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A Tale Of Survival

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  • A Tale Of Survival

    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.
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