Forgotten land
America knows little about tragedies that have become a part of everyday life in Armenia
By Janin Friend / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

GYUMRI, Armenia, November 6, 2000-Jama Varosian is one of many forgotten people living in the ruins of an often forgotten country, Armenia. An earthquake 12 years ago destroyed her apartment in the city of Gyumri, so she occupies a one-room sheet metal trailer, with no toilet, water or electricity.

The table where she cuts her bread – the only food she can afford – dominates the trailer, along with a narrow bed that she shares with a 5-year-old girl who was abandoned by her mother.

To live, Ms. Varosian, 45, sells metal and other material collected from an earthquake-rebuilding project left unfinished when the Soviet Union collapsed and Armenia declared its independence in 1991. Deserted by her husband, who left for Russia to find work, she can't escape her desperate, lonely life.

"If I had the money to buy a bus ticket, I would go," she says.

Throughout Armenia and the Armenian-held territory of Karabakh in neighboring Azerbaijan are desolate cities and towns with impoverished people huddling in their Soviet-style apartments, bombed houses or trailers. They've suffered through earthquakes, massacres, bloody wars, Soviet domination, ruinous emigration, poverty, corrupt leadership and political killings. Tragedy hangs on the nation like the pictures of the dead hang on the walls of its homes.

Armenia has long been buffeted by colliding worlds – the Islamic and the Christian, and the Persian, Ottoman and Russian empires and their modern counterparts. Armenia has stumbled in the transition to a democracy and free-market economy, partly because of its own disastrous policies.

Foreign countries have contributed a huge amount of assistance to stabilize this commercial and political link between Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. government alone has pumped $1.1 billion into Armenia since 1992 – the highest per capita assistance in the former Soviet Union.

Yet, if asked, most Americans probably wouldn't know where Armenia is. Nor would they recall what Armenians say was a genocide of 1.5 million of their people under the cover of World War I by Ottoman Turks seeking to save a crumbling empire.

"Almost every Armenian family faced losses from the genocide," says Rouben Adalian, head of the Armenian National Institute in Washington. "When the world turns away, it magnifies the losses."

The world has never recognized the slaughter of the Armenians the way it remembers the Jewish Holocaust, in which almost 6 million were killed.

During World War II, Adolf Hitler justified genocide by saying, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

To fight this silence, Armenians have tried to get their genocide recognized abroad, despite the Turkish government's position that both Turks and Armenians were killed during World War I in partisan fighting.

"It remains an unresolved trauma," says Richard Hovannisian, a professor of Armenian history at the University of California at Los Angeles. "It's like living next to your murderer and having to be silent."

This fall, Armenian-Americans pushed to get a resolution recognizing the genocide through Congress. Their effort failed, despite the 1.5 million people of Armenian descent in the United States and wealthy Armenians so influential on Capitol Hill that they are compared with the Israeli lobby.

In late October, President Clinton, worried about the crisis in the Middle East, urged House Speaker Dennis Hastert to yank the resolution after the Turkish government threatened retaliation. Shortly thereafter, thousands protested the U.S. action in Armenia's capital, Yerevan, but the issue died rapidly in the United States.

This is what happens to many Armenian events. They slip into the news and then quietly disappear, overshadowed by crises in the Balkans, Chechnya and the Middle East or the interests of Armenia's more powerful neighbors, Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Even Armenia's bloody conflict with Azerbaijan over Karabakh between 1988 and 1994 rarely made headlines in the United States. The long-simmering dispute between Muslim Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia flared up when Armenians in Karabakh, awarded to Azerbaijan during the Soviet era, wanted to secede.

The large Armenian population in Karabakh claimed that they were discriminated against by Azerbaijanis and that the territory was rightfully theirs – the heartland of Armenian civilization dating to the seventh century B.C. The Azerbaijanis, longtime adversaries of the Armenians who also trace their national roots to Karabakh, refused to accept the claims, starting a fight to keep the region.

