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  • Syria's Armenians Return to Their Ancestral Homeland

    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
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