A TALE OF SURVIVAL
By Metro Ã~Iireann
Thursday, February 26, 2009, 17:56
Dublin businessman Ohan Yergainharsian is founder of the well-known
Sona Nutrition Company. He talks to Catherine Reilly about his Armenian
heritage, and how his family survived the genocide that took like
lives of so many
Ohan Yergainharsian is on holidays, but the Dublin entrepreneur’s
eagerness to speak about his Armenian roots means that Metro
Ã~Iireann’s telephone call – to faraway Dubai – is answered
immediately.
Armenia’s diaspora is proportionally massive, with estimates putting it
at around eight million (to Armenia’s population of three million),
and Ohan Yergainharsian was among those who grew up outside the
present-day borders of his motherland.
His family history is laced with trauma, but ultimately is a tale
of survival.
"My grandparents were people who managed to escape the genocide
during the First World War in Armenia," reveals Yergainharsian,
in reference to the brutal onslaught on the Armenian people by the
Ottoman authorities, which is thought to have claimed the lives of
one-and-a-half million Armenians. "That’s why you’ll find that the
Armenian diaspora are mostly, if not completely, the descendents of
those who managed to escape."
Yergainharsian’s grandparents fled on foot, and his grandmother would
later recall a 12,000-mile desert trek.
"My mother, for example, was born in a desert town in Jordan," says
Yergainharsian, "and I was born in Jerusalem. When I was growing up
there were 300,000 Armenians in Lebanon, there were 600,000 Armenians
in Iran, and maybe 250,000 Armenians in Syria."
Yergainharsian – who later attended university in Lebanon – was always
surrounded by ethnic Armenians, and the concentrated populations of
Armenians in the diaspora ensured that the cultural and linguistic
heritage wasn’t easily forgotten.
"You’ll find that they’d congregate together, build up schools,
churches, organise sporting activities which kept the community
together, so it was easier to maintain the cultural and linguistic
links with your roots," he remembers.
His first holiday on his own as a 17-year-old was to Armenia, where
he still has family. "In fact, I have relatives who immigrated to
Armenia from the diaspora," he adds.
Yergainharsian married an Irish woman in 1977, and they settled in
Ireland permanently in 1983. His Armenian family thought he was mad
for moving to a recession-hit Ireland ("They were telling me ‘You are
crazy, the VAT in Ireland is 35 per cent!’") but he stuck it out and
established Sona, which today is a highly successful company producing
nutritional supplements and herbal remedies.
And Yergainharsian seems genuinely modest about his business
success. "I think in some way s it was partly to do with hard work
but also partly to do with the fact that over the past 25 years the
Irish economy has – it’s the old story of the tide lifting all boats
– it has benefited me the same as everyone else. Hard work is always
compensated by opportunities, even in the middle of recessions."
Despite his strong ties to Ireland, Yergainharsian still maintains
close links with Armenia, and his last visit was in December.
"I think Armenia is suffering just like everyone else in this global
economic crisis. It is impacted a bit less on account of not being in
the mainstream economy – this has shielded it a bit from the ravages
of the global downturn," he comments. "But still, it is coming out
of a collapsed Soviet system, war, a blockade, an earthquake. People
who suffered during the earthquake became homeless, and some of them
still are 20 years later.
"The economy in Armenia is very slow, very limited, very poor, and
it’s trying to cope with issues," he continues. "Remitt-ances are
very important to Armenia, and remittances have dried up, and that’s
probably the biggest result that Armenia is experiencing in terms of
the global downturn.
"But I think in some ways, it reminds me of the old adage that ‘those
who expect nothing shall not be disappointed’. There’s a bit of an
acceptance that Armeni a was already poor and it couldn’t get any
worse on the part of some of the Armenians over there."
Nevertheless, Yergainharsian believes that significant investment
prospects do exist in Armenia.
"I think there are huge investment opportunities in Armenia… the
resource that it has is the very highly educated population, and
also the area geographically that it’s in, in that within a couple of
hundred miles there are probably 60 million people who would benefit
from what Armenia can do: Armenia would not only be serving its own
local market but also the neighbouring markets."
Armenians are hard-working, individualistic ("Bring two Armenians
together and they’ll have three political parties established," jokes
Yergainharsian), family-orientated and outward-looking. "We are very,
proud of our Christian heritage and yet in a social sense as opposed
to a religious sense," he adds. "We are very tenaciously clinging to
our heritage, we see it as something worth preserving, and that is
something that has sustained Armenians for the past 3.000 years."
He believes Armenians’ history of occupation has impacted on their
very selves: "It’s shaped our characters. When you are always forced
to change, you cling to what you know or what you are a bit more,
you fight for it a bit harder," he says.
In Ireland, too, Yergainharsian has been involved in efforts to keep
the Armenian language and culture alive among the small population of
Armenians, numbering around 100 individuals. One idea in the pipeline
is a Sunday school. "We’ve managed to get eight kids but they range
in age from five to 12."
Many Armenians in Ireland are Armenian by descent, rather than through
nationality, and grew up in other former Soviet countries. As a result,
the proposed school would play a key role in sustaining the Armenian
language among their children.