AS YEREVAN GETS FACE-LIFT, MANY ARMENIANS LOSE THEIR HOMES
States News Service
February 25, 2010 Thursday
The following information was released by Radio Free Europe /
Radio Liberty:
Nune Hambardzumian was evicted from her home in downtown Yerevan in
late December, as the authorities began clearing out residents to
make room for new commercial and residential districts.
"This is anarchy! They can just come and throw you out of your house,"
she says. "This is my husband’s ancestral home. But it turns out
that one day you wake up and find out that it is already somebody
else’s property."
This is the dark side of urban renewal. As the Armenian capital
undergoes a face-lift, with private investors moving in to gentrify
what was once a dreary post-Soviet cityscape, residents like
Hambardzumian are finding themselves kicked out of their homes with
little or no compensation.
The Yerevan authorities are using eminent-domain legislation — or as
it is called in Armenia "prevailing public interest" — to turn over
entire neighborhoods to private developers, who then build lucrative
high-end shops, hotels, restaurants, and upscale housing.
Thousands of families have been displaced in the past decade and
some 30 neighborhoods in Yerevan are currently slated to be renovated
under eminent domain. While such legislation has traditionally been
reserved for public-works projects like schools and roads, it is
increasingly being invoked to make way for commercial projects run
by private investors.
Watch: Residents complain of being evicted from their homes in downtown
Yerevan (in Armenian).
The State’s Needs
"A redistribution of property is being carried out under the guise of
state needs," says Sedrak Baghdasarian, head of the NGO Victims of the
State’s Needs, which helps evictees win adequate compensation in court.
"When I hear ‘state needs,’ I understand that to mean the construction
of a reservoir or an airport. But look what the government has done —
it has taken property from one owner and handed it over to another
to construct a building and make super profits."
When residents are evicted from their homes, Baghdasarian explains,
they also lose their registration as residents of their district,
meaning they are unable to vote in elections, get passports for their
children, or use municipal services.
Baghdasarian himself was evicted from his home back in 2004 and offered
just $300 per square meter in compensation, a fraction of the price
new residences constructed in its place are now being sold for.
After failing to win legal redress in Armenia, he and 15 other evictees
have taken their case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Vahe Grigorian, an attorney who is representing some of the evicted
tenants in the European Court, says Armenia’s justice system is deeply
corrupt and subservient to the authorities and real estate developers.
"The courts have been used as tools by the developers and the
authorities in order to deprive people of their property and give them
as little compensation as possible. It’s very difficult to believe
that courts have changed their ways now," Grigorian says.
"The real and primary reason for the wholesale violations of the
rights of Yerevan residents is that there wasn’t and isn’t now a
system of justice in the Republic of Armenia. The presence of any
law by itself does not imply the protection of human rights."
Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov (center) and Armenian officials discuss a
major redevelopment project.
Yerevan officials say they are simply trying to improve the city,
and need private investors to do so. "We are not depriving people of
their property. We are simply dealing with the unsanitary condition
of the city," says Levon Hakobian, the director of the department
dealing with construction in Yerevan’s City Hall.
"The whole purpose of this development is to implement an urban
development project so that the city will be beautiful," Hakobian
adds. "And they [the residents] are trying to get as much money as
they can, which is natural. What else can you say?"
Luzhkov Branches Out
The wave of redevelopment in Yerevan began a decade ago, in 2000,
with the Northern Avenue project, a pedestrian boulevard in downtown
Yerevan that now houses chic boutiques, shops, and cafes.
According to local media reports, a key investor in that project
was the Russia-based company Inteko, which is controlled by Yelena
Baturina, the wife of Moscow’s powerful Mayor Yury Luzhkov.
The Moscow mayor has already expressed interest in another planned
urban-renewal project in Yerevan, a business center in the city’s
central Noragyugh district. The $6 billion project will be spread
across 184 hectares and will also include residential properties and
foreign embassies.
Luzhkov himself visited Yerevan in January and toured the site with
Yerevan Mayor Gagik Beglarian. Luzhkov said at the time that the
"location is good…. That’s why we will pay serious attention
to this project." Luzhkov added that his first deputy mayor would
visit Yerevan in March, when construction is scheduled to commence,
to further assess the project.
Luzhkov has his own problems related to real estate development back
home. Critics have long accused him of staging regular "land grabs"
in order to clear prime real estate of low-budget tenants in order to
move ahead with lucrative development plans. Most recently, residents
of the Moscow suburb of Rechnik resisted efforts to evict them.
For his part, Beglarian assured Luzhkov that he would "do everything"
to assure that the residents of Noragyugh "move from here gladly."
Beglarian said the residents would be relocated to new apartments
elsewhere in the city.
But that is small comfort to those currently living in Noragyugh,
as they anxiously await their fates.
"If you were in my place, wouldn’t you be afraid?" one resident asks.
"They forced people in Northern Avenue out of their homes and did not
pay proper compensation to them. People turned into tramps. Will the
state give me the amenities that I already enjoy? No, it won’t."
RFE/RL correspondent Brian Whitmore contributed to this report
from Prague