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Re: Revolutions in the Middle East
The Disintegration of the Armenian Family
By Markar Melkonian
hetq
[ 2011/01/31 | 15:00 ]
Ruling Regime Reigns over Socio-Economic Disaster
The party of power in Yerevan includes in its platform the statement
that "the basis of the Armenian society is a traditional family." The
platform introduces us to a short roster of other marvelous entities,
too, including "the Armenian type," an "Armenian essence," and
spiritual values, all punctuated by invocations of God.
It is probably a mistake to try to make sense of this sort of
"traditional family" talk. The function of this rhetoric, after all,
is not to convey meaning but to numb brains. Putting the best face on
things, though, Armenia's Republican Party deserves credit at least
for using the indefinite article-"the basis of A traditional family,"
instead of "THE traditional family."
But which traditional family? It is hard to take seriously the
suggestion that the "basis" of Armenia today is the extended
patriarchal family of rural Armenia before the 20th century. This
leads to the suspicion that Armenia's Republicans, perhaps unwittingly,
are extolling the nuclear family that thrived in the country's towns
and cities during the Soviet decades.
Although this nuclear version of a traditional family is modern,
it still evokes soft-focus pictures of the Armenian hearth (ojax),
that little refuge of sympathy and mutual support. Back in the Soviet
days, girls and boys were fed, cherished, and educated-and all of
this without the threat of hell or the promise of heaven.
But those were the bad old days, before Armenia joined Bosnia and
Kyrgyzstan in the exalted club of independent nations. Now that Free
Enterprise has returned to Armenia, bread is no longer an entitlement.
Families in Armenia face hard times
Families, traditional or otherwise, are not doing well in Armenia
these days. The self-advertised champions of "a traditional family"
preside over a country where even basic postnatal healthcare is beyond
the reach of many households; a country where single-parent households
have proliferated; where transnational pimping and human trafficking
have become growth industries, and where elderly pensioners, reduced
to wards of soup kitchens, spend their last years as charity cases,
stripped of dignity.
Laura Michael, a member of a charity that works with orphans, recently
made the obvious causal connection between post-Soviet poverty and the
disintegration of Armenian families: "Fifty percent of the population
in Armenia lives in poverty," she noted, "and often people cannot care
for their children due to financial reasons." ("Inside the Orphanages
of Armenia.," The Armenian Weekly online, Oct. 6, 2010.)
Over the past twenty years, successive administrations in Yerevan
have set in motion processes that have gutted public institutions
that used to benefit Armenia's most vulnerable populations.
Privatization of land, together with "pro-business" tax policies,
has depopulated the countryside, pushing the rural population off of
farms and emptying Armenia's villages and small towns. The resulting
dislocation and unemployment have divided tens of thousands of
families in this small country, as husbands, fathers, and sons have
sought jobs in Krasnodar, Moscow, and farther afield. In this way,
successive post-Soviet regimes have created thousands of abandoned
wives, mothers, and children.
Meanwhile, privatization and real estate speculation have pushed
housing costs in Yerevan far beyond what many families can afford.
Real estate tycoons and developers have pressured poor and
working-class residents to sell homes, sometimes at far below market
value. (Among other sources, see: Vahan Ishkanyan, "Futile Fight:
Angry Property Owners Use Barricades as Last Defense," ArmeniaNow,
September 12, 2005). On Buzand Street and elsewhere, police have
evicted longtime homeowners, who could do little more than watch
helplessly while bulldozes leveled their flats. When the homeowners
have sought legal redress, the courts have almost invariably ruled
against them.
Will there be an educated workforce in Armenia?
The same pro-business priorities together with scanty local budgets
have hit hard when it comes to funding for preschools and primary and
secondary schools. According to a recent UNICEF report, "close to 80
percent of pre-school age children do not attend pre-schools due to
poverty and/or absence of pre-school facilities."
(http://www.unicef.org/armenia/education.html) This is far lower than
preschool attendance during the last decades of Soviet Armenia.
Other recent studies have noted growing absenteeism and drop-out
rates among primary and secondary-school students. Children in some
of Armenia's poorest families spend their days working in the fields,
or begging, or selling knickknacks on the streets, or collecting
recyclables from garbage dumps.
Child labor laws have been weakened, of course. But this is largely
irrelevant today, since in any case labor laws are not enforced.
None of this bodes well for Armenia's economic future, since it has
endangered what economists twenty years ago considered to be the
country's main comparative advantage in the new global labor market,
namely a cheap but highly educated workforce.
UNICEF reports that in Armenia, "there is shortage of learning
and teaching materials at schools." When it comes to Free Market
indoctrination, however, it seems that schools receive the necessary
resources. Foreign sponsors bribe underpaid school teachers to adopt
"economics textbooks" that bury the realities of exploitation, class
rule, and imperialism under a thick layer of free market dogmas
and slogans, and that encourage children to blame their parents for
their poverty.
The Republican Party's self-described "pro-family" administration has
privatized social security, and now we hear that it proposes to amend
the Labor Code, to extend a regular work week from five days to six.
