Armenia

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Country summary

Capital

Yerevan

Borders

Azerbaijan-proper 566 km, Azerbaijan-Naxcivan exclave 221 km, Georgia 164 km, Iran 35 km, Turkey 268 km

Government type

republic

Population

2,967,004 (July 2010 est.)[1]

Population growth

-0.03% (2010 est.)[1]

Life expectancy

72.68 years[1]

Unemployment

7.1% (2007 est.)[1]

Index of Economic Freedom

38[2]

Corruption Perceptions Index

120[3]

Doing Business ranking

43[4]


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.[citation needed]

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.[1]


Economical characteristics

  • Currency: Dram (ISO code: AMD)
  • Central bank discount rate: 7.25% (2 December 2008)[1]
  • Commercial banks lending rate: 17.05% (31 December 2008)[1]
  • Stock of money (M1): $1.359 billion (31 December 2008)[1]
  • Quasi money (with M1 makes M2): $950.1 million (31 December 2008)[1]

Notable events:

Statistics

Statistic / Year 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
GDP (million USD)[6] 1 845 1 912 2 118 2 376 2 807 3 577 4 900 6 384 9 206 11 917
Govt. debt (% of GDP)[7]
Govt. revenue (% of GDP)[8] 17.726 18.198 19.305 19.763 21.385 22.372
Govt. expenses (% of GDP)[9] 16.415 16.956 18.146 17.148 17.042 20.688
Debt to revenue (years)


Armenian Genocide

This article uses content from the Wikipedia article on Armenian Genocide (edition) under the terms of the CC-by-SA 3.0 license.

The Armenian Genocide[10] (Template:Lang-hy Hayots’ Ts’yeghaspanut’yun), also known as the Armenian Massacres and by Armenians as the Great Crime (Template:Lang-hy Mets Yegherrn)[11][12] 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.[13][14] 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.[15][16][17]

It is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[18][19]Template:Rp[20] as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians,[21] and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[22] The word genocide was coined in order to describe these events.[23][24]

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.[25][26] 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.[27] The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide.

References

Note: statistical data was rounded. Different sources may use different methodologies for their estimates. Debt to revenue is calculated by dividing the two variables from their original ('unrounded') values. It represents how long it would a government take to repay its entire debt if it used its whole revenue for this purpose.

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 CIA - The World Factbook. "Armenia", from The World Factbook. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  2. ↑ Heritage Foundation. "Armenia", Economic Freedom Score. A lower ranking is better; but please be careful when comparing between different countries or years. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  3. ↑ Transparency International. "Armenia", Corruption Perceptions Index 2009. A lower ranking is better; but please note that the numbers cannot be compared between countries or years due to different methodology. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  4. ↑ Doing Business. "Armenia", Doing Business 2010 (part of The World Bank Group). A lower ranking is better; but please be careful when comparing between different countries or years. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  5. ↑ Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff. "This Time is Different", Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-14216-6, p. 350. (The list does not claim to be complete.) Referenced 2011-07-19.
  6. ↑ World Bank. "Armenia: GDP", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  7. ↑ World Bank. "Armenia: government debt", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  8. ↑ World Bank. "Armenia: government revenue", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  9. ↑ World Bank. "Armenia: government expenses", from World Bank Data. Referenced 2010-09-30.
  10. ↑ The International Association of Genocide Scholars, Affirmation, Armenian Genocide, "That this assembly of the Association of Genocide Scholars in its conference held in Montreal, June 11–3, 1997, reaffirms that the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further condemns the denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and its official and unofficial agents and supporters".
  11. ↑ H. H. Chakmajian's A Comprehensive Dictionary English-Armenian (1920, Yeran Press, Boston) defines "Crime" as Եղեռն (Yeghern) on p. 350.
  12. ↑ M. Kouyoumdjian's, A Comprehensive Dictionary Armenian-English (1970, Atlas Press, Beirut) defines Եղեռն (yeghern) as "crime"on p. 312
  13. ↑ Armenia: The Survival of A Nation by Christopher J. Walker, Croom Helm (Publisher) London 1980, pp. 200–203
  14. ↑ The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden by Viscount Bryce, James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, Uncensored Edition. Ara Sarafian (ed.) Princeton, New Jersey: Gomidas Institute, 2000. ISBN 0-9535191-5-5, pp. 635–649
  15. ↑ (PDF) Resolution on genocides committed by the Ottoman empire. International Association of Genocide Scholars. http://www.genocidescholars.org/images/Resolution_on_genocides_committed_by_the_Ottoman_Empire.pdfTemplate:Inconsistent citations 
  16. ↑ Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2006.
  17. ↑ Schaller, Dominik J; Zimmerer, Jürgen (2008). "Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies – introduction". Journal of Genocide Research 10 (1): 7–14. doi:10.1080/14623520801950820. 
  18. ↑ "Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution". Armenian-genocide.org. http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.153/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html. Retrieved 25 March 2013. 
  19. ↑ Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Press. ISBN 1-59420-100-5Template:Inconsistent citations 
  20. ↑ (PDF) A Letter from The International Association of Genocide Scholars. Genocide Watch. 13 June 2005. http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/Turkey-_13Jun05ErdoganletterAmericanHistoricalAssociation.pdfTemplate:Inconsistent citations 
  21. ↑ "Senate Resolution 106 — Calling on the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to Human Rights, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide Documented in the United States Record relating to the Armenian Genocide". Library of Congress. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r110:FLD001:S03144. 
  22. ↑ Rummel, RJ "The Holocaust in Comparative and Historical Perspective". The Journal of Social Issues. Volume 3, no. 2. 1 April 1998. Retrieved 30 April 2007.
  23. ↑ Coined by Raphael Lemkin, 1943; Hyde, Jennifer (2 December 2008). Polish Jew gave his life defining, fighting genocide. CNN. Archived from the original on 3 December 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20081203090012/http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/11/13/sbm.lemkin.profile/. Retrieved 2 December 2008. 
  24. ↑ Interview with R. Lemkin in the UN implying that the term "Genocide" was invented to describe the killing of a race or group, including Armenians, "because it happened so many times".
  25. ↑ The Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 7, Edited by Hugh Chisholm, (1911), 3; Constantinople, the capital of the Turkish Empire ...
  26. ↑ Britannica, Istanbul: When the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, the capital was moved to Ankara, and Constantinople was officially renamed Istanbul in 1930.
  27. ↑ Hans-Lukas Kieser, Dominik J. Schaller, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah: The Armenian genocide and the Shoah, Chronos, 2002, ISBN 3-0340-0561-X, p. 114.

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