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promote. While under the Soviet regime Armenian women, like women in other parts of the empire, had attained all economic rights associated with a modern society, their social status had not altered significantly from the views imposed by traditional, patriarchal values and customs. The ideal Armenian woman was traditionally expected to be “chaste, restrained and passive,” to “care for her household” and to obey “her husband and elders without protest.”39 The constitution adopted after independence guarantees gender equality, but in practice the government thus far has failed to promote and protect women’s rights. Since independence, many of the accomplishments secured under Soviet rule for Armenian women in social, economic, and political areas have been reversed with the recrudescence of patriarchal, androcentric values and attitudes toward women.40 The International Women’s Rights Action Watch commented in a report that the post-Soviet Armenian government had “done nothing to overcome the stereotypical understanding of women’s role and place in society. In fact, government officials continue to refer to the ‘natural’ roles of women.”41 Whereas in 1990 women held 30 percent of the seats in the Armenian parliament, by 1999 that figure had dropped to 3 percent.42 Women have found it increasingly difficult to enter politics, and those who have attempted have often found it difficult to escape the public perception that they merely represent their husbands.43
Domestic violence has proven particularly difficult to address. In a society dominated by notions of family honor and social shame, domestic violence, though reportedly prevalent in Armenia, has received little attention from government agencies. According to criminologist Sergey V. Arakelyan, more than 30 percent of all murders between 1988 and 1998 occurred within the family; 81 percent of domestic murders were committed by men; in 35 percent of all cases, the victims were wives or girlfriends.44 The Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights reported in December 2000:
Domestic violence is widespread in Armenia. In interviews conducted by Minnesota Advocates, government officials and members of the legal system initially denied the existence of the problem . . . .
Government officials at all levels either minimize the problem or consider it a matter of private concern outside the purview of the legal system. Police reportedly discourage women from making complaints against abusive husbands, and abusers are rarely removed from their homes or jailed. The overwhelming response of the legal system to domestic violence is to urge women to reconcile with their abusers.45
On a positive note, in recent years, a handful of nongovernmental organizations, such as the Women’s Rights Center in Erevan, have made efforts to improve conditions for women.46
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THE NATIONAL ECONOMY
Armenia’s domestic and international political and geopolitical environments pose serious obstacles toward the fulfillment of human rights and similar objectives. After a decade of independence, the expected advantages of market economy and political liberalization and democracy had not fully developed, although perhaps it would be too harsh to judge so negatively a society that for long suffered the burdens and scars of the Stalinist legacy. The Kocharyan government failed to eradicate the twin problems of unemployment and corruption. Even as the political system began to gain some public confidence, the national economy remained mired in corruption at all levels of government and institutions. As one observer has noted, “Corruption, irresponsibility and incompetence quickly became widespread, visible and corrosive. Politics came to be seen as a circle of self-serving intrigue rather than as a responsible attempt to solve the country’s problems.”47 The “shadow economy” is believed to account for 40 percent of the nation’s GDP. A considerable number of people are “employed” in jobs that are no longer in operation, while others are classified under “administrative leave.” The minor improvements in economic development have not been sufficient to increase employees’ income levels. According to official data, incomes for civil servants increased from $22 in the middle of 1990s to more than $140 per month in 2004 when the government raised salaries so as to counter bureaucratic bribery. Employment, however, has not guaranteed mobility above the poverty line.48 Immediately after the parliamentary elections of 1999, Prime Minster Vazgen Sargsyan stated in the National Assembly that the primary task of his government would be “to overcome the economic and social crises in the country” and “to fight against corruption at all levels of civil service.”49 In fact, Transparency International ranked Armenia (along with Bolivia) as eightieth on its Corruption Perceptions Index in 1999 and eighty-eighth out of 158 countries in 2005. On a scale of 10 (least corrupt) to 1 (most corrupt), Armenia scored 2.5 and 2.9 for the same years, joining the ranks of such countries as Ecuador, Russia, Albania, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.50 The Groupe d’états contre la corruption of the European Council reported in early 2006 that corruption permeated nearly all spheres of Armenia’s political economy but especially “the judiciary, the police, the customs service, the tax inspectorate, education, healthcare, licensing and privatizations.”51
