By Susan Sachs 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.
.
Yorumlar kapatıldı.