Who will defend the working class in Armenia?
They do this because they can get away with it. And they can get away
with it because there are no militant unions in Armenia, and because
leftwing parties, for one reason or another, do not fight back in
the relentless class struggle that the plutocrats are waging against
working-class families.
According to the sentimental cliche, the mother is the bulwark of
the family. But in Armenia today women are no longer safe on the
streets-and too often, they are even less safe in the hearth. The
domestic violence case of Greta Bagdasaryan and the beating death
of Zaruhi Petrosyan are notable because they are especially brutal
instances of a more widespread phenomenon.
According to a survey conducted in 2008 by Amnesty International,
women in roughly three out of ten families endured physical abuse,
and about two-thirds experienced mental duress. According to a more
recent study by the Sociometer center, 75 percent of the 1200 women
studied had endured violence at the hands of their husbands. The
study also found that in one out of four cases children witnessed the
violence. (By comparison, a World Health Organization study puts the
number of women physically abused by their partners or ex-partners
at 30 per cent in the UK, and 22 per cent in the US.) Other published
studies report similarly alarming figures.
No one is denying that domestic violence existed during the Soviet
decades. But there was at least a measure of accountability in the
Soviet days. In Free Independent Armenia, as in the Islamic Republic
of Afghanistan, the Cold War victors have re-launched misogyny on a
scale that had not existed for decades.
High rates of poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism probably play
the big role in Armenia that they have played in other places when
it comes to domestic violence. It does not improve things, however,
when pervasive free-market propaganda denigrates such values as
equality and justice.
Confronted with exploding violence against women, authorities have
failed to prevent, investigate and punish perpetrators. Even as the
violence has escalated, the range of legal recourse and institutional
remedies has narrowed. Armenia's Criminal Code does not even have a
specific law against domestic violence.
Reviewing the record of Armenia's self-described champions of
traditional family values, one wonders just what it would take to
distinguish oneself in their eyes as an enemy of the family. In Armenia
as elsewhere, demagogues who resort to family-value talk typically have
nothing good to offer the majority of their citizen-subjects. In the
context of privatization and the dismantlement of the social safety
net, the official phrase-mongering about family and hearth masks an
on-going assault on women, children, and families.
The least Armenia's workers can do is to stop voting for candidates
who keep them unemployed and their families poor and insecure. They
could let the gangsters stuff the ballot boxes themselves.
A longer-term solution, though, would require laying the groundwork
for an organized, militant working-class-one that would put a genuine
fear of God into the hearts of Armenia's rulers.
Markar Melkonian is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles.
The Disintegration of the Armenian Family
By Markar Melkonian
hetq
[ 2011/01/31 | 15:00 ]
Ruling Regime Reigns over Socio-Economic Disaster
The party of power in Yerevan includes in its platform the statement
that "the basis of the Armenian society is a traditional family." The
platform introduces us to a short roster of other marvelous entities,
too, including "the Armenian type," an "Armenian essence," and
spiritual values, all punctuated by invocations of God.
It is probably a mistake to try to make sense of this sort of
"traditional family" talk. The function of this rhetoric, after all,
is not to convey meaning but to numb brains. Putting the best face on
things, though, Armenia's Republican Party deserves credit at least
for using the indefinite article-"the basis of A traditional family,"
instead of "THE traditional family."
But which traditional family? It is hard to take seriously the
suggestion that the "basis" of Armenia today is the extended
patriarchal family of rural Armenia before the 20th century. This
leads to the suspicion that Armenia's Republicans, perhaps unwittingly,
are extolling the nuclear family that thrived in the country's towns
and cities during the Soviet decades.
Although this nuclear version of a traditional family is modern,
it still evokes soft-focus pictures of the Armenian hearth (ojax),
that little refuge of sympathy and mutual support. Back in the Soviet
days, girls and boys were fed, cherished, and educated-and all of
this without the threat of hell or the promise of heaven.
But those were the bad old days, before Armenia joined Bosnia and
Kyrgyzstan in the exalted club of independent nations. Now that Free
Enterprise has returned to Armenia, bread is no longer an entitlement.
Families in Armenia face hard times
Families, traditional or otherwise, are not doing well in Armenia
these days. The self-advertised champions of "a traditional family"
preside over a country where even basic postnatal healthcare is beyond
the reach of many households; a country where single-parent households
have proliferated; where transnational pimping and human trafficking
have become growth industries, and where elderly pensioners, reduced
to wards of soup kitchens, spend their last years as charity cases,
stripped of dignity.
Laura Michael, a member of a charity that works with orphans, recently
made the obvious causal connection between post-Soviet poverty and the
disintegration of Armenian families: "Fifty percent of the population
in Armenia lives in poverty," she noted, "and often people cannot care
for their children due to financial reasons." ("Inside the Orphanages
of Armenia.," The Armenian Weekly online, Oct. 6, 2010.)
Over the past twenty years, successive administrations in Yerevan
have set in motion processes that have gutted public institutions
that used to benefit Armenia's most vulnerable populations.
