Armenia Reporting In Washington Post

[THOTH]

Todays story is concerning exodus of Armenains from Armenia:

 

"only 30 percent of Armenians live on the territory of the motherland.."

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Jul11.html

 

Yesterdays story concerns Kocharian's crackdown vs opposition/move towards authoritarianism:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2004Jul10.html

[Vigil]

Thoth, it does not allow you to access the article unless you are registered.

[THOTH]

Thoth, it does not allow you to access the article unless you are registered.

true

[Azat]

Great articles. Thank you

[ED]

here is the full text in case some have dificult time registering

 

 

 

Exodus Is New Chapter of Loss in Armenia's Sad Story

 

By Susan B. Glasser

Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, July 12, 2004; Page A01

 

 

SEVABERD, Armenia -- First, her son left for Russia. Then a daughter. Then her other daughter. Last fall, her remaining son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren moved. One by one over the last decade, they fled this village on a barren mountain peak, abandoning the rocky earth where the family has lived for a hundred years.

 

 

 

Now it is Atlas Hadjiyan's turn.

 

She has sold her two cows and no longer tends the vegetable garden that is necessary to survive the brutal winter. In September, she plans to become yet another reluctant emigrant, leaving the independent homeland that Armenians dreamed of for generations for the uncertain welcome of an icy Russian city a thousand miles north. "I don't want to leave," she said, "but this is no place to live."

 

For this village, whose name means Black Fortress, where there is no running water, no telephones, no paid work and, for much of the winter, no access to the outside world, Hadjiyan's exit will be just another quiet disappointment.

 

For Armenia at large, her impending departure is the latest result of a slow-motion crisis of confidence that has left the rugged mountain country hemorrhaging people for nearly all of its short history of independence. No one knows just how many have left, but even the most conservative estimates put the total at more than 1 million Armenians and counting -- with a total remaining population of no more than 3 million and perhaps as little as 2 million.

 

The exodus has made Armenia one of the fastest-disappearing nations in the world. "I call it depopulation," said Gevorg Pogosyan, a sociologist in the capital, Yerevan. "It calls into question whether Armenia is a country with a future. We are a weak society, weakened both politically and economically by this migration."

 

At the time of independence in 1991, Armenia's mere existence seemed a triumph over a tragic history. The world's 4 million-strong Armenian diaspora exulted at the idea of a national homeland less than a century after the Turks killed between 500,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.

 

But instead of luring home successful Armenians who had made new lives in the West, the post-Soviet country has written new chapters of loss into an already sad story. Damage remains from the 1988 earthquake that killed tens of thousands.

 

With broad support from its public, Armenia fought and won a war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Artsax in the 1990s, capturing and holding a large swath of Azeri territory. The Armenians in the enclave supported the war. But Armenia has never concluded a peace deal and remains under economic blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey.

 

In a country with no significant natural resources, a collapsed Soviet industrial infrastructure and an economy just now showing signs of recovery, many Armenians had little choice but to leave. About 80 percent headed to Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union; the rest joined the earlier diaspora in the United States or Western Europe.

 

Russian experts have calculated that $1 billion from migrants in Russia flows home annually to support Armenian families -- nearly double the Armenian government's entire budget. "If not for these billions, we would have had riots and revolutions here," Pogosyan said.

 

The wave of departures, which hit a high of about 200,000 a year in the mid-1990s, has stabilized in recent years, but the cumulative effect remains. Far more Armenians now live outside their homeland than in it. The society that stayed has far fewer working-age men, fewer marriages, fewer births. Women outnumber men 56 percent to 44 percent. About 1.5 million people, or nearly half the official population, live on pensions or other government handouts.

 

There's hardly a family untouched by the shifts -- from the government official charged with stopping the migration, whose own relatives decamped for Moscow, to the television host whose wife and two children moved to California 11 years ago without him.

 

Lawyer Hrayr Tovmasyan has watched his circle of friends and family dwindle with each passing year. From his graduate school class of four in 1998, one lives in Paris, one in Heidelberg and one in Moscow. His wife's siblings have all left for Russia; his uncles are in the United States and Denmark. "I'm the only one here," he said. His best friend, a professor, gave up his $70-a-month salary recently to move to Vancouver. He's now working in a furniture plant, but at least, reports Tovmasyan, who got an e-mail update from him last week, "he will get more money than his wife for the first time in his life."

 

 

 

"It's the good part of the population that's gone, the economically active part," Pogosyan said. "They are the ones who are supposed to create a middle class here. Instead, where is this middle class? It's in Europe and Russia."

 

And still it continues. Several times a day, travel agent Diana Asatryan said, she gets customers with telltale questions: What happens if you overstay a visa abroad? Can I buy a one-way ticket? "The ones who are leaving, they always reveal themselves," she said. Black-market prices for European visas are well-known in the business, she said -- a reported $8,000 to $10,000 for a visa to enter any of the 15 European countries known as the Schengen zone. Favorite destinations are France -- "if you have a baby there, you get residency," she noted -- and the United States, "if you're a young person."

