First, her son left for Russia. Then a daughter. Then her other daughter.
Last fall, her remaining son, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren moved. One
by one over the last decade, they fled this village on a barren mountain peak,
abandoning the rocky earth where the family has lived for a hundred years.
Now it is Atlas Hadjiyan’s turn.
She has sold her two cows and no longer tends the vegetable garden that is
necessary to survive the brutal winter. In September, she plans to become yet
another reluctant emigrant, leaving the independent homeland that Armenians
dreamed of for generations for the uncertain welcome of an icy Russian city a
thousand miles north. "I don’t want to leave," she said, "but this is no place
to live."
For this village, whose name means Black Fortress, where there is no running
water, no telephones, no paid work and, for much of the winter, no access to the
outside world, Hadjiyan’s exit will be just another quiet disappointment.
For Armenia at large, her impending departure is the latest result of a
slow-motion crisis of confidence that has left the rugged mountain country
hemorrhaging people for nearly all of its short history of independence. No one
knows just how many have left, but even the most conservative estimates put the
total at more than 1 million Armenians and counting — with a total remaining
population of no more than 3 million and perhaps as little as 2 million.
The exodus has made Armenia one of the fastest-disappearing nations in the
world. "I call it depopulation," said Gevorg Pogosyan, a sociologist in the
capital, Yerevan. "It calls into question whether Armenia is a country with a
future. We are a weak society, weakened both politically and economically by
this migration."
At the time of independence in 1991, Armenia’s mere existence seemed a
triumph over a tragic history. The world’s 4 million-strong Armenian diaspora
exulted at the idea of a national homeland less than a century after the Turks
killed between 500,000 and 1.5 million Armenians.
But instead of luring home successful Armenians who had made new lives in the
West, the post-Soviet country has written new chapters of loss into an already
sad story. Damage remains from the 1988 earthquake that killed tens of
thousands.
With broad support from its public, Armenia fought and won a war with
neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in the
1990s, capturing and holding a large swath of Azeri territory. The Armenians in
the enclave supported the war. But Armenia has never concluded a peace deal and
remains under economic blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey.
In a country with no significant natural resources, a collapsed Soviet
industrial infrastructure and an economy just now showing signs of recovery,
many Armenians had little choice but to leave. About 80 percent headed to Russia
and other parts of the former Soviet Union; the rest joined the earlier diaspora
in the United States or Western Europe.
Russian experts have calculated that $1 billion from migrants in Russia flows
home annually to support Armenian families — nearly double the Armenian
government’s entire budget. "If not for these billions, we would have had riots
and revolutions here," Pogosyan said.
The wave of departures, which hit a high of about 200,000 a year in the
mid-1990s, has stabilized in recent years, but the cumulative effect remains.
Far more Armenians now live outside their homeland than in it. The society that
stayed has far fewer working-age men, fewer marriages, fewer births. Women
outnumber men 56 percent to 44 percent. About 1.5 million people, or nearly half
the official population, live on pensions or other government handouts.
There’s hardly a family untouched by the shifts — from the government
official charged with stopping the migration, whose own relatives decamped for
Moscow, to the television host whose wife and two children moved to California
11 years ago without him.
Lawyer Hrayr Tovmasyan has watched his circle of friends and family dwindle
with each passing year. From his graduate school class of four in 1998, one
lives in Paris, one in Heidelberg and one in Moscow. His wife’s siblings have
all left for Russia; his uncles are in the United States and Denmark. "I’m the
only one here," he said.
His best friend, a professor, gave up his $70-a-month salary recently to move
to Vancouver. He’s now working in a furniture plant, but at least, reports
Tovmasyan, who got an e-mail update from him last week, "he will get more money
than his wife for the first time in his life."
"It’s the good part of the population that’s gone, the economically active
part," Pogosyan said. "They are the ones who are supposed to create a middle
class here. Instead, where is this middle class? It’s in Europe and Russia."