The Armenians fought back, seizing Karabakh and surrounding lands in Azerbaijan. They expelled more than 700,000 Azerbaijanis in the early to mid-1990s while the West was focused on the plight of the Bosnian Muslims.

Because few Western journalists are based in Armenia or Azerbaijan, many stay for just a few days. Thomas Goltz, a Karabakh war reporter and the author of Azerbaijan Diary, says that the West's coverage of the massacre and expulsion of Azerbaijanis from Karabakh and surrounding areas was too little, too late and often misleading.

Although some experts consider the Southern Caucasus region of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia a mini-Balkans, Armenia has been overshadowed by more powerful neighbors. It is also geographically isolated with mountain ranges on all sides.

"It is a remote place," says Ross Vartian, executive director of the Armenian Assembly, a lobby group in Washington. "The Balkans are right at the heart of Europe."

Armenia has about the same amount of land as Maryland and about the same size economy as 57,000-population LaCrosse, Wis. It doesn't have as many resources as its oil-rich neighbor Azerbaijan, where U.S. companies have staked out claims, and it's isolated culturally, with its own religion and alphabet.

Fleeing the country

Small as it is, Armenia is getting smaller. Some experts estimate it has lost almost half its population, which stood at 3.7 million a decade ago.

On a percentage basis, "Armenia's emigration is the worst in the post-Communist world," says Aaron Adekian, a Yerevan sociologist and co-author of Surviving Post-Communism.

Desperate to find jobs and escape poverty, Armenians are leaving the country any way they can – about 80 percent to Russia, where they don't need visas and know the language, and about 15 percent to the United States and Western Europe.

Sometimes, they simply close the doors on their apartments or sell them for as little as $600 to board buses. Nora Hairapetova, who doesn't have an apartment, has tried to sell her possessions to pay for a $55 one-way ticket to Rostov, Russia.

"I can either kill myself or leave. I have nothing left," says Ms. Hairapetova, 63, who stays with friends or relatives in the city of Charentsavan, near Yerevan. Others get tourist visas to board airplanes to the United States or Western Europe and then don't return from vacations or business trips. At the American embassy in Yerevan, more than 200 Armenians stand in line to get visas on the heaviest days.

"It's terrible. We are losing the brains, the workers and the politicians," says Gevork Pogosian, a top Armenian sociologist.

Aram Hovhannisyan, 28, who is fluent in English and Russian and has an advanced degree in physics, lost his $400-a-month computer job when CARE scaled back its office in Yerevan. He cruised the Internet and got a well-paying job with a software company in Florida.

"I have to think about my son," says Mr. Hovhannisyan, who is married and has a 17-month-old baby. "There is no future in Armenia."

Most emigrating are working-age men, leaving a disproportionate share of elderly, women and children. About 80 percent of those who remain are poor, and many women have been abandoned by their husbands. Unmarried women struggle with the reality that they won't find a mate or try to compete for male attention by wearing heels, short skirts and heavy makeup despite the country's conservative attitudes toward women.

"It's the desperation factor," says one Armenian woman.

How it started

A series of events led to this disastrous emigration, starting with the earthquake. Then the Karabakh conflict began after the Armenians demanded the region be incorporated into their nation, and Azerbaijan, later joined by Turkey, imposed a rail, road and energy blockade against Armenia. When the conflict escalated to open warfare in late 1991 and 1992, many men left.

Also in the early 1990s, hundreds of Armenian factories, useless because they made parts for Soviet industry, closed, producing an army of jobless people. Even now, unemployment stands at 40 percent, and underemployment is so staggering that physicians open up doors at hotels and university lecturers clean offices for $5 a week.

Privatized factories, sold for a fraction of what they are worth, often stand empty, and most foreign investors have been scared off by the political and economic crisis, coupled with widespread corruption.

Armenia lives mostly off foreign assistance. The 7.5 million Armenians abroad – almost four times the nation's population – send more than $300 million annually in remittances and donations for development projects.

Wealthy members of the Armenian-American community, including billionaire Kirk Kirkorian, owner of MGM films and large Las Vegas casinos, and Hirair Hovnanian, a New Jersey construction magnate, have pumped millions of dollars into Armenia and Karabakh.

