The New York Review of Books
Armenia Survives!
May 10, 2012
Tim Judah
The Caucasus: An Introduction
by Thomas de Waal
Tim Judah
Statue of Alexander Tamanian, the architect of Republic Square and the
opera house, in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, with the city’s
Cascade staircase in the background Depending on which figures you
look at, Armenia’s population hovers around three million people. That
is some half a million less than it was twenty years ago, when the
state gained independence as the Soviet Union collapsed. But some
believe that the true figure is even less than that. If there are few
jobs, and if Armenia remains isolated, it is hardly surprising that so
many of its people go abroad.
Just look at the map to understand the fundamental geographic problems
facing Armenia. To the west is Turkey, the historic nemesis of the
Armenians, which angrily objects to claims that up to 1.5 million
Armenians were killed by the Ottomans in 1915. Turkey closed its
borders with Armenia in 1993. To the east is Turkey’s ally, Muslim
Azerbaijan, also formerly part
of the USSR, with which Armenia fought a war in the early 1990s. The border between the two states has been closed since, because of the dispute over
the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which, until the Armenians conquered a land bridge to it, was surrounded on all sides by Azerbaijan.
Mike King
To the south is Iran. The Armenians are an ancient Christian people but their relations with the Iranians are good. It helps that Iran is deeply suspicious of Azerbaijan, which has good relations with both the US and Israel and has suppressed a pro-Iranian party, the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan.
To the north is Georgia. Georgians are also predominantly Christian, but the country’s relations with Armenia are cool rather than friendly. In August 2008, Georgia fought and lost a war with Russia. Armenia, by contrast, relies on Russian troops for its security. Still, apart from Iran, the route through Georgia is Armenia’s only way out by land. To borrow a phrase much heard from Israelis, Armenians live in a rough neighborhood.
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1.
You only have to spend a day or two walking around the capital city of
Yerevan to understand just how much the past shapes Armenian thinking
about the present and the future.
The capital is full of sculptures and monuments to musicians, poets,
and national heroes. In recent years there has been a considerable
building boom in the city’s center. I started to walk from Republic
Square, with its vaulting pink stone and arched monumental buildings,
which date from the 1920s. In 1918, after the collapse of the Russian
Empire, a short-lived independent Armenian state was declared that
survived only until the Bolshevik conquest of 1920. The new Soviet
republic of Armenia, which would eventually emerge, was far smaller
than its people had hoped for and was full of refugees. Many had come
from regions now in Turkey-which Armenians still, optimistically, call
Western Armenia-but which were lost to the Turks in those chaotic
years, and many of the refugees were survivors of the genocide of
1915.
Following the Soviet conquest, Armenians were divided. Some saw Soviet
Armenia as the end of a dream of independence, but others saw it as
the only way the Armenian nation, with its own distinctive language,
history, and culture, which historically had been preserved by its
church, could survive. After all, the areas where Armenians had once
lived in eastern Anatolia had just been lost to the Turks. This is why
Republic Square is important. Its arches, for example, are decorated
with motifs of fruit and flowers and animals. Arev Samuelyan,
Armenia’s deputy minister of culture and an architect, explained to me
that in this period, architects such as Alexander Tamanian, who
designed the square and the nearby opera house, were trying to create
a modern secular style to symbolize the new Armenian
republic. Historically the only distinctive Armenian architecture had
been pointy-roofed churches-not the ideal source of inspiration in
Stalin’s state.
