Tweet
Voice of America News
March 6, 2013
Syria's Armenians Return to Their Ancestral Homeland
by James Brooke
March 6, 2013
YEREVAN, ARMENIA - As Syria's civil war marks a two-year anniversary
on March 15, the human cost will be more than 70,000 dead, one million
refugees outside the country, and two million more people forced to
find new shelter inside Syria.
One trickle of refugees has been a flow of 6,000 Armenian Christians,
going north to a landlocked, mountainous country many never knew:
their ancestral homeland of Armenia.
Many Armenians say they have been well treated by Syrians, the people
who gave shelter to their forefathers nearly one century ago, after
they fled massacres by Ottoman Turks.
In recent years, though, Armenians have watched Christians retreat
from Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq. The Syrian Armenians' quiet departure
reflects their doubt that a tolerant, secular state will emerge from
Syria's civil war.
Living in Armenia, thinking of Syria
At Yerevan's High School No. 114, about 150 Syrian Armenian students
are now enrolled in classes.
Last summer, many students left Aleppo, the homeland of Syria's
Armenian community, for what they thought would be a two-week vacation
in Armenia. Now, they try to keep up with friends back home using
Skype and Facebook.
"I can't talk with them," Maria Vartanian, aged 15, said of
girlfriends back home. "Because when I talk with them, I will cry. I
can't."
Garen Balkhian, a 17-year-old senior, said many of his old friends
from Aleppo have scattered. "A couple of my friends are here in
Armenia - this school," he said. "And a couple of them went to Canada.
And I know one friend who went to the [United] States."
Across town, Sarkis Balkhian helps run an aid project designed to help
Syrian Armenians find apartments, schools and jobs in Yerevan. A
Syrian-Armenian himself, Balkhian went to college in the United
States, and then moved to Armenia.
"When the conflict initially started in July, a lot of Syrian
Armenians believed that it would last only for a couple of weeks," he
said, in an office room stocked with blankets and warm sweatshirts.
"So a lot of Syrian Armenians moved to Armenia with summer clothes and
they didn't bring with them winter clothes. A lot of people didn't
bring enough finances to sustain themselves in the long run."
At Yerevan's Anteb restaurant, Sarkis Rshdouni, a foreign currency
trader, said that many fellow Syrian Armenians have had a hard time
getting good jobs in Armenia, a small, isolated country with high
unemployment.
1915 massacre still casts a shadow
Like many, Rshdouni worries about the fate of Christians if Muslim
radicals take power in Syria.
"The Christians, let's say, don't trust the politics of each country
they live in, but they trust the Arabs, the regular Arabs - the
citizens," he said. "They don't feel stable. The countries that
they're living in, in the Middle East, it's not stable."
Driving Armenian insecurity is the collective memory of the 1915
genocide. Almost one century ago, Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million
Armenians in Turkey - about three-quarters of the local population.
For VIP visitors to Yerevan, it is obligatory to visit the capital's
hilltop Armenian Genocide Museum and Institute.
One legacy of the genocide, said Richard Giragosian, a think tank
director, is that Armenians in the Middle East are a people primed to
get up and go. After Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power in Egypt in
1952, Armenians felt threatened by his socialist policies.
"Then they left," said Giragosian, who directs the Regional Studies
Center here. "Then it was Beirut, then the [Lebanese] civil war. Then
it was Tehran. They left in 1979 in large numbers. So there is a
natural dynamic trend for change in what is called the Armenian
diaspora. So the Armenian position in the Middle East has never been
static or stable."
For the young Syrian Armenians, a new generation of Armenia's
diaspora, their passport to the future is flexibility. In the halls of
School No. 114, they talk of going to college in America, of going
home to Aleppo - or of making their future here in Armenia.
James Brooke (http://www.voanews.com/author/4487.html)
A foreign correspondent who has reported from five continents, Brooke,
known universally as Jim, is the Voice of America bureau chief for
Russia and former Soviet Union countries. From his base in Moscow, Jim
roams Russia and Russia's southern neighbors.
