By Marineh Khachadour

I am a descendent of a Genocide survivor.

My grandmother, who relocated to Soviet Armenia in 1946, was a small woman with a shadow that reigned large and wide throughout my childhood. She sat in her armchair, layers of muted color fabric covering her wobbly knees and chain-smoked silently.

The smoke from her cigarettes filled the room, filled my grandmother's cloudy eyes and turned into a barricade that shielded her silence from the world around. My grandmother seldom talked.

When she did, she spoke in Turkish and referred to her home in Aleppo as "bizim orda" meaning "back in our home." Armenia, the homeland of all Armenians, never became a home for her during the 30 years of her life there.

I heard a similar expression used by elderly refugees from Karabagh while in Armenia. They spoke of Karabagh with longing and referred to it as ”mer touneh," (our home), and told me it was greener and richer than the dry lands of Armenia.

While in the "homeland," they yearned for a home they had left behind.

I know the feeling very well. For millions of people like me born between 1920 -1990 in Armenia, Soviet Armenia was home.  So when my family immigrated to the United States in 1980, my grandmother's shadow grew larger. I missed my home terribly and knew, some day, I would be going back.

I returned to Armenia in the summer of 1990, after living in the United States for ten years, to celebrate a momentous event in my life - my marriage to my second generation American-Armenian husband. It coincided with the country reaching a critical point in its struggle for freedom and independence.

Thousands of people flooding the streets of my beloved city, Yerevan, fueled my imagination with possibilities of raising my newly formed family in a place where I felt most grounded. I envisioned how beautiful a life we could build in a place where every public park still breathed with the joy the eight-year-old me had felt while playing on the swings and riding the carousel, where every cobblestone still echoed the same with each step I took, where every pair of eyes I met reminded me of an aunt, an uncle, or a friend. The thought of contributions I could make to better the educational system that had made me who I was to the age of 19 stirred in me a desire and a need to stay.

"Don't go," said my mother. "Why deprive your children of the opportunities here (in America)?" She begged. "Don't go," said my father. "You don't know Armenia. You have not experienced life there as an adult." I went, anyway. Like my grandmother and the women from Karabagh, I longed to be home.

The famous words of J. F. Kennedy had become my motto: "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." Surly, there was something I could do for Armenia.

The country was at war, and many went to fight and die. Heroism and martyrdom are not my calling. I wanted to make life beautiful and meaningful. To me, it meant finding and creating a sense of normalcy amidst of death, destruction, darkness, and cold. It meant bringing stories, poems, literacy, and a warm meal to the day of refugee children living in temporary housing and under the tents in the public parks of Yerevan.

I love my Armenian heritage and never think that Armenia is not a place to call home. However, after six years of living in the free and independent Armenia, and having experienced life there as an adult, I left Armenia again. This time, on my own will.

It was on the night of the presidential elections in 1998 when my husband and I knew it was time for us to leave Armenia. The government of Levon Ter-Petrosyan resigned under the pressure of accusations for falsifying election results. Vazgen Sargsyan was appointed prime-minister under the newly elected president Robert Kocharyan.

History describes this transition as "Velvet Revolution." True, only a handful were dead and a dozen or so were injured from brutal beatings by the police as the mob broke through the iron gates of the parliament building across the street from where we lived. But to a mother who huddled her children in the inner corridor of an apartment fearing that a stray bullet may harm them, there was nothing "velvety" about it.

I did not merely fear for our lives; the battle outside my window was not what I was willing to die for.  It was the culmination of a series of events to take over the existing government. The preceding scandalous events included the prime-minister being viscously beaten and forced to resign and leave the country prior to the arrival of his replacement, Robert Kocharyan, in Levon Ter-Petrosyan's government.

They arrived in long black overcoats - well groomed young men who could be spotted on the streets of Yerevan most often in pairs or groups of threes and fours.
"They're the Kocharyanakans," a random observer in public would inevitably remark.

For almost a year, a brigade of armed soldiers became a semi-permanent feature at the park across the presidential building, where my children used to play. "Who are you protecting?" I questioned sometimes. "I'm fulfilling the commander's orders," was the standard line of response.

The developments of the past six years had made it clear that living in Armenia required either going along with those who had established themselves in the position of power or being a bystander and an observer to public life in direct contrast to our own philosophical and moral paradigms.

Rash and ruthless privatization stripped any sense of ownership and pride from people whose sweat and toil had gone into constructing the public establishments that were being sold.

The democratic development that offered a piece of the public pie to all was terribly skewed in favor of rich diasporans and foreign investors looking to deepen their pockets and enlarge their sphere of influence.

Displays of hateful passion toward history and the reality of the past seventy years that was not to our liking destroyed and degraded even the positive accomplishments of our predecessors: fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers.

Intolerance toward diverging thought and opinion built up a false sense of righteousness and arrogance that became an accepted and expected mode of operation.

Reckless, disrespectful, and aggressive behavior in public by those in charge of arms and armed forces made hooliganism synonymous to courage.

They may have arrived with a higher calling, but what the new government brought to Armenia in the new millennium was more privatization of public lands and facilities, more cronyism, militarization of civic life, brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor mentality.

A new wave of leadership is long overdue.

Winning over the oppressive Soviet regime and securing an independent homeland was a huge, historic step accomplished by our compatriots. With courage and determination Armenia became the first nation in the former Soviet Union to organize and stand up for freedom and independence. 

"Homeland" is a political construct, "home," on the other hand, is humane. Armenians need a home not just a homeland.   

When faced with having to choose between the two, people will always choose in favor of a "home," even if only in memory. Leadership keen on generating and implementing policies that nourish the senses and the sensibilities of the inhabitants of the land can turn the homeland of the Armenians into a home for all Armenians. 

Until then, the shadows of my grandmother and of all those yearning for a home will continue to grow larger and wider. 

Marineh Khachadour is an educator, writer, researcher working in a public school in Pasadena, California.  She immigrated to the United States from Armenia in 1980 and returned to live and work in Armenia from 1992-1998. During that time she provided educational services and resources for Armenian women and children including refugees and served as Gender in Development Expert with UNDP, Armenia from 1995-1998.