YEREVAN. – An Armenian-Scottish band “An Gordonach!” on Wednesday released a song and a video dedicated to Zaruhi Petrosyan, an Armenian woman murdered by her husband and mother-in-law.  

“The idea for a song started in early 2011, after the Zaruhi case had largely ‘disappeared’ from the Armenian media,” the frontman of the band Stuart Moir told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

“I was working in human rights in Armenia at the time, and it struck me how reporting on the case had focused almost exclusively on the fact that Zaruhi had been murdered, and not the months of abuse which preceded it, the patriarchal and societal attitudes which perpetuate domestic violence and ‘keeping silent’, and the apathy of law-enforcement bodies towards violence against women.”

The band wanted to write a song to make sure that Zaruhi’s case was not forgotten, was not conveniently swept under the carpet, and to try to start dialogue to eliminate it. However, later Stuart had to leave Armenia and the song was unfinished.

He decided that the song needed to be finished while reading about the case of Mariam Gevorgyan, another victim of domestic violence.

“We needed the song to be different and striking to grab people’s attention and provoke a reaction. We reached out to the Iranian electronic artist Assadook, a friend, to help us complete the song, which we finished in late 2012,” he said.

Stuart Moir noted that band’s video is not aimed at making an impression, it was not made to sell the band.

“For the song ‘Zaruhi’ we wanted to create a video which would shock the viewer, make him/her think about violence against women in Armenia, and hopefully share it with family and friends and talk about it. In this way awareness could be raised. Filmmaker Raffi Ghazaryan and a bunch of young Armenian actors offered us their amazing support to help us finish the video project, which we filmed in July 2013 when I was back in Armenia recording our new, highly political EP (to be released next year),” he said.

The money collected from the sales online will be donated to projects which rehabilitate abused women in Armenia, working in close collaboration with women’s organisations

Zaruhi Petrosyan died in the hospital in October 2011. She was beaten to death by her husband and mother-in-law. Yanis Sarkisov, the husband of 20-year-old woman, was sentenced to ten years in jail.