13 ARMENIANS ARE PRISONERS IN MOSCOW HOTEL
By Alex Chachkevitch

Moscow Times

June 14 2011
Russia

Valida Avanesyan has been a prisoner in the Hotel Yuzhny on Moscow’s
Leninsky Prospekt for more than six months.

She stays in a friend’s room. When she gets hungry, she asks friends
to shop for her and bring her some food. Her only connection with
the outside world is the balcony.

She cannot leave because the guards at the entrance won’t let her
back in.

“I’ll keep fighting for a place to live for me and the other people
here until the end,” she said.

Avanesyan, 59, is one of 13 Armenian refugees who had lived in Yuzhny
for two decades and are now being kicked out. The residents were
among hundreds of thousands of Armenians who fled Azerbaijan in 1990
to escape ethnic violence that escalated into war the next year.

Hotel Yuzhny became a temporary shelter for more than 100 displaced
Armenians, most of whom were eventually provided with permanent housing
elsewhere in the country. However, some stayed, purportedly tricked
by their informal leader into rejecting offers that he deemed unworthy.

Since then, the residents have sunk ever deeper into a legal quagmire
that would give Franz Kafka a migraine. The actions of all parties
involved in the conflict are justified to some degree – but the
stalemate has resulted in elderly people being evicted with nowhere
to go and no time to gather belongings.

The crackdown began June 3, when court marshals attempted to put Galina
Mesropyan and Raisa Gasparova out on the street. A spokesman for the
nongovernmental Committee for Human Rights and a representative of
the residents managed to talk the marshals into putting the eviction
on hold Tuesday.

But the armistice will last only 10 days, said Valery Gabisov,
secretary for the committee, which has been working with the residents
for eight years. He could not say what’s next.

The trouble began in 1994, when state-owned Yuzhny was privatized. It
has since changed hands several times before ending up with the
current shareholders, led by Guta Group, which has a 65 percent stake
in the premises.

The owners have not announced what they plan to do with the property,
but Yana Kuzina, a real estate consultant with CB Richard Ellis,
said they most likely would demolish the hotel and replace it with
a residential building.

The neighborhood could indeed yield a gold mine, with a two-room
apartment in the area fetching about 5.8 million rubles ($208,000),
according to the web site of real estate agency Stolichniye Metry.

The owners have offered to resettle the 13 former refugees to the town
of Furmanov in the Ivanovo region, about 320 kilometers from Moscow.

They have also offered an alternative compensation of 1 million
rubles per resident, Gabisov said. But with the average cost of a
square meter in Moscow at 197,500 rubles ($7,000), the compensation
would not be enough for a single room in a shared apartment.

The residents have refused, triggering a court battle that they
lost earlier this year when the Gagarinsky District Court authorized
Yuzhny’s owners to move the Armenians to 11 apartments in Furmanov,
despite their refusal to move.

The judge was scheduled to instruct court marshals on how to proceed
with the eviction next week. But they never waited for instructions,
beginning to remove unwanted residents earlier this month by putting
them out on the street – not on a train to Furmanov.

“I guess business is more valuable than people,” Mesropyan said.

The marshals forced Mesropyan, 59, who uses crutches to walk, out of
the hotel without a chance to pack her clothes, medicine and other
belongings, she said. Gasparova managed to sneak into her son’s room,
not targeted by marshals at the time, and lock herself inside.

Mesropyan was left outside with one set of clothes, a purse and
two crutches.

“They don’t have the right to kick us out on the street without giving
us a normal place to live,” Mesropyan said.

She said the early eviction was an attempt to pressure the residents
into accepting the Furmanov housing. “Nor can they make us unwillingly
sign anything,” Mesropyan said, standing in the street near the hotel.

She found temporary housing at her friends’, but said it was only a
short-term solution.

A previous owner of the hotel tried to clear it out in 2004 without
providing alternative housing, but residents fought back in the same
court that now sanctioned their removal.

The hotel’s director, Alexander Markin, declined to comment to The
Moscow Times, as did representatives of Guta Group.

The residents, who obtained Russian citizenship in the early 2000s,
said they don’t want to move because they are Muscovites after
20 years.

“Why would I move somewhere else far away?” said Grigory Khachaturyan,
62, who works as a metals worker in Moscow. “My granddad and mother
are buried here. I have my son, daughter and grandson, whom I raised,
here. I don’t want a second displacement.”

Lawyer David Gariashvili, who represents the residents, said providing
housing to residents is still the government’s job.

The court, however, refused to consult with representatives of state
agencies, including City Hall’s housing department, in the dispute,
he said.

City Hall could put the residents on a program to provide housing
if they can prove they have been living in the capital for more than
10 years, Nikolai Kolesin, a spokesman for the city’s housing policy
department, said by telephone.

But they cannot do that – at least from a bureaucratic point of view.

The Armenians have never obtained residency papers because the hotel’s
private owners have refused to issue them. Several attempts to prove
in court that they have lived in Moscow for years ended in failure,
Gariashvili said.

In fact, the Armenians are not even refugees legally speaking,
because when they fled Baku it was part of the Soviet Union – so no
one crossed any borders.

Because of that, the residents cannot turn to the Federal Migration
Service for help with housing, Gariashvili said.

“The problem started when that building was first put on the auction
table,” said Andrei Stolbunov, head of the rights group Spavedlivost
(Justice). “The government was supposed to make someone responsible
for these people then.”

The owners, however, cannot be faulted for trying to clean up their
legally obtained property, Stolbunov conceded.

The residents blamed the confrontation on the leader of their group,
whom they appointed by consensus upon arriving to Moscow. The leader,
Rachik Sarkisov, rejected all offers of apartments in other parts of
Russia in the mid-1990s, hoping for housing in Moscow, and he acted
without informing the others, the residents said.

Sarkisov left when the crackdown began, the residents said, adding
that they believed he was paid off to move out. Repeated attempts to
reach him for comment were unsuccessful.

“Back then, if I were offered a place in Chukotka, I would’ve gone
there,” balcony prisoner Avanesyan said, referring to the region
near Alaska. “But now, with my health going downhill, I can’t imagine
moving anywhere that far.”

Unlike other residents, Mesropyan said any normal place would suffice
her as long as the town had an ambulance.

“I’m not asking for a palace here, but I want to be sure that I don’t
get fooled,” she said, adding that she and other residents feared
they might not actually receive the promised apartments.

Gariashvili said his main worry was that the case might set a
disastrous precedent in which private corporations are able to take
on the rights and functions of the government.

“If the government comes and tells me to move because it’s planning
to lay down a road where I stand, I will,” he said. “But if some
stranger says he likes my car and wants to take it from me and give
me something else for it, I don’t have to agree.”