Vilena Davutyan, who has changed her place of residence several times, is used to the phenomenon of displacement, changing houses. The family lived in the city of Stepanakert for the last two years. Before that they lived in Shushi, which was surrendered to the enemy, and before that, in the village of Sos, Martunu region of Karabakh. Now, with her three sons and mother-in-law, Vilena is in her fourth house, in a narrow one-room apartment in the Zvartnots district of Etchmiadzin.
She cannot cope with her husband’s death in any way. It seems to her that one day he will open the door, come in and say there was a mistake, he is alive.
The little boy also does not realize that his father is not there. Until now, when upset, he cries and threatens: “I will call papa, I will tell him”.
39-year-old Gagik Avagyan, a soldier of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Artsakh, a senior non-commissioned officer, a participant in 3 wars, died on September 20. Before that, he managed to take his family to the basement.
“I went to my brother’s house; he was at the positions at that time. He called his wife to go and pick up the children from school because the situation was tense. It was the 19th of the month. I went, I brought the children home from school. I was changing their clothes, one with his pants off, one with his pants on, and the fighting started…”
When strong shots were heard in Stepanakert, Gagik, who had taken a vacation before that, accompanied the family to the basement and left, saying, “Let me see what is happening.” These are Gagik’s last words that Vilena heard. “That’s why he left. Then, not a word, not a call. I called, called, for five days, and I couldn’t get in touch. We were in the basement, I had to go upstairs to call, but there was no connection. On the 24th of the month, I learned that he was killed.”
Vilena traveled the path of that last migration without her husband.
The body of Gagik Hakobyan was brought to Armenia from the position of Martuni by the refrigerator-car transporting corpses. Vilena herself came on a bus with her children and mother-in-law. On September 29, Gagik was buried in a closed coffin in Yerablur. Vilena never saw her husband’s face. They say his face was missing. And now she secretly hopes that that body is not her husband’s, that he is alive, he is hiding in whatever place he found, and maybe he will return. A dream always haunts Vilena. Gagik stands in front of her and says always the same thing: “Call me.”
She wakes up, sleepily dials her husband’s Viber number, but there is no answer. “He was a funny guy. Death was not for him. Perhaps, you will say, I am gone mad, or whatever… But I still don’t believe he is dead. It seems to me that he will open the door and enter.”, the woman sighs.
The family of 5 lives in a rented studio apartment. The children are 5, 7 and 11 years old. There is no working hand in the family. The family lives exclusively on the support money provided by the state. Vilena has great hopes that as a widow of a victim, they will also receive compensation from the Military Insurance Fund. The documents were submitted to the Ministry of Defense and they are waiting like the families of the other soldiers that were forcibly displaced from Nagorno Karabakh.
How many servicemen were killed as a result of large-scale military operations unleashed by Azerbaijan against Nagorno Karabakh on September 19? The Investigative Committee recently published figures from which it follows that about 200 soldiers were killed.
Rafayel Vardanyan, Head of the Department of Investigating Particularly Important Cases of the Military Investigative Department, announced on the official YouTube channel of the Investigative Committee: “We have more than 200 dead servicemen and civilians. The location of about 12 civilians and about 30 servicemen is still unknown.”
According to the information of the Investigative Committee, nine civilians were killed as a result of military operations, and three of them were children. If we subtract 9 civilians from the more than 200 dead, it turns out that about 200 of the dead are servicemen.
Will the families of nearly 200 servicemen who died during the September events receive compensation from the servicemen’s insurance fund?
According to the head of the Social Protection department of the Ministry of Defense, colonel Alexander Avetisyan, who is involved in the coordination of issues related to the Fund, the families of the soldiers who died during the recent battles in Artsakh will receive compensation, but the work of collecting documents and information has not yet been completed in the Ministry of Defense of Armenia. “The information has not been collected completely yet. The main thing is to have a complete list of the dead. Then it we will verify under what circumstances those persons died,” Alexander Avetisyan told Forrights.am.
Now, within the framework of the Investigative Committee proceedings, large-scale investigative activities, interrogations, inspections of bodies are being carried out. A number of genetic and forensic examinations have been assigned, the conclusions of which have not yet been received. The relatives of the victims were recognized as victims.
Syuzan Simonyan