Armen from Getavan was shot dead in the center of the village while preventing the desecration of the monument commemorating those who died for the motherland. The Azerbaijanis entered Getavan on September 19, 2023, and proceeded to demolish the monument. 50-year-old unarmed Armen noticed it and ran towards the monument.
“The enemy entered the village: they came to destroy the monument. He ran out to prevent it. At that time, he was with the Russians and, noticing what the Azerbaijanies were doing, jumped over the wall and immediately was hit at that very moment. When he was running towards them, they hit with whatever weapons they had at that moment. I’ve heard that they shot from tecjnical military equipment. I asked a Russian to send me a photo of it, but he said he couldn’t because they were checking his phone,” Armen’s brother, Harut Martirosyan, told Forrights.am.
Armen was a patriot; he participated in the first Artsakh war. Besides that, the photo of his other brother, Pavel, was placed on the pedestal of the monument, next to the other people from Getavan. Pavel died at the age of 17 in Omar. Harut says that Armen could not watch how the monument to the hero boys was destroyed.
Armen gave his life, but the enemy finished his “work”. In the Azerbaijani footage published later, neither the monument with the khachkar nor the photos of the boys can be seen and only a few stones remain from the pedestal.
Armen refused to leave Getavan when the enemy troops approached the village. He sent his relatives to the neighboring village of Drmbon and he stayed there. “He sent my wife, my children, his son and said that he would come later. He was with the Russians: there was a military base of Russian peacekeepers in our village,” said Harut.
Armen was a history teacher; he taught at the school until 2012. He was a participant in the war of the 90s. He was injured and they no longer gave him weapons due to his health problems. Harut remembers his words during the self-defense in September, when everyone was given a weapon, but he was not. “’He asked for a weapon, they didn’t give it to him, he said: you will run away with your automatic weapons, I will stay’. He had shell shock; they didn’t give him weapons.”
Armen’s body was removed from Getavan by the Russians. He was buried in Artsakh. None of his relatives were present. They know the approximate location of the grave, which is impossible to visit.
“I contacted the Russians, I said: can you remove the body and bring it to Haterk village? My other brother was serving there. They brought his body, but my brother was not there anymore: he was in the blockade. His comrades buried him near the headquarters,” Harut said, stating that the Russian peacekeepers, who are considered as guarantors of security, did not protect his brother.
“I cannot say why the Russians did not protect. It can be said that the Russians are white Turks: we consider them friends, but they allowed us to be persecuted. We did not trust them to protect us. They did business with us, they sold cigarettes, they sold a pack of cigarettes for 4-5 thousand drams [a pack of cigarettes is approximately 500 drams], and they were Azerbaijani cigarettes.
Getavan village of Martakert region was targeted by Azerbaijanis from the first hours of the September 19 attack. The village is on the Artsakh-Azerbaijani border. The battle started in this village, on the side of Shahumyan region.
“When the region of Shahumyan passed to the Azerbaijanis, our village became a border. I was at home when the shooting started. The people were in a panic: they were hitting the villages, not only the positions,” said Harut Martirosyan in a conversation with Forrights.am, recalling the days of Azerbaijani aggression.
“I came back from the positions and saw that they hit our neighbor’s house. On the same day, the enemy entered our village. They did not come by positions; they entered the village by road. We left the village a few minutes before they entered. We came to Drmbon, it was the next village, and from there we came to Stepanakert,” recalls Haruty, who was forcibly displaced from Artsakh.
When he and his comrades-in-arms returned to Getavan, the village was already empty, women and children had been removed for safety reasons. “I found my family in the shelter of the school in the neighboring village: until then, I didn’t didn’t know their whereabouts.”
In the video shared by the Azerbaijani media, there is a mess in Getavan. The footage shows overturned cars damaged by gunshots. The same traces were on the walls of the houses. The footage shows how the doors and windows of the houses were smashed. The village is empty.
Narek Kirakosyan