Yet many problems remain, and World Bank figures show that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The Armenian government, with a budget of about $420 million a year, almost always seems short of funds, waiting for infusions from the World Bank.

Armenia's political leadership is constantly under attack or changing. The country has had four prime ministers in two years.

President Robert Kocharian, a Karabakh war veteran, has faced several calls for impeachment or resignation because of the chaos that followed five terrorist gunmen killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sarkisian and seven members of Parliament on Oct. 27, 1999. The gunmen were protesting unbearable conditions in the country.

"Many people are very angry," says Anahit Gjulbudaghian, a 27-year-old Yerevan resident. "They are ready to kill."

In late October of this year, a wealthy Armenian businessman organized a protest of about 10,000 people and was jailed, accused of trying to violently overthrow the government.

Last spring, thousands of members of the Armenian Communist Party protested conditions in the country and called for Armenia to join the Russia-Belarus Alliance, which has some similarities to the former Soviet Union.

"Some Armenians are lost in the transition," says Thatoul Manasserian, an economist with Armenia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "They still hope the Soviet regime will come back."

Few crowds seem to gather in Yerevan unless people are protesting, mourning or lining up for visas. In April, thousands go to the Genocide Memorial in Yerevan to commemorate the killing of 1.5 million Armenians, many of them starved in death marches.

The Karabakh and Armenian governments, controlled by powerful elites, are tainted by secrecy, corruption and violence. In Karabakh, the authorities restricted journalists' coverage of the trial of a general accused of masterminding an assassination attempt last spring on the president of Karabakh. A former Armenian interior minister, accused of ordering the contract killing of five prominent Armenians, fled after his trial began earlier this year.

Some claim that Armenia's problems stem as much from misguided policies and corruption as outside forces. The failure to resolve the Karabakh conflict, despite a cease-fire reached six years ago, has been particularly costly.

The United States and the Western Europeans have been trying in vain to help negotiate a peace agreement for six years.

"The situation is getting more explosive. The Azeris are talking about revenge," says Karen Ohanjanian, the Karabakh human rights representative for Amnesty International and the Helsinki Association.

Legacies of war

Both sides suffered heavily in the conflict. Azerbaijan lost 20 percent of its territory, and displaced Azerbaijanis had to move into squalid, disease-ridden camps.

"There is only one solution: the people must go home. They all want to go back," says Elin Suleymanov, spokesman for the Azerbaijan embassy in Washington.

Meantime, Armenia is paying a huge price for trying to grab what it says has historically been its land from Azerbaijan. With its borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey closed, its economy is losing $62 million in annual exports to its neighbors. And Armenia also has been bypassed for a big pipeline transporting Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan.

In Karabakh, unemployed people are flooding out, cutting the population in half to an estimated 75,000, and some cities and villages have not been rebuilt after the war. The former center of Azerbaijan culture in Karabakh – Shusha – is almost empty, and the people remaining sometimes live in one intact room in their bombed houses.

The people in Shusha are so poor that a small shop owner says she can't even sell 20 pieces of bread a day, and then most of it is bartered for walnuts that people gather from trees.

In Khojaly, about 100 Armenians have replaced several thousand Azerbaijanis who either fled or were massacred by Armenians. The main street of town is a dirt road with dead rats where Karabakh Armenians eke out a subsistence living and occupy houses without running water.

"We don't feel assistance or support," says Giunchura Saroukhanyan, 43. "No one from the government comes here to ask how we are doing. We don't feel there is any kind of government."

Nor do they feel they have a voice. The Karabakh Armenian government quickly silences critics. A journalist was jailed and muzzled this spring after he was accused of falsely reporting that officials didn't provide promised assistance to Karabakh settlers.

So Mrs. Saroukhanyan and others occupy territory that has more land mines than people. They are forgotten in little-known Karabakh, haunted by tragedies they can't forget.

Janin Friend, a Dallas free-lance journalist, recently spent a year in Armenia establishing a program for an independent press.

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