The New York Times:
Yerevan Journal: For Young Armenians, a Promised Land Without Promise
December 9, 2004
By SUSAN SACHS
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 apologetic shrug.
Ms. Amatuni, 21, imagines herself in London or perhaps Moscow. Her
language skills might land her a well-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
country the size of Maryland with a population of barely three million
people, it is an awkward paradox.
Their parents grew up in a captive republic of the Soviet Union. Their
grandparents escaped the massacre of Armenians by Turks in the years
of World War I. For them, and for the four-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 with a double-digit unemployment rate and 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, 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, Mr. Simonian, 21, was uncomfortable with what seem to
be the country’s 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
assimilated Russian culture.
So 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, a theater student. He saw the
world as essentially hostile and neighboring Turkey, just 15 miles 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.”
Mr. Harutiunian had evaluated his prospects. His father was already
working in Russia, his brother was working in Spain and he was
resigned to finding a chance for artistic expression elsewhere.
“Leaving the difficulties aside, Armenian culture is not developing
and you have to go out,” he said.
Mr. Simonian interrupted, chiding, “It’s wrong to leave the country.”
The other students fell silent.
The insular views of some of these young people dismay older Armenians
who have a sharp sense of how their own horizons have shrunk since
independence.
“For 70 years we lived in a different country, where we were open to
Russian culture and history,” said Svetlana Muradian, a mother of six
in Gyumri who used to work in Russia but now supports her family with
odd jobs. “Kids now see nothing beyond Armenia. My only hope is that
my three sons will grow up and leave.”
The students gathered in the Red Bull bar in Yerevan were struggling
with a different facet of the same predicament. Fluent in English and
Russian as well as their native Armenian, they were impatient with the
growing pains of a post-Soviet state and 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,”
Mr. Karapetian said.
Unlike the less privileged students in Gyumri, he and his friends in
the capital have reached out beyond Armenia’s borders. They get their
news from the Internet and use the Web to chat with English speakers
from around the world. They regularly meet Armenians from the United
States and Russia who come to visit Armenia, to teach at the
universities, plant trees or to set up charities.
But their relative sophistication also makes them keenly aware of the
contrast between their aspirations and their country’s opportunities.
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. “We’re cheaper than Indians and
probably 10 times cheaper than Americans.”
Mr. Agababov is considering moving to Moscow to find a technology job
that might promise advancement and independence.
As far the Armenian-Americans and other diaspora visitors who say they
yearn to come to the new Armenia, Mr. Agababov and Zara Amatuni, the
linguistics student, have a suggestion.
“We can swap,” Mr. Agababov said.
“Right,” said Ms. Amatuni. “They can come back and we can
go there.”
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