An interview with a Georgian parliamentarian, Armen Bayandouryan, was published by Hetq yesterday. He was trying to justify several points about the plight facing Armenians in Samtskhe-Javakheti, or Javakhk, such as the inability for many to speak the Georgian language.
Here’s what he had to say:
All I’d say is that there isn’t one nation on earth where its citizens don’t speak its primary language. If they don’t speak Georgian in Javakhk today, it’s not their fault. The system has been lacking, incorrect.
Yet later in the interview he said the following regarding the question of making Armenian a second official language of Javakhk:
To establish a second official language in Javakhk would imply that Armenians are incompetent. We’d be doing ourselves a great disservice if we said that we Armenians cannot learn another language. This is my view. It would be like saying; we are citizens of Georgia but we aren’t capable of learning the language. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Today we can’t, but tomorrow we can.
My father used to say that it is their language that binds Armenians together, to keep them unified and less apt to succumbing to assimilation in their host countries. By contrast, I have heard others like my grandmother argue that it is rather Christianity that maintains the identity and fuels the persistence of Armenians. I think both are correct to some degree, but I am leaning more on the language aspect of being able to sustain Armenian integrity rather than religion. There’s plenty of agnostic or atheist Armenians in the world who maintain their culture and identity by speaking the language and teaching their children to do the same. Many of them live in Armenia.
But in Javakhk Armenian youth are not “incompetent” because they are not able to learn Georgian. Rather, they are not given the proper means to do so. I was in Javakhk in 2002 with a fellow Armenian from Boston, and everywhere we went people complained about poverty, the low standard of education for children in the region and the lack of job opportunities for earning a decent living.
Georgians tend to live better in the region despite the fact that it is mainly populated by ethnic Armenians. Bayandouryan is linking the capacity to get decent jobs with the ability to speak the state language. He’s right, Armenians in Javakhk need to know Georgian, but he’s not addressing the underlying issues, namely the damaged educational system—or lack of one—that is in place in the region. He mentions several times that Armenian kids need to go to Armenian school, yet those same schools were not receiving the proper amount of state funding and were thus in shambles. How are you going to teach kids without proper classroom facilities and especially, books?
Later he states, when asked about the recent arrests of Armenian activists who were from Javakhk:
No one is illegally arrested in Georgia; just as in Armenia. There is a justification one someone has been charged with a crime. Being Armenian has nothing to do with it. If you’ve committed a crime you go to jail. These people broke the law. It’s that simple.
That first sentence alone is alarming. How stupid does he think the people are who are reading this interview? Anyone who has been following Armenian news for the last 18 months knows that this is an absurd statement to make.
Bayandouryan also went on to mention that President Mikheil Saakashvili has been doing a lot for the region by building a road from Akhalkalak to Tbilisi, suppying gas to rural areas and supposedly ensuring that the elderly receive pensions. I don’t know about that because I haven’t visited Javakhk since then and thus I haven’t been able to speak to people firsthand.
But I will say one thing: Akhalkalak, which was 90 percent populated by Armenians at one time and most likely still is, was the most miserable, depressing, aesthetically displeasing city I have ever visited in the South Caucasus so far. Things were very bleak for many families there. At that time 5,000 people were employed at the Russian military base that was operating, but that’s been closed for about two years. I have no idea how people are getting by now, but back then people were barely eking out a living from what I saw and heard. The kids I spoke to couldn’t wait to attend university in Yerevan (a sublime paradise by comparison) to get out of there. And I can’t imagine that sentiment has changed at all since then.
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