VIDEO: "The Kond residents will throw you off your chair," protest participant tells Avinyan

Residents of the Kond district in Yerevan have organized a protest in front of the Yerevan City Hall. They are opposing the expropriation of the Kond neighborhood and the implementation of a new urban development project there.

“Avinyan does not accept us; he sent us to his head of the correspondence department and states that their decision is unchanged. We will now demonstrate with our strength that everything can be changed. We will head to Kond, decide what we are doing, and begin our struggle. The police told me that they would accept you; we went and saw that it was their correspondence department head who said, ‘Tell us what the problem is.' Are you receiving us? We have explained everything to Avinyan’s advisor; we have told them, and since they do not want to accept us now, we are moving to the next phase of our struggle. During the election campaign, Mr. Avinyan told us that everything would be free, but they have delayed so much, and now they are imposing this heavy burden on us,” said one of the residents of Kond.

Another resident, Gohar Poghosyan, addressing Mayor Tigran Avinyan, stated, “Tell him that the Kond residents will throw you off your chair; you aren't taking your chair to the grave with you. When we needed him, he begged us to elect him, and now we will throw him out. As much rubbish and trouble there is in the streets, we will throw it at his head. If he can’t manage the situation, he should just leave; we are fed up. Whoever sits in power only thinks about themselves. Will Avinyan come to live under our conditions? He promised the Kond residents that he would solve their issues, and Kond elected him unanimously. Is this how he solves their problems? He promised us that before he was elected, he would provide us with our privatization papers; where are they?”

It should be noted that during the previous council meeting, Mayor Tigran Avinyan announced that the Kond district would be completely expropriated to implement a new urban development project. Now residents are required to pay a fee for the delineation of boundaries and the restoration of the foundations for land distribution for their own homes—2780 drams or 4280 drams per square meter. This means that a resident with a 100 square meter house must pay a fee of 278,000 to 428,000 drams.