These are not the best of times for Armenia. The former Soviet republic, although victorious in the war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the largely Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, remains economically depressed and politically stagnant. With talks over Karabakh deadlocked and political opposition to President Levon Ter-Petrosian brutally repressed, Armenia’s move toward reform and democracy has stalled.
The Armenians, with a diaspora spread around the world, have an image as perennial victims – of earthquakes, Soviet domination and Turkish massacres. In Karabakh they were victors – but at a high cost. Armenia’s economy, blockaded for years by Turkey and Azerbaijan, is in freefall. Meanwhile, the political spectrum has narrowed to dictatorship, despite Ter-Petrosian’s Soviet past as a dissident.
‘You’ve won the war, now win the peace,’ says a Western diplomat in Yerevan. The country is no longer under siege, and the economic noose has loosened. Petroleum and electricity remain scarce. But trade with Georgia, Russia and most of all, Iran, is booming. Yerevan now boasts new supermarkets, European sports cars and a night-life replete with casinos. The Armenian lobby in the US has done its share too. Their homeland will receive $95 million in US aid this year, little less than the $120 million for all of Russia.
The threats to stability and prosperity come from within. Karabakh is to blame for Armenia’s slow march towards reform. In the waning years of the USSR, the conflict there was driven less by a religious or ethnic divide than a purely political impulse for independence. Armenians see themselves as an ancient Christian people, surrounded by Muslim enemies. The fighting went on for eight years but the 1994 ceasefire is still holding – and having trounced the Azeris and scorched the countryside, the Karabakh Armenians now rule themselves. Amid the ruins of war they are patching up their self-proclaimed republic – measuring just 20 by 40 kilometres, with a population of some 200,000. They get fuel, arms and recruits from their big brothers in Yerevan. But ironically their ‘purified’ Christian state survives on Iranian and Turkish imports. The trucks that deliver food and clothes to Karabakh bear Tehran license plates and signs announcing ‘Allah Is With Us’.
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Officially Karabakh exists in a legal limbo – no longer part of Azerbaijan, but separate from Armenia. Unofficially, however, Armenia has annexed the region. Moreover, thanks to Ter-Petrosian’s recent appointment of the Karabakh ‘President’, Robert Kocharian, as Prime Minister of Armenia, Karabakh has again stolen center-stage in Yerevan. The promotion has inflamed regional tensions and threatened to turn international opinion against the Armenians.
But given the growing social discontent, it is a clever, if desperate, move. Criticized for rigging last fall’s election, Ter-Petrosian needed to mend Armenia’s fractured body politic. Karabakh remains the one issue all can agree on and Kocharian will serve as a unifying symbol.
This can only work in the short term. ‘We cannot play the Karabakh card forever,’ concedes a foreign-ministry aide. ‘We must open normal trade routes.’
But it is not merely a matter of trade. ‘It’s about Armenia’s need to clear its conscience,’ says Mikhail Danilyan, a human-rights advocate in Yerevan.
Indeed, during the worst years of the war, the Karabakh forces practised ethnic cleansing long before the Republika Srpska. ‘Armenia will never develop into a truly democratic society,’ predicts Danilyan, ‘until we face the crimes committed in Karabakh.’
Andrew Meier
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AT A GLANCE |
LEADER: President Levon Ter-Petrosian
ECONOMY: GNP per capita $680 (Russia $2,650; United States $25,880) PEOPLE: 3.6 million, not including the 200,000 in Nagorno-Karabakh HEALTH: Infant mortality 26 per 1,000 live births (Canada 6 per 1,000)
CULTURE: Around 96% of the population is Armenian. There are minorities of Azeris, Kurds and Russians. Advert Sources State of the World’s Children 1997, UNICEF; Europe Review 1997, World of Information; information supplied by the author. Never previously profiled |
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INCOME DISTRIBUTION Very few Armenians are well off; the vast majority struggle to make ends meet. |
LITERACY 99%. One of the few healthy legacies of Soviet rule. Although schools have suffered greatly in the post-Soviet collapse, literacy rates remain high. |
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SELF-RELIANCE Armenia gets millions of dollars from the Armenian Diaspora and the US Government. But its people make the most of very little. |
FREEDOM How can Armenians be free when political dissent is brutally repressed and the free press stifled? |
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POSITION OF WOMEN Nearly all women work. But most employment is restricted to the home. |
LIFE EXPECTANCY 73 years. One of the world's oldest peoples, Armenians still have longevity in their favour. |
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EXCELLENT GOOD FAIR POOR APPALLING |
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