The building located about 15 kilometers west of Yerevan housed the ministry until 2005. More than 150 impoverished families moved to occupy its rooms in the following years.
The Armenian government decided last year to give the high-rise to its State Revenue Committee (SRC). The agency comprising the national tax and customs services is due to relocate there in 2027 after a large-scale reconstruction.
The occupants of the abandoned building received formal eviction orders last month. They refused to move out, saying that they are too poor to rent, let alone buy, homes elsewhere.
Hundreds of police officers scuffled with some squatters as they began the evictions early in the morning. A police spokesman said later in the day that more than two dozen people were detained as a result.
“Who the hell are you?” one man shouted at the policemen. “Under what law? Tell us about that law.”
“They kicked the door open. It’s such an inhuman treatment,” said Paulina Petrosian, a middle-aged woman who has shared a room in the building with her daughter and two young grandchildren for the last four years.
The family previously lived in Gyumri. Petrosian said it left the city for economic reasons.
After being forced out of their rooms, the squatters gathered in the building’s courtyard with suitcases and other belongings, refusing to leave. They said they have nowhere to live.
“If they give us another place to live in, no problem, we’ll hand their privatized building back to them,” Petrosian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “If not, I will stay here with the other people.”
The Armenian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs promised to provide the evicted people with temporary housing. The ministry said it is also considering fully or partly paying their rent.