 

No one knows just how few Armenians remain. A long-delayed official census -- the first since the Soviet collapse -- was conducted in 2001 and just released in full this year; it found an official population of 3.2 million. Independent experts, opposition politicians and many ordinary Armenians find that figure impossible to believe. "By the numbers, nothing changed," said Asatryan. "But even in my own family, 10 people left. Officially they are still here, they are still registered. But they are not here!"

 

Several experts said the country's population today likely is at between 2 million and 2.5 million.

 

The disputed figures have become a subject of urgent political debate. Opposition leaders, who united to protest vote fraud in last year's presidential election, claim the census was deliberately inflated to provide more voters for President Robert Kocharian's reelection.

 

More broadly, they say the constant loss of Armenians represents a widespread skepticism about the country's prospects. "Armenia is disappearing, broken into pieces," said Artashes Geghamian, head of the opposition National Unity Party. "The authorities took away the feeling of having a future from the people."

 

In an interview, Kocharian said there is not "a serious person in Armenia" who would dispute the accuracy of the census, and he said that "migration out of Armenia has stopped" as a result of strong economic growth on his watch that pushed the gross domestic product up by 13.7 percent last year.

 

U.S. Ambassador John Ordway endorsed the official head count, pointing to U.S. technical assistance. "We are very confident there was no artificial manipulation of the census figures," Ordway said. "It's not as if the last person is about to slam the door and turn the lights off," he said.

 

But the head of the government agency created in 2000 to deal with the migration crisis is less sanguine. "To say that the wave of migration has stopped would be wrong," said Gagik Yeganyan. Armenian society, he said, is permanently marked by the "very negative demographic and social consequences" of its lost population -- even if there are tentative signs of improvement. Births, for example, are down from about 90,000 a year in the early 1990s to around 35,000 today.

 

Most migrants were reluctant to leave and might be persuaded to come home if conditions in Armenia improved, Yeganyan said.

 

"We have a national idea -- 'One country, one nation, one culture, one religion.' It means that Armenia is considered the motherland for all Armenians living around the world, even though only 30 percent of Armenians live on the territory of the motherland," he said. "Armenians who leave always think they are not leaving forever."

 

Yeganyan acknowledged the government has yet to produce a comprehensive strategy for luring them back and providing opportunities once they are here. A study from 1998, he said, offered a cautionary tale: Out of 1,500 Armenians deported from Germany that year, 92 percent returned to Germany within a year.

 

To entice some Armenians back, at least those at the upper end of the income scale, manicured lawns and immaculate California-style suburban houses are taking shape on the outskirts of Yerevan in what is billed as the first American-inspired gated community in the South Caucasus. "Come home to Armenia," reads the sign outside the guardhouse at the Vahakni Homes and Timeshare Resort.

 

The brainchild of a building magnate based in New Jersey, it was originally pitched to successful expatriate Armenians ready to rebuild the country. Company owner Vahak Hovnanian "firmly believes the future growth of an independent Armenia lies in the diaspora actively coming back, not just sending money," said Arthur Havighorst, the firm's vice president.

 

But of about 32 houses built or in mid-construction, at prices starting at $190,000, 65 percent have been bought by local Armenians. The remainder, executive director Karekin Odabashian said, are being sold to people who left in recent years to make money in Moscow and elsewhere in East European countries and now want a place in the old country. Not a single resident has come from the United States.

 

Havighorst said the company has modified its pitch. In addition to ownership, it is offering overseas Armenians time shares at the rate of $6,000 for 20 years' worth of one-week vacations in the motherland. "We're very optimistic," he said. In a week in late June, he said, the firm found two takers for that deal -- "both in California."

[Vigil]

We need to help Sudan.

[MJ]

We need to help Sudan.

Armenian doesn't need help.

 

She needs people who claim ownership over her.

[bellthecat]

No one knows just how few Armenians remain. A long-delayed official census -- the first since the Soviet collapse -- was conducted in 2001 and just released in full this year; it found an official population of 3.2 million. Independent experts, opposition politicians and many ordinary Armenians find that figure impossible to believe. "By the numbers, nothing changed," said Asatryan. "But even in my own family, 10 people left. Officially they are still here, they are still registered. But they are not here!"

The population figure is artificially high because aid agencies give funds according to population numbers. But things are so bad in Armenia that the agencies are happy to go along with the deception. Coincidentally, I got told this 3 days ago from someone who was involved in an ngo agency in Armenia.

[bellthecat]

...and another person with whom I have been travelling with has a brother who used to go out on heavy drınking sessions 3 or 4 times a week with George Bush junior before he found religion and became president!

 

It's a small and interesting world.

[Accelerated]

...and another person with whom I have been travelling with has a brother who used to go out on heavy drınking sessions 3 or 4 times a week with George Bush junior before he found religion and became president!

 

Yeah, sounds about right.

[564312]

Can Armenians from Diaspora become Armenian citizens? No.

[Armen]

Jerusalem Post (subscription), Israel

Aug 4 2004

 

Snap judgement: Between Ararat and Zion

By CALEV BEN-DAVID

 

 

For centuries, a people with its own unique culture, language and

religion lived in exile from its ancestral homeland as it lay under

foreign rule.

