To whom it may concern

22 April 2004

Re the intended closure of the MEI

I am an Englishman and, before marrying my wife, Iranian born Armenian, like still too many Europeans knew nothing of Armenia or its history.

We have two boys bilingual in written and spoken English and Armenian. They have been attending MEI for the last 4 and 2 years respectively. They and all our friends and family are dismayed and astonished at the intended closure of MEI. (As indeed is nearly the entire Greek Cypriot community who cannot believe Armenians could do such a thing to themselves.) .

I have studied carefully the AGBU announcement , because you have to study it very carefully in order to work out what it is trying to say. The argument seems to be like this :

1
MEI was helpful when the disturbances occurred in Lebanon and Iran but now everything everywhere is quiet

2
The influx of ex USSR Armenians in to MEI has created groupings and there is a lack of shared endeavour

3
National governments now involve their Armenian-speaking nationals in to their national education schemes, so Armenians can get ahead in their country of upbringing.
For example “very few” Cypriot Armenians go to MEI.

4
The closure would have been understood and agreed by the Melkonian brothers.

Let us examine these arguments :

1
MEI was created in the wake of one major upheaval and has been a source of strength and educational sanctuary many times thereafter. Who can possibly predict that such an upheaval – obliging Armenian parents to seek their children’s schooling elsewhere – may not happen again somewhere/anywhere?
In view of very recent events, it seems to me that even the situation even within Armenia itself is again becoming unstable.
(And before making any more vague proposals about educational ventures in Armenia, the AGBU would be well advised to take more note of the experience of independent diaspora Armenians who understandably sought to channel funds to projects in Armenia only to find so many of them turn in to a financial “black hole”.)

2
How did the AGBU in New York form this opinion? Has it come from their advisor in situ at MEI ? I am afraid that the comment reads simply like “Well, this is what the children are all saying there, that the Iranians don’t like the Bulgarians and the Bulgarians don’t like the Albanians etc etc”.
Is the future of the 78 years old MEI to be determined on playground gossip? Of course there is some intra-national tension and rivalry but all students in the school know and support their common heritage, as witnessed by their united efforts in these past few unhappy weeks.

3
MEI was not established for the benefit of Armenians living in Cyprus.
Currently most parents are not sending their children to MEI because of difficulties at their residing country ; they are sending them there BECAUSE IT IS THERE! Because they want their children to be educated in MEI, founded in a long-established friendly and supportive “neutral” country, and with its unique history of educating Armenians from all over the world. What right has AGBU to now refuse Armenians that option?

4
The legal rights and wrongs of the closure I leave to lawyers to examine, although from my own brief study of the original documents closure for the grounds expressed in the announcement seems outwith the terms of the trust.
But to say “This is what the Melkonians would have wanted” is presumptuous in the extreme.
The AGBU statement importantly, for whatever reason, has not addressed the one essential and continuing fact about MEI : everyone who is educated there values that experience the whole of their life ; everyone is enriched by it ; everyone graduates from MEI as a true “ambassador” for Armenian history, culture and way of life. Would the Melkonians have wanted this useful, powerful, effective and continuing legacy to be ended? For what to take its place? Why is the current AGBU committee refusing to acknowledge and address these facts?
Instead of issuing press statements that are full of ambiguity and almost impossible to really decipher their true meaning, why doesn’t the committee say what everyone knows they are really thinking? It is not about “the school loses money every year”, it is about not wanting to put up the money to undertake what is urgently need ie a major refurbishment of the school’s buildings and facilities. If you spend the money to make the school look good again, the student numbers will increase : the inherit demand and need for the school is undiminished, as is the will of its recently wrongly maligned teaching staff. For the sake of a one-off investment in superstructure, is the MEI to close? I cannot believe it and it must not be allowed to happen.
And what of the MEI’s alumni and current students : what will they conclude regarding the closure? They will say to themselves that nothing lasts, nothing has a value beyond cost, that 78 years of history and values mean nothing, that financial motives of a small controlling group – perhaps with little personal experience of MEI in particular and European history in general, residing in and nationals of a country thousands of miles away - can prevail over everything, that nothing lasts, that money and profit is everything. It is giving an awful – and untrue – message to these young children.

Miles D.H. Martin
31 Outrillo
3110 Limassol
 

Cyprus