Unemployment also has remained a vexing problem. Although official data place the unemployment rate below 8 percent of the total labor force of 1.2 million, a more accurate figure perhaps would be about 25 percent. In recent years an estimated 21 percent of the employed remained “very poor,” and more than 40 percent of the population remained below the
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poverty line. The Armenian middle class (as understood in the West) constitutes no more than 25 percent of the population. The highest 10 percent of the population accounts for more than 41 percent of all household incomes, while the share of the lowest 10 percent is 1.6 percent.52
It was not until 2000 when signs of economic improvement began to appear, and the World Bank reported with some optimism that its poverty reduction program would reduce the poverty levels to below 20 percent by 2015.53 Per capita GDP (PPP) increased from $2,220 in 1999 to $4,190 in 2004. It is common in the diasporan communities in the United States to compare Armenia with advanced economies such as Switzerland. Yet the chasm between the levels of economic development in Armenia and the West is so wide as to render any such claims irrelevant. In 2004, per capita GDP (PPP) was about $40,000 in the United States and $33,000 in Switzerland.54
In the meantime, in hopes of attracting capital, the government instituted laws greatly favoring foreign investments. The economic growth was concentrated mainly in Erevan and its vicinity, which registered “50 percent of [the nation’s] industrial production, 80 percent of registered trade turnover, and 76.3 percent of services.” Other parts of the country, however, remained “in much the same miserable condition as a decade earlier.”55 Significantly, not only was the economic growth limited to Erevan; it also did not translate into effective social programs. Health services remained deplorable nationwide because of insufficient funding and lack of supplies and specialists. The number of visits to medical clinics during the first decade since independence dropped by about 60 percent per citizen and the occupation rate of hospital beds, by 50 percent. Education and training institutions have not fared better. Government allocation to education has dropped considerably since the end of the Soviet Union. Between 1989 and 1993 the resources allocated to education fell from 8 percent of the republic’s GDP to 4.9 percent; by the middle of the decade, that figure declined to 1.9 percent. About 55 percent of schools required structural repairs, and nearly 38 percent of vocational schools remained vacant, as they lacked the basic infrastructure (heating, sewage, water supplies). The Education Act of 1999 sought to rectify a number of deficiencies in the post-Soviet educational system, with special focus on establishing uniform standards for accreditation of institutions of higher education, examinations, and student certification. It remains to be seen whether such reforms can in the long-run address the problem of inequality in access to good-quality education, as the poor, especially in the rural areas, find such institutions inaccessible. Government expenditure on defense decreased as well, from 3.7 of GDP in 1999 to 2.7 percent in 2002 and stabilized at that level thereafter, although the shrinking share of military expenditures has not contributed to improving the social welfare programs.56
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No other area demanded greater attention than the region struck by the earthquake in 1988. The Kocharyan government, like its predecessor, has been unable to cope effectively with the social and economic crisis in the earthquake zone although construction of new housing beginning in 2000 gave some hope. In 1999, a decade after the earthquake, unemployment in the town of Spitak, the quake’s epicenter, with a population of about 21,000, stood at 40 percent, and about 14,500 of the displaced residents continued to live in temporary housing.57 As late as 2000, 14 percent of the population in the area was extremely poor, lacking even the minimal necessities for subsistence, with an estimated 20 to 30 percent of women (particularly in the twentyto thirty-age group) affected by poverty and responsible for feeding their families in the absence of their husbands.58 As one observer has noted, “An entire generation of children has grown up knowing nothing but the painful legacy of the earthquake.”59 Spitak remained a “disaster zone” for more than a decade.
