Reflections on Armenia

In trying to put on paper my feelings about Armenia after two years living here, I find my emotions in conflict with each other. I feel that I am generally an optimist, but I feel depressed for Armenia. I have come to love many individual Armenians, but despair over the lack of individual responsibility Armenians feel for their country. The over-wrought American expression “It takes a village to raise a child,” is not felt in Armenia. There is an under current of hopelessness in this country. I have been discouraged by the number of people who have asked for help to “get out.” I am really thrilled when I run into a young person who says that he wants to remain in Armenia and make the country great. But a part of me also wonders how that is possible.

I see myself as forward looking. I am always hopeful that things will change, and for the better. In Armenia I felt I was living against the tide. Because Armenia is land-locked and border-locked to the East and West (and South if you want to count Iran), this very poor country cannot advance economically until border issues are resolved. I have enormous sympathy for the Armenians in their relationship with Turkey. Armenians simply hate the Turks, and with justifiable reasons. The genocide of over one million Christian Armenians at the hands of the Muslim Turks in 1915 after decades of low-level conflict seems to have left the Armenians permanently depressed and unable to move forward substantially. Armenians are still discriminated against in Turkey. And with the increased rise of a Muslim consciousness in Turkey today I find it difficult to believe that the conflict can be resolved in the near future. The Armenians need an apology from the Turks. My hope is that Turkey will not be able to join the EU until it offers this apology, as many nations are asking, and that our President will use the word “genocide” in referring to the Armenian-Turkish border conflict, which hinges on a solution to the Azerbaijan dispute over Nagorno Karabakh. Our Presidents have refused to mention genocide because the US has military bases in Turkey, which take precedence over the despair of this nation of three million people.

Turkish citizens are news-suppressed, and students do not learn about the Armenian genocide. At the direction of the Turkish government, the incident “never happened.” But the independent reports from prominent European observers, aid workers, and missionaries leave no doubt about the indiscriminate murder of Armenian women, children, and old men. Christian Armenians who had lived in areas of the Ottoman Empire for centuries before it shrank in the 1910s due to excessive debt, war-mongering, and lack of a central structure became a target for the Turk’s drive for a Muslim state. For decades Istanbul Armenians had been bankers, merchants, and traders, positions not entirely compatible with Islam, and they were resented. During this period the Ottoman Empire lost Greece, the Balkans, what is now Eastern Turkey, and most of what became the Soviet Caucasus. (The story is much more complicated than what I’ve outlined.) I’ve come to believe that to psychically “save” Armenians, the Turks need to acknowledge what they did, and the world community needs to demand it. (There are 70 million Turks and three million Armenians in Armenia.)

I used to think that the Armenians should “just get over it.” The Germans apologized for the Jewish slaughter. In many other genocides, leaders have been brought to trial. The world community has condemned offending governments. But for political reasons, Armenia has not had the same backing. The country is not strategically important. The Armenians have a common expression, “I feel your pain.” They need to hear this for healing.

Armenians live in multi-generational family groups. Everything is passed down from grandmothers to grandchildren, including this ethnic pain. They hate the Turks, but I’m not sure that the Turks hate them; they just see them as “the problem” which is even more painful because it is as if the Armenians don’t exist, and never have, to them.

Armenia is also still remembering the good-old Soviet days, incorrectly. Education, business, work attitudes and ethics, and community responsibility are all still heavily influenced by the Soviet socialist period, though the Soviet Union dissolved in 1992. The country does not feel like a democracy, though it is in name, and it does not operate as a capitalist economy, though it is in name. Corruption is rampant in all aspects of society. A few families of oligarchs control strategic businesses and government.

I have often felt psychologically trapped in Armenian. It was knowing that I could not cross the border five kilometers to the West (Turkey) of Gyumri, to the South (Iran), or to the East (Azerbaijan). I’ve become very aware of how Georgia exploits their position to the North by charging unfair transit taxes for all goods that enter Armenia. Then the corrupt Armenian Customs Department levies unfair import taxes so that Armenians (per capita income is $3,000, though people I know make far less) pay far more for common goods of less quality then we do. In addition the border between Georgia and Russia is closed, further limiting trade.

I felt frustrated by my work in Armenia. You can’t talk to businesses about financing inventory when bank loans are based on human relationships (and holding your wife’s gold jewelry as collateral), interest rates are 24%, the payback period is always two years, and the supply of goods is uncertain (due to the customs and duty ministries.) Students don’t do assignments unless they feel like it, and if they don’t feel like it they know they can “buy” their grades. Plagiarism and cheating are rampant, and not seen as something “bad.” NGOs, who do social good, often inflate their numbers, hire their own unqualified family members, redirect donations to their own use, and lie on their reports. The list goes on.

But I have no regrets about my decision to live and work in Armenia for two years. I have learned much about another culture, another language, and about the effect the shifting alliances and politics in this region have had on shaping what Armenia is today. A friend related a story about a diaspora Armenian she met at the US Embassy in Yerevan who asked, in a meeting, what the Embassy was going to do about the sorry state of the Armenian National Art Gallery. The issues and problems in Armenia are huge, and this is the very least of them. I appreciate what many of the issues and problems are, and I am grateful for that understanding. But the solutions seem over-whelming. I know much of what has to happen, but how to make it happen is the problem. The corruption in daily life is so endemic and Armenians seem so passive about it; “passive” in the same way that they were to the Ottoman Empire’s encroachment on their human rights.