"400 square meters of our yard has disappeared. We don't have a courtyard anymore, they just left a narrow path between the garages," complain residents of Yerevan 's # 27A Mashtots Avenue. There are now eleven garages made of stone and two of metal between the buildings at 27A and 29 Mashtots Ave. There used to be only two garages, neighbors say, and the rest of the yard, with its trees and flowers, was cared for by the people living on the first floor. The garages started to spring up when Armen Giozalyan, the director of the travel agency ArmenTour, bought an apartment at 29 Mashtots Ave. He built a multi-car garage in the courtyard; then, other stone garages went up. "We have all kinds of documents," says Giozalyan's wife Anahit. "My husband is a law-abiding citizen. If it were illegal, he wouldn't have built a garage,"

The owners of stone garages have indeed received property licenses from the state cadastre. The cadastre granted these licenses based on a number of decisions by the mayor's office to lease plots of land in the yard, mainly for three years each. The cadastre also registered the right to build private garages on the plots. The garages' owners live at # 29 Mashtots Ave. , and their neighbors in the building, aware of how well connected they are, haven't complained. But residents of the adjacent #27A Mashtors Ave. have applied to the Kentron District Mayor's Office, to the Mayor of Yerevan, to the State Inspection of Municipal Engineering, and to the President's Supervision Service.

The Kentron Mayor's Office responded, "The garages were built in 1998 or earlier, and were registered by the department of housing and communal services in 2000-2001. In late 2003, the owners of the garages renovated their garages and modernized the territory. The majority of residents of the neighboring buildings have expressed their appreciation for the modernization work and, together with the owners of the garages, have designed and even begun implementing certain work to develop the surrounding area and plant trees and gardens, to turn the territory into a model courtyard. Some small-scale sanitary felling of trees which was considered necessary has also taken place."

But Henrik Sargisyan, a resident of # 27A Mashtots Ave. , maintains, "First of all, during the sanitary felling a green area was destroyed, and twenty trees were cut down. There is no appreciation, there's nothing to appreciate. They collected signatures from a few families through well-known means, which means nothing. It is impossible to improve the environment, to create a green area, since there is no environment, there is no land left for that kind of work."

People who have lived in the building for thirty years insist that there were only two stone garages in the past, and the others were built in 2003. But the head of the Department of Town Planning and Supervision of the city mayor's office, H. Muradyan, says, "I was born in this neighborhood; these garages have been there since the 1960s and 1970s. They have just been renovated." To the residents he responded in writing that "the garages have construction limitation and in accordance with the existing norms were registered by the department of housing and communal services in 2000-2001 and the applicable payments were made. In 2003 reconstruction work on the land in question was performed." But later, when Muradyan visited the site with a representative of the President's Supervision Service, he apologized to residents, saying that he had been misled, and he promised to follow up on the matter.

In a written response he referred only to the two metal garages, saying that they would be dismantled in accordance with a mayoral decision, which had been signed on June 10, 2004 and was supposed to be implemented within 10 days. But both the owners of the metal garages and the owners of the stone garages have certificates of property rights, granted by the State Cadastre, based on mayoral decisions to lease the land. This makes it impossible to implement the decision to tear down the garages. As a way out of this mess, Muradyan suggests taking it to court. "There is a mayoral decision and it must be implemented. I will intercede with the court; our lawyers will participate in the proceedings. Let the court decide what to do about the property rights certificates and the mayor's decision," he says.

It is unlikely that the Mayor's Office will ever go to court. But even if it does, the court will hardly prove helpful, since one of the garage owners works at the State Tax Department (we have been unable so far to find out his name and position), and another is the head of the Department of Finance and Economy of the Ministry of Health, Armen Karapetyan. In Armenia , as experience shows, the courts rarely rule against government officials.