Here is an article in the Wall Street Journal in which I am mentioned and so is this web site. Pretty cool! The article is of course a bit on the depressing side, and I can point out some problems with it, but I will refrain and only say one thing. He implies that there are only 200 diasporans in Armenia by saying that is how many are registered at the US Embassy. Well FIRST of all, not all the American Armenians are registered, I can tell you that for sure, and SECOND of all, the diaspora is not all in America. We have people from Canada, Australia and Egypt on this log and I know French, Argentinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, Russian, Iranian and other diasporans as well. Aaanyways, read on.
The Wall Street Journal
July 6, 2001
Armenia, After a Decade of Statehood, Suffers Rapid Loss of HumanCapital
By Hugh PopeStaff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
YEREVAN, Armenia -- Armenians suffered massacres, earthquakes, wars and
invasions before their status as a people without a state ended in 1991.
But at the end of its first decade of independent nationhood, Armenia is
fast becoming a state without people.
"They're spread all over the world. Mine are in America," says Heran
Keshishian, a 65-year-old retired plumber, as he limps up the stairs of
his apartment building in the city of Charentsevan counting off
locked-up and abandoned homes.
Eight of the building's 50 apartments are empty. Nearly all the
remaining families have seen members leave the country. Mr. Keshishian's
brother, sister, daughter and daughter-in law have departed. Patriotism
keeps him in Armenia, he boasts. His wife explains they came back after
eight months in the U.S. in 1999, lacking the visas or resources tostay.
Armenia is suffering through one of the most rapid population declines
on Earth, the result of a funk of uncertainty, depression and poverty
that has settled over the population.
Several former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia also
have seen troubling population declines, one factor frustrating U.S.
efforts to create a corridor of vibrant nations south of Russia.
Armenia's is the worst.
At least 800,000 Armenians have left in the past decade, almost a
quarter of the country's population of 3.4 million, figures Gagik
Yeganyan, head of a new department of migration, established a year ago
to help deal with the problem. One Western diplomat estimates the real
figure is 1.5 million, meaning almost half the nation's population would
have left. Nobody will know for sure until a long-delayed census is
conducted with U.S. assistance in October.
In the half-empty offices and echoing corridors of a government building
in the capital, Stepan Mnatsakanyan piles the table with statistical
leaflets containing a litany of his country's woes: Industrial
production has sunk to levels last seen in the 1970s. Inhabited
residential space is back to where it was in the 1940s. The number of
babies born in 1999 fell to 36,000, less than half the 80,000 born in1990.
The impoverished government has cut early classes from schools. Subway
trains in Yerevan run with two cars now, instead of three. Women are
visibly in the majority as working-age men leave to seek work elsewhere.
Only one worker is left now to support each pensioner, a far more
onerous burden than the 3-to-1 ratio in most Western societies.
Armenia's situation isn't unremittingly bleak. Signs of growth are
creeping back into the economy, thanks to migrant-worker remittances and
some investment by the now four million-strong Armenian diaspora.
Armenian politics appear calmer after a decade of desperate volatility.
But Armenia's history makes its plight all the more poignant. An ancient
people who this year celebrate the 1,700th anniversary of becoming the
first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion, Armenians have
been scattered repeatedly over that time by armies sweeping through the
crossroads of the Caucasus and the Middle East. By the 19th century,
they were a majority barely anywhere.
The worst was yet to come. Although historical accounts differ, during
the first World War somewhere between 300,000 and 1.5 million Armenians
died from disease and outright massacres as Ottoman Turks forcibly
deported or killed them. Armenians call it the modern world's first
genocide. An earthquake killed 25,000 people in 1988. Nearly as manydied in the
Nagorno-Karabagh fighting between 1988 and 1994. Then came the economic
collapse within Armenia.
"It's a tragedy, the loss of our most important asset, our human
capital. The Armenians and the government have nobody to blame but
themselves," says Raffi Hovanissian, chief of an Armenian think tank.
A trickle of arrivals like Mr. Hovanissian -- including about 200
Americans, according to the U.S. Embassy -- represent one of Armenia's
best chances to eventually reverse the exodus.
Zabel Artinian still remembers how her grandmother urged her as a child
in Boston to someday rebuild the family's crushed homeland. But when the
25-year-old artist took up that challenge, she found that Armenians
thought she was crazy. "People here don't think about what they can do
for themselves. They just want to leave," says Ms. Artinian, who cashed
in her savings as an animator and painter in New York two years ago.
She helped restore thousand-year-old stone churches in remote mountain
valleys. She fell in love with fellow volunteer Raffi Kojian, 29, a
business major who built a Web site to communicate their passion for
the country. Both now work for another Armenian-American in one of the
new companies that are bringing a measure of economic hope -- a few
glossy shops, some restaurants and disposable income -- to the center
of the capital.
Some Armenians hold out hope. Karekin II, head of the Armenian Orthodox
church, radiates optimism. He stands in a cathedral near Yerevan
surrounded by golden treasures and buildings restored with money
collected from the Armenian diaspora.
"It is a pain for us that Armenians are leaving the country. We preach
that they should stay, but we can't order them not to go," Karekin II
says. "We have to rebuild the country so they can live and satisfy theirneeds."
Such words haven't shortened visa queues at the few embassies left in
Yerevan. So few Armenians return from "tourist" trips that the refusal
rate for applicants has reached 80% at some missions. "I tried to go to
the U.S. But I couldn't get a visa. I'd go anywhere," says Adelina
Gevorkian, 38, weeping softly at her open-air clothing store in a
Yerevan market. "My son left university early and is working in Russia.
I'm only staying because my other son has to do his military service.
What's there to stay for?"
Write to Hugh Pope at hugh.pope@wsj.com