From: Baghdasarian
March 6, 2013
Syria's Armenians Return to Their Ancestral Homeland
by James Brooke
March 6, 2013
YEREVAN, ARMENIA - As Syria's civil war marks a two-year anniversary
on March 15, the human cost will be more than 70,000 dead, one million
refugees outside the country, and two million more people forced to
find new shelter inside Syria.
One trickle of refugees has been a flow of 6,000 Armenian Christians,
going north to a landlocked, mountainous country many never knew:
their ancestral homeland of Armenia.
Many Armenians say they have been well treated by Syrians, the people
who gave shelter to their forefathers nearly one century ago, after
they fled massacres by Ottoman Turks.
In recent years, though, Armenians have watched Christians retreat
from Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq. The Syrian Armenians' quiet departure
reflects their doubt that a tolerant, secular state will emerge from
Syria's civil war.
Living in Armenia, thinking of Syria
At Yerevan's High School No. 114, about 150 Syrian Armenian students
are now enrolled in classes.
Last summer, many students left Aleppo, the homeland of Syria's
Armenian community, for what they thought would be a two-week vacation
in Armenia. Now, they try to keep up with friends back home using
Skype and Facebook.
"I can't talk with them," Maria Vartanian, aged 15, said of
girlfriends back home. "Because when I talk with them, I will cry. I
can't."
Garen Balkhian, a 17-year-old senior, said many of his old friends
from Aleppo have scattered. "A couple of my friends are here in
Armenia - this school," he said. "And a couple of them went to Canada.
And I know one friend who went to the [United] States."
Across town, Sarkis Balkhian helps run an aid project designed to help
Syrian Armenians find apartments, schools and jobs in Yerevan. A
Syrian-Armenian himself, Balkhian went to college in the United
States, and then moved to Armenia.
"When the conflict initially started in July, a lot of Syrian
Armenians believed that it would last only for a couple of weeks," he
said, in an office room stocked with blankets and warm sweatshirts.
"So a lot of Syrian Armenians moved to Armenia with summer clothes and
they didn't bring with them winter clothes. A lot of people didn't
bring enough finances to sustain themselves in the long run."
At Yerevan's Anteb restaurant, Sarkis Rshdouni, a foreign currency
trader, said that many fellow Syrian Armenians have had a hard time
getting good jobs in Armenia, a small, isolated country with high
unemployment.
1915 massacre still casts a shadow
Like many, Rshdouni worries about the fate of Christians if Muslim
radicals take power in Syria.
"The Christians, let's say, don't trust the politics of each country
they live in, but they trust the Arabs, the regular Arabs - the
citizens," he said. "They don't feel stable. The countries that
they're living in, in the Middle East, it's not stable."
Driving Armenian insecurity is the collective memory of the 1915
genocide. Almost one century ago, Ottoman Turks killed 1.5 million
Armenians in Turkey - about three-quarters of the local population.
For VIP visitors to Yerevan, it is obligatory to visit the capital's
hilltop Armenian Genocide Museum and Institute.
One legacy of the genocide, said Richard Giragosian, a think tank
director, is that Armenians in the Middle East are a people primed to
get up and go. After Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power in Egypt in
1952, Armenians felt threatened by his socialist policies.
"Then they left," said Giragosian, who directs the Regional Studies
Center here. "Then it was Beirut, then the [Lebanese] civil war. Then
it was Tehran. They left in 1979 in large numbers. So there is a
natural dynamic trend for change in what is called the Armenian
diaspora. So the Armenian position in the Middle East has never been
static or stable."
For the young Syrian Armenians, a new generation of Armenia's
diaspora, their passport to the future is flexibility. In the halls of
School No. 114, they talk of going to college in America, of going
home to Aleppo - or of making their future here in Armenia.
James Brooke (http://www.voanews.com/author/4487.html)
A foreign correspondent who has reported from five continents, Brooke,
known universally as Jim, is the Voice of America bureau chief for
Russia and former Soviet Union countries. From his base in Moscow, Jim
roams Russia and Russia's southern neighbors.
From: Baghdasarian