And still it continues. Several times a day, travel agent Diana Asatryan
said, she gets customers with telltale questions: What happens if you overstay a
visa abroad? Can I buy a one-way ticket? "The ones who are leaving, they always
reveal themselves," she said. Black-market prices for European visas are
well-known in the business, she said — a reported $8,000 to $10,000 for a visa
to enter any of the 15 European countries known as the Schengen zone. Favorite
destinations are France — "if you have a baby there, you get residency," she
noted — and the United States, "if you’re a young person."
No one knows just how few Armenians remain. A long-delayed official census —
the first since the Soviet collapse — was conducted in 2001 and just released
in full this year; it found an official population of 3.2 million. Independent
experts, opposition politicians and many ordinary Armenians find that figure
impossible to believe. "By the numbers, nothing changed," said Asatryan. "But
even in my own family, 10 people left. Officially they are still here, they are
still registered. But they are not here!"
Several experts said the country’s population today likely is at between 2
million and 2.5 million.
The disputed figures have become a subject of urgent political debate.
Opposition leaders, who united to protest vote fraud in last year’s presidential
election, claim the census was deliberately inflated to provide more voters for
President Robert Kocharian’s reelection.
More broadly, they say the constant loss of Armenians represents a widespread
skepticism about the country’s prospects. "Armenia is disappearing, broken into
pieces," said Artashes Geghamian, head of the opposition National Unity Party.
"The authorities took away the feeling of having a future from the people."
In an interview, Kocharian said there is not "a serious person in Armenia"
who would dispute the accuracy of the census, and he said that "migration out of
Armenia has stopped" as a result of strong economic growth on his watch that
pushed the gross domestic product up by 13.7 percent last year.
U.S. Ambassador John Ordway endorsed the official head count, pointing to
U.S. technical assistance. "We are very confident there was no artificial
manipulation of the census figures," Ordway said. "It’s not as if the last
person is about to slam the door and turn the lights off," he said.
But the head of the government agency created in 2000 to deal with the
migration crisis is less sanguine. "To say that the wave of migration has
stopped would be wrong," said Gagik Yeganyan. Armenian society, he said, is
permanently marked by the "very negative demographic and social consequences" of
its lost population — even if there are tentative signs of improvement. Births,
for example, are down from about 90,000 a year in the early 1990s to around
35,000 today.
Most migrants were reluctant to leave and might be persuaded to come home if
conditions in Armenia improved, Yeganyan said.
"We have a national idea — ‘One country, one nation, one culture, one
religion.’ It means that Armenia is considered the motherland for all Armenians
living around the world, even though only 30 percent of Armenians live on the
territory of the motherland," he said. "Armenians who leave always think they
are not leaving forever."
Yeganyan acknowledged the government has yet to produce a comprehensive
strategy for luring them back and providing opportunities once they are here. A
study from 1998, he said, offered a cautionary tale: Out of 1,500 Armenians
deported from Germany that year, 92 percent returned to Germany within a year.
To entice some Armenians back, at least those at the upper end of the income
scale, manicured lawns and immaculate California-style suburban houses are
taking shape on the outskirts of Yerevan in what is billed as the first
American-inspired gated community in the South Caucasus. "Come home to Armenia,"
reads the sign outside the guardhouse at the Vahakni Homes and Timeshare Resort.
The brainchild of a building magnate based in New Jersey, it was originally
pitched to successful expatriate Armenians ready to rebuild the country. Company
owner Vahak Hovnanian "firmly believes the future growth of an independent
Armenia lies in the diaspora actively coming back, not just sending money," said
Arthur Havighorst, the firm’s vice president.
But of about 32 houses built or in mid-construction, at prices starting at
$190,000, 65 percent have been bought by local Armenians. The remainder,
executive director Karekin Odabashian said, are being sold to people who left in
recent years to make money in Moscow and elsewhere in East European countries
and now want a place in the old country. Not a single resident has come from the
United States.
Havighorst said the company has modified its pitch. In addition to ownership,
it is offering overseas Armenians time shares at the rate of $6,000 for 20
years’ worth of one-week vacations in the motherland. "We’re very optimistic,"
he said. In a week in late June, he said, the firm found two takers for that
deal — "both in California."
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