A sad reality

Business Week (Int'l Edition)
October 30, 2000

Letter From Armenia: Abandoning a Sinking Country
By JANIN FRIEND

Friend, a Dallas journalist, worked for a year in Armenia on a
program to strengthen the independent press.

EDITED BY SANDRA DALLAS

Armenia's nine years of independence from the Soviet Union and its
long enmity with neighboring Azerbaijan have not been kind to Sonya
Toumanyan. She was already a widow when one of her four sons died
after the Azeris bombed the southern city of Kapan, where Toumanyan
lives, in 1992. Another decamped for Russia that same year, and her
two remaining sons have since joined him.

At 67, Sonya Toumanyan is abandoned. She hasn't heard from her
sons in two years. Family pictures line the walls of her shabby
three-room apartment. She lives on bread she begs from
shops. Fearful of the cold and dark, she spends almost all of her
$6 a month pension to pay the electricity bill. An asthma sufferer,
Toumanyan could hardly gasp out her story as she returned from the
Armenian Red Cross, where she gets her medicine. ``I've wanted to
throw myself off the balcony,'' she says, inhaler in hand. ``I was
almost dying last night. I was calling to God.''

To Toumanyan, it must seem sometimes as if God is the only one
left. Armenia is in danger of becoming one of the first modern
nations abandoned by its own people. Some experts estimate that
almost half of the population--3.7 million a decade ago--has
emigrated. In the wake of this mass exodus are towns and cities of
silent streets, shuttered shops and offices, and desperate
communities of the left behind--80% of them poor.

Kapan, once a flourishing industrial center, is especially
hard-hit: Its population has dropped from 47,000 to 20,000 since
independence. Its roads are lined with half-empty apartment blocks
and abandoned factories. Its once noisy cafes are lifeless. In its
open-air market, there are more sellers than buyers.

TRAPPED

Kapan is an isolated, shriveling city in an isolated,
shriveling nation. Armenia never recovered from the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991. Hundreds of factories, scientific institutes,
and businesses never reopened. In 1991, the new nation quickly went
to war with neighboring Azerbaijan over its Nagorno-Artsax
enclave, which had a large Armenian population. While a mid-1990s
ceasefire has left Armenia in control of Nagorno-Artsax and
surrounding areas, Armenia now lives between two hostile neighbors:
Azerbaijan to the east and Turkey to the west. Its borders with
both are closed.

It's tempting to conclude that Armenia never had a chance. The
exodus began even before independence, after an earthquake
devastated the northern region in 1988. More Armenians departed
when Azerbaijan imposed a road, rail, and energy blockade--and
still more left to avoid the draft when war broke out. The Soviet
collapse produced an army of jobless workers. The unemployment rate
is now 40%, and the underemployment is staggering: Doctors work as
doormen, and university lecturers clean offices for $5 a week.

Political instability has taken its toll, too. In October, 1999,
terrorist gunmen killed Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian and seven
members of Parliament--prompting some Armenians to conclude that a
transition to democracy and a market economy may never come to
pass. Life, they believe, lies elsewhere.

For Avag Yepremian, it lies within. A 42-year-old poet, writer,
and former publisher, Yepremian lives in Kapan and refuses to
leave. His life, he says, is defined by the Armenian language. But
like the city's impoverished survivors, who huddle in their
apartments, Yepremian is in full retreat from Kapan's harsh
realities. ``Ordinary life is so bad that we escape into our inner
world,'' Yepremian tells me. Struggling to feed his wife and two
children, he consoles himself with writing and reading. In the past
year, he and his brother had to close their beloved
newspaper. Since last year's political killings, Yepremian says,
Kapan's emigration rate has doubled.

DESOLATION

Some 80% of those leaving head for relatively prosperous Russia,
which doesn't require a visa. Most, like Sonya Toumanyan's sons,
are working-age
men. Often, the departed send money home or relocate their families
when they find jobs. But some simply abandon those left behind:
Sonya Toumanyan's sons fall into that category, too.

What remains is a breathtaking desolation. Most of Kapan's
factories are useless now: They made military equipment, electronic
components, and other products geared to the Soviet industrial
system. Cows forage on garbage. Young women linger idly on park
benches. ``It's an empty town,'' says Lilit Zacharian, 24. ``The
young men go, and the young women stay.'' The main route out of
Kapan is a mountainous road that is sprinkled with land
mines. Still, people simply close the doors of their apartments, or
sell them for as little as $600, and quietly board those buses. All
over the country, people are desperate to get out any way they can.

In addition to Russia, many Armenians leave for Georgia, Turkey,
and Iran, where they connect to other European, Middle Eastern, and
Asian cities. About 15% of those leaving end up in the U.S. and
Europe. At the American Embassy, the line for tourist visas is more
than 200 applicants long on the heaviest days. Many Armenians will
get their visas, either to the U.S. or Europe, and never return
from their vacations or business trips. Others have American
companies help them get visas. Aram Hovhannisyan, 28, who has an
advanced degree in physics and is fluent in Russian and English,
cruised the Internet and landed a job with a software company in
Florida. He decided to go overseas when the CARE office in Yerevan
was scaled back and he lost his $400-a-month job maintaining the
computer system. ``I have to think about my son,'' says
Hovhannisyan, who is married and has a 16-month-old baby. ``There
is no future in Armenia.''

In all of this, the government has many critics. Armenians love
their homeland, they say, and many will return when jobs are
available. But Yerevan has been too passive--and too
disorganized--to halt the ruinous exodus, critics charge. Armenian
officials are trying to boost tourism and promote technology parks
to recapture something of the country's former role as a technology
center during Soviet times. But few projects have been completed,
and the economic and political crisis, coupled with widespread
corruption, has scared off most foreign investors.

At this point, Armenia lives mostly on foreign loans and
remittances. The U.S. has pumped $102 million into Armenia for the
year to Sept. 30; the World Bank lent $60 million in the first six
months of 2000. Armenians abroad send home more than $300 million
annually, either to family members or as gifts for development
projects.

Hanging over all of this are the tensions with Azerbaijan. Even
now, Armenia's blocked borders cost the nation an estimated $62
million in annual exports. And peace talks with Azerbaijan, now
five years old, have so far proved fruitless. The prospect of war
is palpable. Should another erupt, Armenia, with few draft-age men,
could lose the fight. ``We wanted more land,'' says Anahit
Gjulbudaghian, a 27-year-old Armenian woman in Yerevan.

``But now, all of our lands are empty.''