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• A Shattered Family: No consolation in home of victim Gor Kloyan

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“Mum, I saw a dream,” 28-year-old Gor Kloyan was telling his dream to his mother in the morning.

“I said, Gor, you saw a bad dream. Falling out teeth foretells a death of a loved one. Don’t go out today,” Gor’s mother Azatuhi says. “We have elderly grandmothers and grandfathers in our family, all are in bad health, I thought some bad thing would happen to one of them.”

The “bad thing” happened to Gor himself.

Members of his family are dressed in black, women hold crumpled handkerchiefs in their hands, their eyes red because of constant crying.

On the first day of spring when downtown Yerevan was exploding, Gor Kloyan left his peaceful family home in one of Yerevan’s suburbs without warning anyone and headed for the epicenter of the events.

He did not come back. And in his absence only questions are left for his wife, parents and grieving relatives.

After he left his family in the evening, at midnight a woman’s voice delivered the bad news. A nurse at hospital informed the Kloyans that Gor was wounded and was in hospital.

“They said his leg was wounded, he was undergoing surgery,” the mother remembers. “I don’t even remember how we reached emergency hospital N 3 and began to walk like madmen through its corridors.”

At the hospital the parents learned that their son had received a shrapnel wound and that the aorta was damaged.

“The surgery proceeded strangely long. They said blood was needed. I offered my blood as we had a particular blood category. First category negative…Then they said his pressure would not normalize and then for several hours they could not say to me that my son had gone,” sobs the mother who lost her son.

“Grandmother, are you crying? But you said you wouldn’t,” Gor’s elder son, three-year-old Sargis asks as he runs up to his grieving grandmother.

There is an enlarged size picture of Gor on the chest of drawers in the sitting-room, the grieving women – grandmothers and an aunt – are in the corner. Gor’s baby son, Levon, who is less than two-months old is in the next room, sleeping.

With his look glued to one point, Gor’s father, 57-year-old Sargis Kloyan says that his son had not participated in any public rallies before that day.

“We, the friends of my son are still in shock, we are astounded, we don’t understand why he didn’t participate in any public rally for the whole time and on that day decided to be present there at all cost,” he says. “He followed everything on television, though he liked reading newspapers as well.”

The father mentions Gor’s favorite newspapers – Haykakan Zhamanak, Chorrord Ishkhanutyun.

Both are radical opposition newspapers, which is surprising since Gor was a member of one of the governing parties, Prosperous Armenia, and during the elections he was a proxy for Serzh Sargsyan at one of the polling stations.

Sargis Kloyan says that during the whole pre-election period he also worked for Serzh Sargsyan’s campaign, as a truck driver. He says that he feels insulted to the innermost of his heart.

“We received no message of condolence,” he says.

The mother looks at Gor’s photograph and says that her son had big hopes and plans for the future – to continue his education, to start new things.

“I lost my child senselessly… I do not know the answer,” says Azatuhi. “He did not talk much, he was very honest, a real man. He did not speak much after the election either. Perhaps he had been disappointed at something… We don’t know what happened in reality. I don’t know what to demand from whom.”