Before Tsunami, World Aid Helped Armenia
By STEVE GUTTERMAN
.c The Associated Press
GYUMRI, Armenia (AP) – The sliding doors of the battered Soviet
railroad car that Artak Akopian calls home reveal a small space almost
as icy as the outdoors. The makeshift quarters are decorated by little
but an old photograph of his mother, who was killed in the earthquake
that devastated Armenia in December 1988.
Akopian, then age 4, was at nursery school when the quake struck,
killing 25,000 people and leaving half a million homeless. Like the
tsunami that devastated southern Asia last month, the disaster focused
the world’s attention on the region and brought forth an outpouring of
aid.
“The aid was colossal, unexpectedly massive,” said Fadei Sarkisian,
who headed the government of Armenia at the time of the quake, when it
was a Soviet republic.
A look back at the aid effort shows successes and failures: More than
$1.2 billion of domestic and foreign aid was given for medical needs,
clothing, food and new housing. But thousands, like Akopian, remain in
substandard housing – 2,000 families according to government
estimates, some 7,000 families according to journalists who have
studied the problem.
The quake shook the mountains of northern Armenia just as Mikhail
Gorbachev was opening the Soviet Union to the West. He cut short a
summit with outgoing President Ronald Reagan – where he had announced
military cuts and pledged support for human rights – to rush home.
The international aid effort “wouldn’t have been so big without
Gorbachev. It was a milestone in the history of the Cold War,” said
John Evans, who is now U.S. ambassador to Armenia and was involved in
the earthquake relief effort. “The initial response – there was no
question about it – was all-out.”
Less than two weeks after the quake, Soviet authorities said they had
received $100 million in aid from 77 countries. An Armenian official
in the Central Committee of Armenia’s Communist Party at the time of
the quake said on condition of anonymity that earthquake-related aid
through 1992 totaled $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion. About 40 percent
came from abroad.
The United States sent heating stoves and search-dog teams. Britain
sent ultrasonic listening devices and fiber-optic cameras for
searching the rubble. Clothing and medical equipment came from around
the world.
Sarkisian recalled standing by rubble and hearing cries for help; but
he knew the powerful cranes needed to lift the concrete slabs on top
of them would take days to assemble. Two days after the quake, cranes
arrived from Italy and Germany, saving, he said, thousands of people.
Akopian’s mother was not among them. Along with his younger brother,
she was killed when the 6.9-magnitude quake destroyed their apartment.
Akopian’s father survived but became mentally unbalanced and later
died.
Now 20, Akopian lives with his aunt, her two children and his wife in
the cramped, corroding railroad car – part of a jumble of cargo
containers and other tiny shelters huddled in a hollow in Gyumri,
Armenia’s second-largest city, which was called Leninakan in the
Soviet era.
The hard-scrabble neighborhood illustrates the desperation that
persists despite the recovery effort that has restored a semblance of
normal life to Gyumri and even Spitak, a town where the quake left
only a handful of buildings standing and killed about half the
population of 20,000.
Gorbachev pledged to rebuild the devastated area, but the 1991 Soviet
collapse scuttled that effort and plunged Armenia into an economic
crisis.
As Armenians across the newly independent country chopped down trees
in parks and chopped up furniture to heat their homes, the
quake-stricken area become just another region where residents
struggled to survive. Into the early 1990s, the earthquake zone was
still shattered and demoralized.
Karlen Ambartsumian, who was deputy mayor of Gyumri when the quake
struck and now advises the current mayor, put part of the blame on a
decrease in foreign aid following the initial, emotionally driven
interest.
“It should have been more prolonged – not just to aid at the time
when the whole world is talking about it and then forget, but to
continue, step by step, doing what is needed at each stage,”
Ambartsumian said.
He said what’s needed most in Gyumri, where dozens of factories are
idle and unemployment is staggering, is aid in the form of job
creation.
“When a U.N. official asked me how much flour we needed, I told him:
Send us fishing rods, not fish,” said Simon Ter-Simonian, head of the
government’s humanitarian assistance department.
While Sarkisian said the aid effort in the quake’s wake was
well-coordinated, Ambartsumian said distribution was badly flawed and
that people who suffered the most missed a lot of the aid, which was
handed out while they were looking for loved ones’ bodies.
“Everybody sent aid, but nobody was able to organize its fair
distribution,” Ambartsumian said.
Sofia Airopetian, a 73-year-old Spitak resident, though, tells a
different story. She says the world never forgot the earthquake
victims and that she still receives food aid. Last year she moved out
of a cargo container and into one of several new apartments built
under a program funded by Armenian-American Kirk Kerkorian.
The new housing beneath the mountains that shadow Spitak augments
homes and hospitals built by foreign countries following the quake.
A U.S. Agency for International Development program has enabled more
than 7,000 families to move out of temporary housing, ridding Gyumri
of many of the metal shacks that survivor Gayane Markarian called a
constant reminder of the quake that killed her brother.
After 15 years in a temporary home near Akopian’s railroad car,
Markarian and her family of five are preparing to move back to their
old building, finally renovated after the quake. But her 18-year-old
son Vigen fears the lack of jobs will force him into the army.
Across the dirt road, 30-year-old Ella Voskanian said she, her mother
and 12-year-old daughter have no hope of leaving their dilapidated
metal container because they are not eligible for other housing for
bureaucratic reasons. At the time of the quake, they were registered
at a home that belongs to relatives.
“We have nowhere to go,” she said.
01/19/05 02:22 EST