground floors will be made into offices.”

A number of court cases are now in progress over the Northern Avenue scheme, but Major-General Vaginak Kazarian, a legal expert, said that residents had yet to win a single case.

Court rulings have cited two government decrees of October 2001 and August 2002, rather than the law, angering the plaintiffs.

“The government effectively took over the functions of the judicial body, thus exceeding its own authority,” said Kazarian.

Government spokeswoman Meri Harutiunian told IWPR that every government decree receives prior approval from the justice ministry to ensure it conforms with the law – and that this had happened with the decrees on the Dalma Gardens and the Northern Avenue.

The justice ministry refused to comment, saying it was inappropriate to do while legal proceedings were still going on.

According to Vachagan Akopian, an activist in the Northern Avenue case, 27 lawsuits are ready to be filed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

“We, the people who worked the Dalma Gardens, sparing no effort or our own health, will not give up an inch of the land,” said plot-holder Khachatrian. “We are prepared to fight till the end.”

Rita Karapetian and Susanna Petrosian are journalists for the Noyan Tapan news agency in Yerevan.