 

Scattered in diaspora communities across the globe, these people

suffered ostracism, persecution and even genocide, while dreaming of

the day their nation would regain its independence. Finally, through

an almost miraculous set of geopolitical circumstances, that dream

was fulfilled against all odds.

 

It's not the Jews I'm talking about - it's the Armenians, whose

homeland achieved long-awaited independence with the breakup of the

Soviet Union in 1991.

 

At that time, Armenia's resident population was thought to be

comparable with that of the Armenian diaspora, numbering in the

three-to-four million range. No longer. Armenians are now free to go

home; however, they are also free to leave, and apparently, many are

doing just that.

 

According to a recent report in The Washington Post, there has a been

a mass exodus of Armenians out of their country in the past decade.

 

Although an Armenian census in 2001 listed the official population as

3.2 million, most Armenians believe the actual figure is now at least

a million, if not two million, lower than that. Most of the emigrants

have gone to Russia, with others joining the large ethnic Armenian

communities in France, North America and elsewhere.

 

"It's the economy," a member of the Armenian community in Jerusalem

told me. "It's gotten so bad people can barely get bread to eat

there."

 

Gevorg Pogosyan, a sociologist in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, told

The Washington Post: "I call it depopulation. It calls into question

whether Armenia is a country with a future. We are a weak society,

weakened both politically and economically by this migration."

 

Why are things so bad in Armenia? Well, it's a small country with few

natural resources that must share its borders with hostile Muslim

countries (Turkey and Azerbaijan)... you get the idea.

 

Reading of Armenia's plight, I couldn't help thinking of the

similarities with Israel, as well as the differences. Comparisons

between Armenians and Jews have been noted fairly often in the past,

and Armenian activists have admitted taking inspiration from their

Jewish counterparts in trying to get the world to acknowledge what

they see as the Turkish genocide perpetrated against their people

during World War I.

 

The Armenian diaspora, just like the Jewish one, is also pumping

billions of dollars back home to alleviate the situation there. "If

not for these billions, we would have had riots and revolutions

here," Pogosyan told The Washington Post.

 

Although things aren't quite as dire in Israel, the parallels between

the Armenian and Jewish diasporas in the relationship to their

"national homelands" are striking. Both even express their

nationalistic yearnings through the symbolism of holy mountains,

Ararat and Zion.

 

Is there anything useful for Israel and the Jewish people to learn

from Armenia's current migration plight? One lesson almost too

obvious is that the deepest feelings of yearning for a beloved

motherland, even those inculcated from birth, are not enough to

attract (or even hold) a population there if that nation cannot offer

its people adequate material conditions.

 

All the money invested in such worthy programs as birthright israel

won't help bring aliya from the Western world if foreign capital

isn't also being invested in Israeli businesses. Promoting Israel to

the Jewish world primarily as a charity case also doesn't help

matters, which is why Jewish Agency Chairman Sallai Meridor was right

this week to take exception to the new government plan to use funds

raised abroad to directly underwrite the providing of hot lunches for

Israeli schoolchildren.

 

Maybe, though, we should be cautious about taking this comparison too

far. After all, Israel has gone through bad patches comparable to

Armenia's, perhaps even worse in terms of the security situation. And

although an estimated hundreds of thousands of Israelis have voted

with their feet to seek a better life elsewhere, this country's

population has risen steadily, often dramatically, since its birth,

sometimes during its most difficult periods.

 

The difference, of course, lies not with the situations of the

nations of Israel and Armenia, but of their respective diasporas. A

series of historical circumstances since Theodor Herzl first called

for the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth more than a century

ago has propelled much of the Jewish world back to its ancestral

homeland, often not out of ancient yearnings, but as a last refuge.

 

Looking back over just the past quarter-century, it's remarkable how

a confluence of events in most of the remaining major centers of the

Jewish diaspora - the former Soviet Union, Argentina, and now France

- has seemingly contrived to nudge a significant number of Jews in

the direction of Israel. As bad as things have gotten here at times,

it seems there is always someplace else in the world where it's even

worse for the local Jewish population.

 

This isn't cause for complacency, though, and Israel should take note

of Armenia's current woes as a cautionary example. It's in this

context, perhaps, that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent call for

the Jews of France to make aliya should be understood - and not as

French President Jacques Chirac interpreted it, as a rebuke to France

for failing to prevent the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism. If Jews

aren't coming to Israel, from France and elsewhere, then they're

probably leaving it, and "depopulation" is a phenomenon this nation

can't afford.

 

Gagik Yeganyan, the government official in charge of dealing with the

Armenian migration crisis, told The Washington Post: "We have a

national idea - 'One country, one nation, one culture, one religion.'

It means that Armenia is considered the motherland for all Armenians

living around the world, even though only 30 percent of Armenians

live on the territory of the motherland. Armenians who leave always

think they are not leaving forever."

 

Right. Now where have I heard that one before?

[Vigil]

I find this article hypocritical, but do not ask me unless you want a long reply. Edited August 4, 2004 by Vigil