“Their 25–30 years of work are being destroyed with one stroke of a pen”: tenant

Heavy machinery has been brought to Shinararneri Street in Yerevan’s Ajapnyak administrative district to dismantle commercial kiosks. The kiosk owners are staging a protest in an attempt to prevent their shops from being demolished.

During the protest, a tenant of one of the kiosks said the structures should have been appraised before demolition, and that negotiations with the owners should have been held only after that.

“Who will appraise them if the structure has already been demolished? An appraisal organization should have come first and assessed everything, and only then should negotiations have been held. Now that everything has been dismantled, they can say it wasn’t a wall but a piece of sheet metal, and we won’t be able to prove anything,” he said.

According to him, negotiations with the owners should have been held first, before the demolition work began.

“People could have been consulted in advance, the owners. I’m not an owner, I’m a tenant, and I’ve already dismantled my shop with my own hands. I’m speaking now in the owners’ interests, because my heart aches for them: these people worked for 25–30 years so that today, in their old age, they would have at least some structure. And today these structures are being destroyed with one stroke of a pen,” the citizen stressed.