Stepanakert contract soldier Madat Asryan was in his military unit on September 19, 2023. “We were expecting a war since the end of May. In the difficult conditions of the siege, it was expected that the situation would become more serious and eventually an armed struggle would begin. From the beginning of September, it was already clear that the enemy was going to resort to military aggression. But we did not imagine the forced displacement and complete depopulation of entire Artsakh,” said M. Asryan, currently living in Gyumri, in a conversation with us.
During the One-Day War, their unit had 1 dead and several wounded. As a result of the ceasefire agreement, he and his family had to be displaced. “On September 19, I was at home, my husband was in the military unit. I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not: both in 2020 and 2023, my two daughters woke up in the morning with high fever and I didn’t send them to school. I understood from the first explosions that it was war again. I immediately took my girls down to the basement, where we stayed all night,” M. Asryan’s wife Nara described the first hours of the war.
Their family was displaced from Stepanakert on September 25. Continuing their story of those cruel days, Nara informed that they did not take anything from the house. “Only my children asked to take their bags so that they could fit as many books as they could. They said, ‘Mom, let’s take our old books so that the Turks don’t tear the books when they come to our house.’ I filled their bags with books as much as possible and then we just left. We had no hope that we could cross Hakari Bridge. My daughters did not sleep at all for 2 days and as soon as they learned that they had to cross the Hakari bridge, they immediately fell asleep out of fear. After waking up, they asked, ‘Mom, we crossed the bridge: it’s so good that we were asleep and didn’t see the Turks’,” the 38-year-old woman said excitedly.
During the chaotic days of the forced deportation, many of the servicemen, for security reasons, burned their personal documents along with confidential documents. Liaison M. Asryan also destroyed the documents of his 25 years of military service and faced problems for his military retirement in Armenia. After seven months of struggles, the problem was finally settled. However, since the deportation, the family of our interlocutor has not benefited from the 40+10,000 drams social assistance program provided by the RA government to solve housing problems for the people of Artsakh. They receive only 10 thousand drams each. The reason for not being a beneficiary of the project, as they said, was the fact that M. Asryan’s wife Nara was born not in NK but in RA.
The wife was born in Goris and received Artsakh registration after her marriage. She and her children have not been granted refugee status until now. “I am 27 square meters in my father’s house, because of which I, my husband and our two minor daughters were denied the support of 40,000 drams intended for house rents. They say that you are husband and wife, where the wife is, there is also the husband. Well, they can reject me, but why should my husband and children suffer? My two brothers live in our father’s house with their families; each of them has 3 children and it is not possible to live with them. We applied to Gyumri’s social territorial department, unified territorial center of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of RA, but we received a rejection answer,” informed Nara indignantly.
She is even ready to give up her share of her father’s house, but even in that case she will have to wait 5 years for that decision to be considered legal. M. Asryan’s family found themselves in a desperate situation. They cannot pay the house rent and it is not possible to take care of the vital problems of the family with the salary of the husband’s job as a janitor. They will not even be able to become beneficiaries of the RA state support program for housing provision of families displaced from Artsakh. Until now, they have not received the support of 100,000 drams for one of the two children.
“Our main problem is the apartment rent and the utilities. When we came to Gyumri after being displaced from Artsakh, the rent was 150-200 thousand drams. Until now, we were paying 150,000 rent and we just moved to another apartment for 100,000 AMD. We lived normally in our apartment in Stepanakert, we also had a plot of land and planned to build a house, my husband was working and thank God, we kept our 7- and 9-year-old girls safe. But during the 9 months of the blockade, my children were deprived of everything. Even now, we take care of our vital problems with great difficulty. We don’t know what to do, who to turn to: no organization supports,” the woman said.
It should be noted that, according to the relevant decision of the RA government, those citizens whose share of the residential house does not exceed 20 square meters should also receive rent compensation, but the citizens of Artsakh who find themselves in such a situation do not receive this support. On the platform of the state support programs of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, it is stated that “Those persons who do not own property in RA or have only one immovable property intended for their residence under the right of share or common joint ownership and the area corresponding to that share is less than 20 square meters, will receive 50,000 drams of support per month. in other cases, support will be provided in the amount of 10,000 drams.”
Zara Mayilyan