Armenia: Growing Repatriation?
The International Herald Tribute has an interesting article on diaspora Armenians immigrating to Armenia.
What would prompt a young family to abandon a comfortable life and move to a poor country where running water is still a luxury for many, politics are messy and the threat of war looms large?
For Aline Masrlian, 41, her husband, Gevork Sarian, and their two children, it was their motherland calling.
“It is something special when you live in your own land,” said Masrlian, who moved here after her family had lived for generations in Syria.
Lured by the economic opportunities in a fast changing country and the lure of home, some people from Armenia’s vast diaspora are moving to the land that their ancestors had long kept alive as little more than an idea. Longtime residents, meanwhile, are no longer fleeing the country in large numbers.
While 3.2 million people live in this landlocked Caucasus mountain nation — the smallest of the ex-Soviet republics — an estimated 5.7 million Armenians reside abroad. The largest disappears are in Russia (2 million), the United States (1.4 million), Georgia (460,000) and France (450,000), according to government data.
[…]
garen on 09 Jun 2008 at 1:34 am #
looks like a nice articles for khosq.com
We’re launching a new kind of news-site, whereby 100% or content is submitted by it’s readers. We called it khosq.com — it’s an Armenian Social-Bookmarking site (similar to Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com). It’s also a Citizen-Journalism site so bloggers can submit their blog entries and ordinary readers can submit interesting URL links that they stumble upon while surfing the net.
And there’s no Chief-Editor… the People themselves democratically vote on articles Up or Down, and that’s how the system decides what goes to the front page.
Of course there’s more, but this is the brief description.
We’re launching khosq.com this week and encouraging all the bloggers in the Armenian blogosphere to join.
hope you like the idea, and how to see you on khosq.com
… and hope I’m not spamming :-/
cheers
Garen
Raffi Kojian on 21 Jun 2008 at 6:55 pm #
This article for me highlights just how small the numbers of repatriates are, and where they are coming from. There are painfully few Armenian raised in the west, or with western passports… the vast majority come from Iran and Syria, and even many of them do not stay.
For repatriation to actually grow and become popular, Armenia needs just 2 things – good paying jobs, and rule of law. In my opinion, they go hand in hand. Of course, those are the two things that native Armenians also need to stay and be happy.
It’s funny, in the 80s I remember in the US all the talk about moving back to our lands – which of course back then was a reference to Western Armenia (which seemed more likely to be returned, than the USSR collapsing). If just 5,000 American Armenians, or imagine 20,000 had moved to Armenia back in the 1990s… we’d be looking at a very different Armenia today.