The wife and daughter of academician Rafael Ghazaryan were brutally beaten, along with thirty other civilians, on the evening of March 1st as they were walking in the vicinity of the French Embassy towards the direction of Paronyan Street.

Grezelda Ghazaryan and her daughter Gayaneh had participated in all the Levon Ter-Petrosyan rallies. That evening at around 9 p.m., upon the invitation of the wife of Vahan Shirkhanyan, a former Deputy Minister of Defense, the two women decided to walk towards the Shirkhanyan apartment located at 18 Paronyan Street. They intended to rest there a bit and then return. Along the way they saw that Mashtots Avenue was full of policemen all the way up to Amiryan Street. 

Mrs. Ghazaryan relates that at that point a group of police made their way towards the Mayoralty Building while a smaller group of police broke away and started to ‘disperse’ a small crowd of individuals that had, for various reasons, been separated from the on-going rally at the Square.”

“I approached one of the officers and told him that when all this was over I’d have his ‘stripes’ removed since I knew him very well.” Mrs. Ghazaryan says. In fact she knew the officer in question from the Jirayr Sefilyan court trial. The police officer continued to ‘disperse’ the crowd, all the while cursing and hitting Mrs. Ghazaryan on the spine with his rubber truncheon. The police drove the crowd to the intersection of Paronyan and Leo Streets when they heard shots ring out. The crowd, fearing that only corpses had been left in the Square, decided that they had to make their way back there.”

“My relatives were in the Square, including my son. We were scared and yelled out - ‘what are you doing? We are the government. If you kill one million or even two, who will be left for you?’ The police, in way of a response, began beating their shields to drown out our voices and our message,” recounts Mrs. Ghazaryan.

The police became even more infuriated and started to chase after people who tried to find shelter in nearby houses. One policeman dragged Gayaneh away from a building and threw her down onto the street. Other policemen joined in and began kicking the girl with their feet. At the same time Mrs. Grezelda Ghazaryan was savagely beaten as well despite the protestations of Mrs. Shirkhanyan that they were beating the wife of Rafael Ghazaryan.

After the beating they dragged Gayaneh, who at this point couldn’t walk from the pain, to her mother’s side. An officer shoved them inside a building and told them he had just saved their lives. The officer then left them there and the two women tried to gain access to one of the apartments in the building. No one living on the first floor opened his or her door. They made their way to the second floor and saw that many who had fled the melee below had found refuge in the apartments there. Gayaneh telephoned two of her friends from there and told them to send emergency help.

“After a while the two friends called back with the same story. The emergency workers told them that they had made it to Leo Street but couldn’t get through because the police were firing on their ambulances,” Gayaneh relates.

Later on, from their position on the balcony, they heard that the police were searching for those who had hid. “In other words, their aim wasn’t just to disperse the people but to beat them as well. And they still weren’t satisfied after all that,” concluded Gayaneh.

It was around 2:30 a.m. when an ambulance finally arrived on the scene but the Ghazaryans refused to go with them. Gayaneh states that, “They told us we’d be taken to Erebuni Hospital but I knew that they’d kill me there. I also didn’t want to be taken to Grigor Lusavorich Hospital either so we drove to the Hanrapetakan Hospital in our car. Once there, the doctors were amazed that it wasn’t only policemen that they were letting in.”

Mrs. Ghazaryan was treated with eight stitches to the head at the hospital. She was not allowed to stay there as a patient and when she requested her medical records so that she could continue to be treated elsewhere the hospital staff refused arguing that - “Since you are connected to those events we can’t give you any records. The Public Prosecutor will make inquiries into the matter. We’ll give them an answer and supply you with a copy.”

After all this Gayaneh was fired from her job. Despite this, Mrs. Grezelda Ghazaryan believes that they will win in the end and that, once victorious, they’ll live only in Armenia.