Batting for Armenia, the American Way!

By Jennifer Gnana

It won't be a surprise that most people's introduction to Armenia comes through America.

From Kim Kardashian to be more specific.

The Armenian-American businesswoman and celebrity is a surprising ambassador for bringing Armenia to most people's living rooms.

The reality TV series Keeping up with the Kardashians, has been the place where millions of people have heard of a country called Armenia as well as about the Genocide.

The pop culture quotient aside, what is interesting is that large numbers of people have had their introduction to the ancient Central Asian country from the United States of America.

This underscores the powerful lobbying done with persons having greater political clout than the Kardashian clan to keep Armenia in everybody's conscience.

The Armenian lobby in the United States Congress is said to be a powerful and effective ethnic lobby in the US along with the Israelis and the Cuban Americans.

It was the Americans after all who first brought Protestantism to the oldest Christian nation and helped initiate several reforms among Armenians in the Ottoman empire.

The relations between Armenia and America hence go a long way.

With more Armenians living abroad than in their own countries, the diaspora and the lobbies they form play an important factor in the international clout and financial aid that Armenia enjoys.

Armenia too, has opened itself to welcoming its sons and daughters back.

It is one of the few countries in the world which openly welcomes trainees and interns, preferably from America to come and work.

For example, Sara Anjargolian, an American-Armenian documentary filmmaker was funded by the New York based Tufenkian Foundation to make a film on the dire poverty in Armenian countryside.

Twenty-eight percent of Armenia lives below the poverty line and heartrending footage from the documentary shoes Armenian families scavenging among rubbish heaps to feed themselves on a daily basis.

Especially after the genocide, when appeals to help the starving millions were sounded in the US and Britain, shocking images such as these continue to horrify and baffle the Armenian-American diaspora.

Anjargolia says in an interview about her documentary, 'How We Live', "Some of the feedback we received from folks within the Armenian Diaspora was a naïve shock, and sometimes a resistance and blatant denial, that this type of desperate poverty could exist in Armenia. Moreover, some who were willing to accept that it existed, expressed anger that the project “aired the country’s dirty laundry” in such a public way, and that this was bad for the county’s image."

Financial aid from the United States is what keeps the Armenian economy going.

Without foreign remittances, the landlocked country which has sealed its borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan would find it very hard to survive.

However, some say that the Armenian lobby in the US is not as powerful as it is made to be.

It has for instance, not managed to influence the United States to officially recognise the Armenian Genocide.

Though there are powerful groups such as the Armenian National Committee of America, incidentally founded after World War I by another Kardashian, Vahan who was the Ottoman Empire's consul to Washington, they haven't managed to convince the Obama administration to use to word 'genocide' when the holocaust is commemorated on April 24.

Maybe, it is time that America's most famous Armenian face rustled some support, the Kardashian way!