Until then, and even today, church and nation had always been
intertwined. Armenians are proud of the fact that theirs was the
first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion, as far
back as the year 301 AD; and the church, with its own rituals and
sacred texts in Armenian, is independent of the Vatican and is not a
strand of Orthodoxy like the Russian, Greek, or Georgian
churches. Today, its members make up over 90 percent of the Armenian
population. Across town, I walked up a massive staircase, called the
Cascade, which has some five hundred steps. It was begun in the 1970s
but only completed after the Soviet state collapsed. Sitting on the
steps, basking in the sun, young couples were kissing. Behind the
steps, inside the hill they are built on, is a modern art museum
funded by Gerard Cafesjian, an Armenian-American who made his fortune
in publishing. The Armenian diaspora is perhaps seven million
strong. There are no exact figures, but 1.2 million are believed to
live in the US, 2.2 million in Russia, and half a million in France,
with the rest scattered everywhere from Georgia to Syria and
Argentina. The relationship between Armenia and the diaspora is often
compared to that of diaspora Jews and Israel-a kinship that depends on
family and religious ties and a sense of nationhood that requires
Armenians to help one another.
For the Armenian state the diaspora is an important source of money:
some 10 percent of Armenia’s GDP derives from it. Of that, between 70
to
80 percent comes from Armenians in Russia, and not only from newly
minted billionaires, of whom there are several. While the forebears of
much of the diaspora in the West came from Anatolia following the
genocide of 1915, Armenians have been in Russia for centuries; they
continued to emigrate there during the Soviet era and in the two
decades since.
At the top of the Cascade is the Maison Charles Aznavour, which
contains the apartment of the veteran French-Armenian
crooner. Aznavour has long been a leading figure of the diaspora,
helping mobilize it to raise money for everything from schools and
hospitals to roads and irrigation schemes in both Armenia and
Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2009, he was appointed Armenian ambassador to
Switzerland. This is the second reason why the Armenians of the
diaspora are so important. They are organized and lobby for Armenian
causes. The most important of these relates to the genocide, but they
also include, in the US for example, blocking the confirmation of
Matthew Bryza as American ambassador to Azerbaijan this past December,
which led to his recall from Baku after a year. Armenian groups in the
US had lobbied against him, accusing Bryza-who was appointed by the
White House in December 2010 during a congressional recess and never
confirmed by the Senate-of pro-Azerbaijani and pro-Turkish views, and
even of denying that a genocide of Armenians had taken place in 1915.
However, Armenians often told me that Armenians in Armenia and those
in the diaspora don’t always agree. For many Armenians in the West,
the primary goal has been to convince parliaments around the world to
pass resolutions recognizing the events of 1915 as a genocide. On
December 22, for example, the French National Assembly passed a bill
making denial of the Armenian genocide a crime. In response, Turkey
announced that it was recalling its ambassador to France and freezing
all bilateral relations in protest. The bill was confirmed by the
French Senate on January 23, and President Nicolas Sarkozy said he
would sign it into law within fourteen days. On January 31, however,
Turkey welcomed the fact that the law had been suspended pending its
referral to the Constitutional Court. This decision by the
=80=9Cwise’ French would `preserve’ Franco-Turkish relations, said
Ahmet DavutoÄ=9Flu, the Turkish foreign minister. The issue of the
genocide is important in Armenia too; but opening the border with
Turkey to boost trade and create jobs seems more urgent if you live
here, not in Paris or California. The French bill might be emotionally
satisfying, in other words, but it won’t help Armenian farmers keen to
sell pomegranates just over the border in a Turkish market rather than
shipping them all the way to Russia at great cost. Just above the
Cascade steps is a stele and a sort of secular black temple, erected
in 1970 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Soviet rule. Cross the
street and walk through the park and you soon arrive at the huge
Soviet Mother Armenia statue, which replaced one of Stalin in 1962. In
front of it is an eternal flame for the Armenian soldiers who died
fighting in the Soviet army in World War II. Inside the Mother Armenia
pedestal, an exhibition commemorates the casualties of the war against
Azerbaijan in the 1990s. Nearby is another, newer, war memorial, for
those who died between 1979 and 1989 fighting with the Soviet forces
in Afghanistan. Important though all these are, the single most
important memorial in the country is the one to the genocide and its
museum. It commemorates the Armenians who died in 1915 and earlier, in
various pogroms. The memorial is centered around another eternal
flame. This is surrounded by twelve massive, inward-curving, black
petal-like walls, representing the twelve `lost provinces’ of Western
Armenia, which is to say the regions now in Turkey where Armenians
once lived. When I was there, children were laying flowers around the
flame. As I entered the museum, I ran into a group of journalists
waiting for Bertrand Delanoë, the visiting mayor of Paris. (Two weeks
earlier, Sarkozy had also visited.) Delanoë spoke about the need to
remember the genocide, and then, outside, he shoveled earth onto a fir
tree sapling, which he watered for the cameras. The other firs there
all displayed little plaques indicating that they had been planted by
a visiting politician, many of whom were Americans. Like visiting
American politicians, Delanoë would want to make sure that his voters
of Armenian origin back home were aware that he had
spoken out in Yerevan.
