Doubly deceived
By Rashid Shirinov
Many Armenians had organized their lives around the dreams they thought they were certain of and did not expect to have the rug pulled from under their feet.
They were deceived, both by the previous government and the current Sargsyan administration, who promised a lot – investments, new jobs and demographic growth, but did not realize any.
The Sargsyan administration made a string of promises, but in reality contented with populist statements.
Local media reports that MP from the Republican Party of Armenia Samvel Farmanyan will soon voice a proposal to establish a working group that would deal with the demographic problems of Armenia.
Farmanyan seems obsessed with “dreamy” promise of President Serzh Sargsyan made at the forum of the Diaspora.
Then, the Armenian President has again promised the population to bring it to four million by 2040. However, he did not clarify how the Armenian government is going to reach this goal, and many people have had a lot of questions about it. Here Farmanyan showed up and decided to help his President to cope with this task.
Armenian media suppose that the working group of Farmanyan will deal with the “scientific justification” of Sargsyan's thesis about “Armenia with four-million population”.
However, Armenian population no longer believes the tales, as they are well aware of the current rate of emigration from the country. The interesting thing is that members of the government themselves do not believe in it.
Head of Migration Service under Armenia’s Ministry of Territorial Administration Gagik Yeganyan spoke quite clearly on migration problem in Armenia in his recent interview with Lragir.am.
"If there were attractive conditions in our country, there would not be such an interest for foreign countries. As the Prime Minister of the country says, if the country will become a country, people will not leave,” he said.
Yeganyan added that is necessary to create normal conditions in the country – high-paying jobs, normal moral and psychological atmosphere, stability and trust. “Civil society should contribute to the formation of correct value system so that there would be less factors pushing out from Armenia,” he noted.
Today Armenia suffocates in a bunch of unresolved problems – increasing emigration, corruption, inflation, unemployment, poverty, falling exports, demographics and many others. In this context, the population of Armenia is declining at a rapid pace and the Armenian government is unable to stop the process. The official Armenian statistics show that some 3,226,000 people lived in the country in 2000, but this figure fell to 2,981,000 million by 2017.
As many as 245,000 people have left Armenia during this period, and these are only official figures. Most likely, the real situation is even worse.
Independent experts say that more than 40,000 people annually emigrate from Armenia.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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