Privatization of land, together with "pro-business" tax policies,
has depopulated the countryside, pushing the rural population off of
farms and emptying Armenia's villages and small towns. The resulting
dislocation and unemployment have divided tens of thousands of
families in this small country, as husbands, fathers, and sons have
sought jobs in Krasnodar, Moscow, and farther afield. In this way,
successive post-Soviet regimes have created thousands of abandoned
wives, mothers, and children.
Meanwhile, privatization and real estate speculation have pushed
housing costs in Yerevan far beyond what many families can afford.
Real estate tycoons and developers have pressured poor and
working-class residents to sell homes, sometimes at far below market
value. (Among other sources, see: Vahan Ishkanyan, "Futile Fight:
Angry Property Owners Use Barricades as Last Defense," ArmeniaNow,
September 12, 2005). On Buzand Street and elsewhere, police have
evicted longtime homeowners, who could do little more than watch
helplessly while bulldozes leveled their flats. When the homeowners
have sought legal redress, the courts have almost invariably ruled
against them.
Will there be an educated workforce in Armenia?
The same pro-business priorities together with scanty local budgets
have hit hard when it comes to funding for preschools and primary and
secondary schools. According to a recent UNICEF report, "close to 80
percent of pre-school age children do not attend pre-schools due to
poverty and/or absence of pre-school facilities."
(http://www.unicef.org/armenia/education.html) This is far lower than
preschool attendance during the last decades of Soviet Armenia.
Other recent studies have noted growing absenteeism and drop-out
rates among primary and secondary-school students. Children in some
of Armenia's poorest families spend their days working in the fields,
or begging, or selling knickknacks on the streets, or collecting
recyclables from garbage dumps.
Child labor laws have been weakened, of course. But this is largely
irrelevant today, since in any case labor laws are not enforced.
None of this bodes well for Armenia's economic future, since it has
endangered what economists twenty years ago considered to be the
country's main comparative advantage in the new global labor market,
namely a cheap but highly educated workforce.
UNICEF reports that in Armenia, "there is shortage of learning
and teaching materials at schools." When it comes to Free Market
indoctrination, however, it seems that schools receive the necessary
resources. Foreign sponsors bribe underpaid school teachers to adopt
"economics textbooks" that bury the realities of exploitation, class
rule, and imperialism under a thick layer of free market dogmas
and slogans, and that encourage children to blame their parents for
their poverty.
The Republican Party's self-described "pro-family" administration has
privatized social security, and now we hear that it proposes to amend
the Labor Code, to extend a regular work week from five days to six.
Who will defend the working class in Armenia?
They do this because they can get away with it. And they can get away
with it because there are no militant unions in Armenia, and because
leftwing parties, for one reason or another, do not fight back in
the relentless class struggle that the plutocrats are waging against
working-class families.
According to the sentimental cliche, the mother is the bulwark of
the family. But in Armenia today women are no longer safe on the
streets-and too often, they are even less safe in the hearth. The
domestic violence case of Greta Bagdasaryan and the beating death
of Zaruhi Petrosyan are notable because they are especially brutal
instances of a more widespread phenomenon.
According to a survey conducted in 2008 by Amnesty International,
women in roughly three out of ten families endured physical abuse,
and about two-thirds experienced mental duress. According to a more
recent study by the Sociometer center, 75 percent of the 1200 women
studied had endured violence at the hands of their husbands. The
study also found that in one out of four cases children witnessed the
violence. (By comparison, a World Health Organization study puts the
number of women physically abused by their partners or ex-partners
at 30 per cent in the UK, and 22 per cent in the US.) Other published
studies report similarly alarming figures.
No one is denying that domestic violence existed during the Soviet
decades. But there was at least a measure of accountability in the
Soviet days. In Free Independent Armenia, as in the Islamic Republic
of Afghanistan, the Cold War victors have re-launched misogyny on a
scale that had not existed for decades.
High rates of poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism probably play
the big role in Armenia that they have played in other places when
it comes to domestic violence. It does not improve things, however,
when pervasive free-market propaganda denigrates such values as
equality and justice.
Confronted with exploding violence against women, authorities have
failed to prevent, investigate and punish perpetrators. Even as the
violence has escalated, the range of legal recourse and institutional
remedies has narrowed. Armenia's Criminal Code does not even have a
specific law against domestic violence.
Reviewing the record of Armenia's self-described champions of
traditional family values, one wonders just what it would take to
distinguish oneself in their eyes as an enemy of the family. In Armenia
as elsewhere, demagogues who resort to family-value talk typically have
nothing good to offer the majority of their citizen-subjects. In the
context of privatization and the dismantlement of the social safety
net, the official phrase-mongering about family and hearth masks an
on-going assault on women, children, and families.
The least Armenia's workers can do is to stop voting for candidates
who keep them unemployed and their families poor and insecure. They
could let the gangsters stuff the ballot boxes themselves.
A longer-term solution, though, would require laying the groundwork
for an organized, militant working-class-one that would put a genuine
fear of God into the hearts of Armenia's rulers.
Markar Melkonian is a writer and teacher living in Los Angeles.
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