2.
A few hours later I walked past the grand opera house in the center of
town. It performs the works of famous Armenian composers such as Aram
Khachaturian; in December you could hear Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and
Bizet’s Carmen is scheduled for 2012.
Filmed by the police, a small group outside the opera was protesting
the arrest of a young political activist. Armenian politics has been
turbulent and even violent these last twenty years. It is a
parliamentary democracy with a strong president and weak
institutions. On paper, Armenian politics looks like an alphabet soup
of parties, coalitions, and alliances. However, in reality, much of
contemporary political life is dominated by the current president,
Serzh Sargsyan, head of the conservative Republican Party of Armenia,
and his two predecessors, Robert Kocharian and Levon
Ter-Petrossian. As in many post-Communist countries, who is in and who
is out tends to be connected to whom one owes one’s allegiance to,
rather than ideological or policy differences.
In February 2008 the opposition, led by former president
Ter-Petrossian, claimed that Sargsyan had stolen the elections. After
that the police clashed with demonstrators and ten died. Dozens were
jailed. The opposition claimed they were political prisoners. For
twenty days Armenia was put under a state of emergency. Since then,
all the prisoners from 2008 have been released, and in 2011 the main
opposition alliance, made up of thirteen parties and led by
Ter-Petrossian, was allowed, after a three-year ban, to hold rallies
in a central square in Yerevan. Several were held, but this time,
instead of violence, the government offered talks with Ter-Petrossian,
and he accepted. I asked the protesters how many political prisoners
there were in Armenia today. They replied `one’-the young man they
were protesting about-although just what he had done to be arrested no
one could say.
Tim Judah
The Granny and Grandpa memorial just outside Stepanakert in
Nagorno-Karabakh, which has become an unofficial symbol of the enclave
Later that day I met Salpi Ghazarian, who was born in Aleppo, Syria,
and then lived in the US. Now she is the director of the Civilitas
Foundation, which works to encourage the development of a liberal and
democratic modern Armenia, as well as reconciliation with
Turkey. Armenia’s transition to democracy has been harder than anyone
expected, she said. But then, Armenians had no experience of
democracy. Either they had lived in former Ottoman lands or under the
tsars and then the Soviet empire. As for freedom of
the press, hardly anyone reads newspapers anymore. But the government
firmly controls the main television stations, from which most people
get their news, though this, and thus political control of the media,
is changing, since people increasingly get their news from the
Internet. Things are far from perfect in Armenia, Ghazarian said, but
still she was optimistic because
the progress that has been made, she said, is `irreversible.’
Ghazarian’s office is full of educated and enthusiastic young
people. But how many will stay in Armenia, where average salaries are
$300 a month? (By contrast, in Russia monthly salaries are more than
twice that amount.) As Ghazarian pointed out, in this globalized
world, increasing numbers
of Armenians either from Armenia or from the diaspora come and go,
though no one could say how many. This includes many unskilled
Armenians, who go to Russia as construction or seasonal workers. I saw
some at the airport when I boarded a flight to Moscow. They were
carrying local food, including jars of pickles in bulging bags. The
lady who sat next to me on the plane told me that her uncle had left
Armenia during the early 1990s. Now he had a successful private clinic
in Moscow, although he could not afford to come home to work even if
he wanted to. There are just not enough people with enough money to
pay for his services in Armenia. Moscow alone has a population
at least three times greater than Armenia’s, and there are more
wealthy people in Moscow than in all of Armenia.