Prior to the earthquake, the population in Gumri was about 211,000; by 2002 that figure had dropped to 150,000 as a result of death and migration. Gumri, twenty-five miles west of Spitak, was an industrial city during the Soviet period. Its glass and textile factories, which employed about 35,000 people, were destroyed in the quake, and by 2002 unemployment in the city stood at 45 percent. External financial assistance supplemented insufficient government allocations to reconstruct the city and its schools and medical centers.60 Government assistance for the medical care of handicaps totaled about 22,400 drams ($40) per month, but the medical staff as at the Kuperstock Rehabilitation Center of Gumri, for example, worked for months without pay. The economic conditions left the region’s inhabitants helpless and with little confidence in the government. In Gumri, when asked by a reporter her place of residence, a woman replied hopelessly, “at the devil’s bosom.”61
Rather than receive services from the formal institutions of government, an informal web of family and social ties have emerged as the more reliable institutions for support.62 While ordinarily reliance on such relations would not represent a problem, the fact that a considerable proportion of society is unemployed and poor renders the available pool of support from family and social networks nugatory. Unemployment and poverty have led to economic hardship especially for women, whose highly precarious financial standing in the traditional patriarchal society render them vulnerable to the trappings of the informal market. International trafficking of Armenian women represents one such problem. According to the Armenian-European Center for Economic Policy and Legal Consultations, an estimated 61 percent of Armenian women trafficked were exported to Turkey, nearly 30 percent to the United States, and the rest to Eastern Europe (e.g., Bulgaria and Poland) and the Middle East (e.g., Dubai). Most of these women were from the cities of Erevan
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(33 percent) and Gumri (30 percent). A large percentage decided to remain in their new host countries to work in various jobs, including prostitution.63
The economic difficulties have led to a large proportion of the Armenian population, perhaps as many as 1 million, to emigrate, leading to the crucial problem of brain drain. In the first half of 1990s, approximately 700,000 citizens emigrated from Armenia, about 240,000 people leaving the country in 1993 alone; by 2002 the total figure since independence had increased to 800,000. Nearly 75 percent of them emigrated to Russia and the former Soviet republics, and others to the West, especially to France and the United States. The mass exodus included the professional classes (doctors, scientists, etc.) who sought greater access to employment opportunities abroad, leaving the country with a shortage of those with the skills necessary to reinvigorate the economy.64
The government’s failure to alleviate the economic hardships for a vast majority of the public may have been the root cause of the assassinations on October 27, 1999, when a group of five gunmen rushed into the parliament and murdered eight members. One of the gunmen, Nairi Hunanyan, reportedly shouted “Enough of drinking our blood.”65 Among those killed were Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan and Speaker Karen Demirchyan. Immediately after the assassinations, the military appeared prepared to seize power, as the defense ministry issued a declaration ordering the resignations of National Security Minister Serge Sargsyan, Interior Minister Suren Abramyan, and the prosecutor general. The defense ministry stated on television that “in such circumstances the national army cannot stand idly by.”66 The enormity of such a declaration for the fragile republic cannot be overemphasized. It was not clear whether the military would in fact intervene to “restore order,” but Kocharyan was able to prevent such an act and to avoid a constitutional crisis. The five assassins apparently were not affiliated with any specific domestic political faction or a foreign organization, although future investigations may yield evidence to the contrary.
The assassinations had serious ramifications for the republic. The parliamentary elections earlier in the year appeared to have established a sense of political normalcy after years of political instability, particularly in the aftermath of the presidential elections in 1996. The crisis in October 1999 exposed the precarious nature of that normalcy in Armenian politics. The assassinations further weakened the economy as they heightened the saliency of the risks facing foreign investors. Moreover, the assassinations occurred at a time when the United States had become directly engaged in the negotiations over the Karabagh conflict. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott had met with Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanian and Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan earlier in the day on October 27. Talbott’s visit