Young Armenians puzzle over their homeland
By Susan Sachs

International Herald Tribune

The New York Times Thursday, December 9, 2004

YEREVAN, Armenia – In a smoky corner of the Red Bull bar, a favorite
hangout for university students, Zara Amatuni mulled over the reasons
she would leave her homeland.

“It’s poor, it has no natural resources, it has an undeveloped
economy and it’s unlikely to be developing in the next 10 years,”
she said with a small shrug.

Amatuni, 21, imagines herself in London, or perhaps Moscow. Her
language skills might land her a good-paying job, and plenty of
Armenians have marked the trail before her.

“We can fit in anywhere,” she said. “The only place we can’t is
Armenia.”

For young people who have come of age in an independent Armenia,
a small country with barely 3 million people, it is an awkward paradox.

Their parents grew up in a captive republic of the Soviet Union. Their
grandparents escaped the Turkish massacres of Armenians in the bloody
aftermath of World War I. For them, and for the 4-million strong
Armenian diaspora, the creation of a sovereign Armenian homeland 13
years ago was the fulfillment of a dream.

Yet the promised land has proved too constricting and its promise too
distant for the next generation’s ambitions. Those who want to leave
and those who want to stay are all trying to reconcile what it means
to be Armenian.

For some, no longer being part of the empire that was the Soviet
Union means a loss of significance in the world. Then there were
opportunities for well-educated Armenians to work in Moscow and
elsewhere.

Independence, they had hoped, would propel Armenia into the wider
world, important on its own. Instead, they find themselves in a
backwater where most of the decent-paying jobs are with international
aid organizations.

“Let us build Armenia here,” said Artyom Simonian, an acting student in
the struggling town of Gyumri, 120 kilometers, or 75 miles, northwest
of the capital, where residents are still recovering from a devastating
1988 earthquake.

He is one of those nostalgic for an imagined past. Like many of his
fellow students, Simonian, 21, was uncomfortable with the country’s
apparent choices, integration with Europe or tighter bonds with Russia.

“We are trying to love foreigners too much,” he said.

He and some other students, gathered around a small table in the
chilly cafeteria of the Gyumri Arts School, understand they have
fewer opportunities than did their parents, who learned to speak
Russian and became assimilated to Russian culture.

They long for a bigger, more muscular Armenia, a land that would
embrace what is now southeastern Turkey where their ancestors lived a
century ago. The snowy crest of Mount Ararat, now on the other side
of the border, floats on the horizon beyond Gyumri as a reminder of
that phantom homeland.

“I won’t consider myself Armenian until all of sacred Mount Ararat is
in Armenia,” said Alexan Gevorgian, another theater student. He saw
the world as essentially hostile and neighboring Turkey, 25 kilometers
to the west, as “an animal waiting for its prey to weaken.”

His bitterness was too much for Ludvig Harutiunian, the student council
president. “We young people should leave this hostility behind,”
he protested. “I’d like Armenia to be known for good things, not
genocide and wars and victims and mourning.” Harutiunian had evaluated
his prospects. His father was working in Russia, his brother was
working in Spain and he was resigned to finding a chance for artistic
expression elsewhere.

“Armenian culture is not developing and you have to go out,” he said.

Simonian interrupted, chiding, “It’s wrong to leave the country.” The
other students fell silent.

The insular views of many of these young people dismay older Armenians
who have a sharp sense of how their own horizons have shrunk.

“For 70 years we lived in a different country, where we were open to
Russian culture and history,” said Svetlana Muradian, a Gyumri mother
of six. “Kids now see nothing beyond Armenia. My only hope is that
my three sons will grow up and leave.”

The students in the Red Bull bar in Yerevan were struggling with a
different facet of the same dilemma. Fluent in English and Russian as
well as their native Armenian, they were impatient with the growing
pains of a post-Soviet state and deeply cynical about politics.

To Gevorg Karapetian, a doctoral student in computer engineering,
the ideal leader would be a businessman, “someone educated and clever
enough to make relationships with the neighboring countries.” The
present crowd of politicians did not measure up. “Our president and all
the presidents before him just want to be president,” said Karapetian.

Unlike the less privileged students in Gyumri, he and his friends
in the capital have reached out to the world beyond Armenia’s
borders. They get their news from the Internet and use it to chat with
English speakers from around the world. They regularly meet Armenians
from the United States and Russia who visit the homeland. But their
relative sophistication also makes them keenly aware of the contrast
between their aspirations and their country’s opportunities, souring
even their successes.

Victor Agababov, 22, earns the princely sum of $650 a month working
as a computer programmer in Yerevan, making him the best paid member
of his university class. Yet he tends to mock his own achievement
because his job involves doing outsourced work transferred from the
United States and Japan.

“We are a cheap work force,” he said.