On March 12, 2008, at around 2:00pm, 53 year-old Henrik Abovyan was shot in the left shoulder by Azeri fire along the border in the village of Koti. Mr. Abovyan, a resident of the village of Berdavan in the Noyemberyan district drives a tractor. When I visited him in hospital, Henrik told me that military officials had instructed him remove irrigation pipes along the border’s danger zone. Two hours after being shot he was taken to the Noyemberyan hospital for medical treatment.

In the state police report regarding the incident it is noted that “A certain Henrik A., while in the Koti village fields, was injured from gunfire emanating from the ‘Odoun-dagh’ Azeri check point.” The police statement doesn’t specify his village of residence and what he was doing in a dangerous location along the border. Whilst in the Noyemberyan hospital Henrik was operated on and the doctors removed the bullet lodged in his shoulder. Later, however, complications set in and he was transferred to the Armenia Medical Center in Yerevan where he was again operated on about one month ago. Today, Henrik isn’t doing so well. Pus continues to accumulate in the festering wound and there’s an abnormally high amount of nitrogen in Henrik’s blood. During a recent phone conversation, Henrik told me that he’s spent about $3,000 in medical expenses in the last one and a half months. Henrik Abovyan says that a group of young men from Koti and Yerevan assigned him the task of digging up irrigation piping along the border. They even supplied him with a tractor and paid him 20,000 drams a day for the job. The 140 centimeter diameter pipes were a part of the former main irrigation system in Tchoghaz. After being dug up, they were transported away on huge trucks. For twenty days Henrik worked digging up these large pipes in the border zone, within the target range of enemy fire, until the day came when he was struck by an Azeri bullet. Today, no one cares about the medical condition of this tractor driver from Berdavan. The telephone numbers of his erstwhile employers from Yerevan and Koti are no longer in service. His injuries are the result of the indifference shown him by his former employers. All this begs the question – who could have transported a tractor to a stretch of land under military supervision and given permission for a civilian tractor driver to enter such a site in the border zone. Who carted away all those hundreds of pipes and why? We should point out that pipes of such diameter go for 30,000 drams per meter on the open market. Irrigation pipes are removed along Koti border The network of feeder pipes drawing water for the Tchoghaz reservoir irrigated thousands of hectares of arable land in the Noyemberyan and Ijevan area through a series of pumping stations starting in the fall of 1980. Beginning in the 1990’s, the pipes were no longer used due to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Much of the system passed thorough Azeri territory. A few years ago, in Koti, they started to dismantle the main pipes from the Tchoghaz reservoir. This work hit a new peak in the spring of this year up until the time when Henrik Abovyan was shot and wounded in the border zone. Henrik says that the tractor he was using none stands abandoned along the border. Sedrak Yesayan, Director of   “Debed-Aghstev Tchrar” Ltd. says that in 2002 “Vorogum” Ltd. separated from the irrigation enterprise. The property of that irrigation system passed to the firm but lies unused. Money from the sale of the pipes must also go to pay wages owed the workers. Mr. Yesayan states that the pipes of the former Tchoghaz water system have been allocated as assets to that enterprise and area community municipalities. Government plans to irrigate border after pipes are removed During our conversation, Koti Mayor Felix Melikyan denied that irrigation pipes were being dismantled on municipal lands in the Koti border zone. “Vorogum” Ltd. Director Gevorg Avagyan told us over the phone that in 2004 his company was given the unused property of the state’s irrigation system. He claims that out of the 1.5 billion dram debt of the former irrigation enterprise, the unpaid payroll of the Noyemberyan irrigation firm doesn’t exceed 20-30 million. Mr. Yesayan assured us that this year his firm hasn’t been dismantling pipe either in Koti or the neighboring village of Voskevan. Wandering through the Voskevan fields, I came across the dismantled inner system of the Tchoghaz piping. Rafik Vardanyan, who for years managed the system in the area, says that three years ago “Vorogum” Ltd. removed 530 and 273 millimeter diameter pipes in the inner network. The state government is taking steps to supply irrigation water to border villages in the Voskevan sub-district. In 2006, with $2.9 million in funding from IFAT, work began on the construction of 37 kilometer Voskepar-Baghanis-Voskevan-Koti stretch of gravity-fed irrigation pipe. The irrigation pipe, starting from the Voskepar River that flows down from the Noyemberyan mountains, will irrigate some 1,100 hectares of pasture land in the four villages; 500 hectares in Voskepar, 380 in Koti, 100 in Voskevan and 70 hectares in Baghanis. This project was scheduled to be completed by July, 2008. Later, the start date for the pipe was pushed back till November, 2008. The construction is still underway today. In Voskevan, 100 hectares of land neighboring houses is supposed to be irrigated. Voskevan Mayor Seryozha Aleksanyan stated they intend to propose modifications to the project and irrigate 30 hectares of Shagh fields instead of the house plot lands. The question arises, just how proper was it to remove the Tchoghaz irrigation pipes in 2006 when, just three years later, those lands were to be irrigated. Couldn’t the irrigation pipes removed from the village of Koti for unknown reasons have been incorporated in the inner network of the new pipeline? Who is dismantling those large diameter pipes in the Koti border zone given that even a “snake couldn’t slither its way in”. During the last decade, there have been hundreds of cases of livestock theft along the Noyemberyan border that have never been solved. Villagers believe that the tracks left by the rustlers lead to Azerbaijan. Border residents believe that the booty is being stockpiled in a neighboring, unfriendly country.  We believe that border guards should perform the task assigned to them, which is to defend the border, rather than giving the OK to dismantle irrigation pipes under their eyes.