Armenia

Armenia (Armenian: Հայաստան Hayastan, Հայք Hayq), officially the Republic of Armenia, is a landlocked mountainous country in Eurasia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, located in the Southern Caucasus. It shares borders with Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and the Nakhichevan exclave of Azerbaijan to the south. A former republic of the Soviet Union, Armenia is a unitary, multiparty, democratic nation-state and one of the oldest and most historic civilizations in the world with a rich cultural heritage, as well as the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Although Armenia is constitutionally a secular state, the Christian faith plays a major role in both its history and the identification of the Armenian people.

Armenia prides itself on being the first nation to formally adopt Christianity (early 4th century). Despite periods of autonomy, over the centuries Armenia came under the sway of various empires including the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman. During and after World War I in the Western Armenia, modern day eastern Turkey, fell subject to a policy of forced resettlement coupled with other harsh practices that resulted in an the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians. The Armenian Genocide, as noted by the scholar Ugur Ungor, the largest property transfer of the 20th century. The Eastern Armenia was ceded by the Ottomans to Russia in 1828; this portion declared its independence in 1918, but was conquered by the Soviet Red Army in 1920. Armenian leaders remain preoccupied by the long conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a primarily Armenian-populated region, assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s by Moscow. Armenia and Azerbaijan began fighting over the area in 1988; the struggle escalated after both countries attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. By May 1994, when a cease-fire took hold, ethnic Armenian forces held not only Nagorno-Karabakh but also a significant portion of Azerbaijan proper. The economies of both sides have been hurt by their inability to make substantial progress toward a peaceful resolution. Turkey closed the common border with Armenia in 1994 because of the Armenian separatists' control of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas, further hampering Armenian economic growth. However, in 2009 senior Armenian leaders began pursuing rapprochement with Turkey, which could result in the border reopening.

Economical characteristics

 * Currency: Dram (ISO code: AMD)
 * Central bank discount rate: 7.25% (2 December 2008)
 * Commercial banks lending rate: 17.05% (31 December 2008)
 * Stock of money (M1): $1.359 billion (31 December 2008)
 * Quasi money (with M1 makes M2): $950.1 million (31 December 2008)

Notable events:

 * Banking crisis: August 1994-1996

Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide (Հայոց Ցեղասպանություն Hayots’ Ts’yeghaspanut’yun), also known as the Armenian Massacres and by Armenians as the Great Crime (Մեծ Եղեռն Mets Yegherrn) was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects from their historic homeland in the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. It took place during and after World War I and was implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and forced labor, and the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches to the Syrian Desert. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians, the Greeks and other minority groups were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government, and their treatment is considered by many historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.

It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,  as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians, and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. The word genocide was coined in order to describe these events.

The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

Links

 * Armenia on Wikipedia
 * Central bank of Armenia
 * Country profile (pdf) from the Enterprise Studies page (part of the The World Bank Group)
 * Studies from the Library of Congress (1986-1998)
 * BBC country profile