Armenia is primarily an agricultural country but also has minerals,
including diamonds, and produces pig iron and some finished industrial
goods. It exports fruit and vegetables, dairy products, and wine, and
it is famous for its brandy. In 1988, the country was hit by an
earthquake that claimed 25,000 lives. Then came the political turmoil
at the end of the Soviet era and the war with Azerbaijan. Between 1988
and 1994, maybe a million or more Azeris fled from Armenia and
Nagorno-Karabakh and some 500,000 Armenians from Azerbaijan. It was
then that the Turks sealed the frontier. The country was plunged into
darkness as all of its main sources of energy were cut.
Today, Armenia is a long way from those years. It is poor, but its
economy
is five times bigger than it was a decade ago, thanks to remittances,
a construction boom, and the emergence of private businesses. But it
is also an
economy that is highly vulnerable to what happens in the rest of the
world. For most of the last decade it grew by double digits, only to
contract by
14.4 percent in 2009, although this was followed by modest growth in
2010 and projected 4.6 percent growth for 2011. If Armenia could make
peace with Azerbaijan it might even flourish-a big if.
3.
Driving southeast from Yerevan to Nagorno-Karabakh, one passes the
twin peaks of Mount Ararat. (`Nagorno’ is Russian for `mountainous’
and `Karabakh’ means `black garden’ in Turkish.) From the main road,
the base of Ararat, hard on the
Turkish frontier, is only a few miles away, yet today the mountain
long revered by Armenians as their national symbol is in Turkey. In
1918, with the
declaration of an independent Armenia, the mountain was placed in the
middle of the country’s coat of arms. There it has remained ever
since, although with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 the once
again independent state added a tiny Noah’s Ark to the top of the
mountain, in the center of the crest.
Turkey’s borders with what is now Armenia were fixed in 1921. Since
the border is closed, today Armenians can only look at Ararat-unless
they go around, through Georgia, to get there. Arev Samuelyan showed
me a photo of a ruined Armenian church, which lies a stone’s throw
away on the other side of the frontier, in Turkish territory, where
there were once many Armenians; none live there now.
In 1923, after years of conflict between Azeris and Armenians, Stalin
decided to turn the mostly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh into
an autonomous part of Soviet Azerbaijan. Throughout the Soviet period
there were protests about this from Armenians-they wanted the enclave
to be officially part of Armenia-something described by Thomas de Waal
in his excellent recent book, The Caucasus: An
Introduction. Nevertheless, the area became `a backwater,’ de Waal
writes, and `rumblings of Armenian discontent were audible only to
those listening very carefully’; in any case, such `resentments were
more or less managed by the Soviet system.’
In 1988, as the USSR began to buckle, the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh
began to dominate the politics of the region. Conflict broke out
between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and with the end of the Soviet Union,
Nagorno-Karabakh declared itself independent in 1991; the fighting
turned into an international conflict. Soviet Karabakh was a region of
4,400 square kilometers but by the end of the war in 1994 the
Armenians controlled 7,600 square kilometers more. Not a single Azeri,
according to everyone I spoke to there, remains inKarabakh and the
territories it now occupies around the old autonomous
enclave. (According to a recent report by the International Crisis
Group, 600,000 Azeris from the Nagorno-Karabakh region remain
displaced within Azerbaijan.)
Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, is small but orderly. It
is full of banners celebrating twenty years of independence. Yet no
country recognizes it. Although it has all the trappings of statehood
for its 140,000 people, an official from Armenia told me that his
ministry regarded it as just another province of Armenia. His opposite
number in the government in Stepanakert, he said, signed off on any
decisions made in Yerevan. Economically, Nagorno-Karabakh is supported
by Armenia and the diaspora. Hayk Khanumyan, a local journalist, told
me that in this way the administration could give jobs to large
numbers of people, even if they did not have much to do. I went to
Aghdam, a town that used to be populated mostly by Azeris. It sits
outside the boundaries of the old autonomous region. After the
Armenians captured the town in 1993, it was as good as leveled. No one
lives there. The place looks like a sort of overgrown Caucasian
Pompeii without frescoes or postcards. For the past few years, Armenia
and Azerbaijan have been discussing a draft peace plan, by which much,
but not all, of the region around the old autonomous area would be
given back to Azerbaijan. In return, and for an indefinable period,
Nagorno-Karabakh would have an interim status before a referendum
decided its fate. In Nagorno-Karabakh no one seemed much interested in
the talks. After all, they told me, no one was asking them, since the
negotiations were between Armenia and Azerbaijan; and there had been
many false dawns in the past few years.
All this should matter in the West. Azerbaijan is an increasingly
important oil and gas supplier. In 2005 oil began flowing along a
1,768-kilometer pipeline from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, via
Tbilisi, Georgia, to the port of Ceyhan, in Turkey, where it is
shipped out. A major natural gas pipeline also runs along part of this
route, and there is talk of future pipeline projects to carry gas from
Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan to the West (avoiding
Russia). Since the existing oil pipeline to Ceyhan runs a mere
thirteen kilometers from territory controlled by Nagorno-Karabakh, in
the event of a new war, which today seems possible if not probable,
the pipeline could be cut by the Armenians within hours. Azerbaijani
oil platforms in the Caspian Sea could be hit by Armenian missiles.
The consequences of a new war in the region could be truly
catastrophic. Israel has close military relations with Azerbaijan (in
February it signed a deal to sell $1.6 billion in arms to Baku) and
gets more than 30 percent of its oil via Ceyhan. If it goes to war
with Iran over the nuclear issue, it would make sense to have
Azerbaijan on its side. But conflicts tend to have unforeseen
consequences, and both Azerbaijan and Iran must wonder how Iran’s
millions of potentially restive Azeris might respond. (There are more
Azeris in Iran than in Azerbaijan itself.) A senior Western diplomat
told me that the fact that Azerbaijan is a secular Shiite state is a
more important factor now in thinking about the region’s geopolitics
than the fact that it is a major source of energy.
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnIn 2009, amid much
optimism, Turkey and Armenia came close to an agreement that would
have led to a reopening of the border between them and a resumption of
formal diplomatic relations. Then Azerbaijan protested and the deal
was called off. The Turks linked any future deal to progress in
negotiations between Azerbaijan and Armenia on Nagorno-Karabakh. There
has been none, and it seems unlikely that progress will be made
anytime soon. Azerbaijan’s energy resources partly explain why. In
October, Azerbaijan and Turkey signed a major deal by which the Azeris
will both supply natural gas to Turkey and use Turkish territory to
export it to Europe. Such deals are making the Azeris, who have said
that they will never formally surrender any territory to Armenians,
increasingly self-confident. Meanwhile, Armenia relies on Russia for
its security and Russian troops continue to help guard the Armenian
borders with Turkey and Iran. If there were a new war over
Nagorno-Karabakh and Turkish troops moved across that border, they
could cut the main road from Yerevan to Nagorno-Karabakh within
hours. The likelihood of this happening with the Russians there is
low; but if you understand that Armenians grew up listening to tales
of the genocide and lost lands, you can also understand why their
leaders are reluctant to trade the security they have now for open
borders and a peace deal without firm guarantees. Azerbaijan, for its
part, poured over $3.3 billion into its military forces in 2011, more
than Armenia’s entire state budget. No wonder Thomas de Waal calls
Nagorno-Karabakh `a sleeping volcano.’