"I stood here for two days from sunrise to sunset to prevent them from destroying my land. They promised that they wouldn't, but they destroyed it at night when I went home. I came the next morning and saw that my green garden had been bulldozed. I almost had a heart attack," says Anik Ohanyan, who lives at # 14 David Anhaght Street.

"Overnight, they crushed twelve years of hard work with a bulldozer. They didn't give us any warning, they never even told us, 'Those are your trees; take them away from here," complains another resident of the building, Knarik Ohanyan.

The green area between D. Anhaght and K. Ulnetsi Streets is to be used to build a "Canadian district" and a military academy. It used to be woods, planted in the 1940s. Yerevantsis used to call this area Mko's Woods, for the forest watchman who had vigilantly protected the trees. In 1992 and 1993 during the energy crisis in Armenia, people from the nearby buildings chopped down part of the forest. In subsequent years, about a hundred families from the neighborhood took the initiative to divide the territory into 800-1000-square-meter plots, and began to cultivate them. For most of these families, this was all they had to live on.

"They've driven these families to the garbage dumps, and now they have to dig in the garbage. They are pensioners; what else can they do? During those years when there was no light, when people were cutting the trees down, this place was turning into a garbage dump. But we divided it into plots and made it green again. Was it a bad thing to plant trees? And now we learn that this territory has been given to somebody else, and our gardens are being destroyed," says sixty-year-old Vazgen Arakelyan.

The land was given away through several decisions by the mayor and the government. When they learned of this, neighborhood residents appealed to the mayor's office to privatize their plots, but they were turned down, since the Canadian district is expected to bring in major investments.

"The mayor is responsible for land allocations in Yerevan. Our district not only didn't participate in the allocation of these lands, but also didn't learn about it until eight months after the fact, from unofficial sources. But we are required to implement government decisions," Ghazar Ghazaryan, the head of the architecture department of the Kanaker-Zeytoun district mayor's office, says.

The area residents these plots belong to have applied to the district mayor, the Yerevan mayor, the real estate cadastre, the police, the prosecutor's office, and the president's supervision service, emphasizing that not only is ten years of their work being ruthlessly destroyed, but an "ecological disaster" is also taking place in this area.

"We have applied to all possible addressees, but the replies we have received are one more ignorant and uninformed than the other. It is pointless to go anywhere else. The court would be a waste of time, too, because it's obvious that the laws don't work in this country," says Rafayel Ohanyan, who lives at # 30 Ulnetsi Street.

"The total area is about twenty-five hectares. The Canadian district will occupy nine hectares, the military academy two hectares. But I've heard that the rest of the land has been sold off as well," Ghazar Ghazaryan says.

In a 2002 government decision, 4.5 hectares of land were given for 50 years, without any tender, to HRAAA Ltd., to build a Canadian district at the company's own expense.

Article 76, Paragraph 5 of the Land Code of Armenia gives the government the right to make such an allocation: "The cases of land allocation for lease without a tender shall be defined by the government." But the Land Code doesn't define which cases these are.

The mayor of Yerevan and the foreign minister of Armenia interceded with the government to make the decision it did. We haven't yet been able to find out who the real owners of HRAAA Ltd. are. The founder of the company is Arthur Ketikyan. Clearly, there must be some reason why the government allocated the land the way it did, with no tender.

In a 2000 decision by then-Mayor Robert Nazaryan, 4.3 hectares of this land was sold "at auction", for apartment houses and hotels. But local residents were never informed of the auction, and none of them had the chance to bid on their own land.

"We don't want to privatize this land to build houses, we want the green area that used to be woods to be preserved, and the trees to grow," they say.