STUDENTS of the Melkonian Educational Institute (MEI) staged a walkout and peaceful protest in front of the founders’ mausoleum yesterday, demanding that the decision to close the school in June, announced a year ago yesterday, be overturned.

The students, who hail from Cyprus, Greece, the Middle East, Europe and Armenia, want the New York based Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) that administers the school, to recall its decision to close MEI.
The alumni and other friends of the Melkonain have banded together to fight the decision, believing that the true motive for the closure is financial, given that the school is sitting on some £40 million worth of commercial real estate in the capital.

They say the AGBU plans to sell the entire property, including the historical buildings and the forest that have all been declared protected by the Ministry of Interior as a national heritage site.

“Don’t abandon us,” pupils shouted during yesterday’s demonstration. “Stand with us in this struggle” and “we will not allow the Americans to close our school,” they also said.

On March 16 last year, the AGBU claimed its justification to close the Melkonian was that “it no longer satisfies its mission” and that it would be wiser to shut down the existing school and open a new Melkonian elsewhere.

“At the time, the House of Representatives condemned the closure decision by issuing a unanimous resolution, while the House Education Committee said it would deem any such decision as ‘a hostile act’,” a statement from the protesters said. “Both the AGBU and its American representative in Cyprus continue to mock the House and ignore its decisions.”

In January, the Patriarch of the Armenian Patriarche of Turkey, Mesrob Mutafyan, filed suit in Los Angeles against the AGBU in an attempt to prevent the closure of MEI.

The Patriarch is the original trustee of the MEI, and the action is being co-ordinated and mediated by the California group on behalf of the Patriarchate, a beneficiary of Garabed Melkonian’s Deed of Assignment. Garabed Melkonian was one of the two sibling founders of the Nicosia-based secondary school 78 years ago.

Sources at the school told the Cyprus Mail yesterday that the AGBU’s lawyers had managed to postpone a hearing in the case. The sources said this was obviously a tactic to ensure the school was closed down before the case could be decided at court, making a reversal of the situation more difficult.

In a letter issued yesterday, Jack Melkonian, the great great nephew of Garabed Melkonian, said he and his family were being discredited by the AGBU for asking where the MEI trust money had gone.

“I have asked repeatedly for documents, as far back as on September 9 2004, related to the donation and a copy of the latest AGBU bylaws. The handing-out of these documents was declined ‘on the grounds of a longstanding policy not to hand out photocopies of files’. Instead I was invited to come to New York and look through the files myself,” Melkonian said.

“During my stay in Nicosia I visited the school and the tomb of my two great-great-uncles and was shocked to find the monument dilapidated, overgrown with weeds and the flower containers filled with cigarette tips. I lodged an oral complaint with the administrators of the school and wrote a letter to the President on November 18, 2004. Up to-day I have no reply, nor an apology.”

Melkonian said that to add insult to injury, the AGBU has decided to close the MEI on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, from which the school’s founders had fled to Cyprus in 1915.