Knight Ridder Newspapers
Jan 25 2005
16 years after earthquake devastated Armenia, international aid
continues
By Mark McDonald
SPITAK, Armenia – When rescuers began pulling victims from the rubble
of the sugar factory here in 1988, the corpses seemed like ghastly,
crimson ghosts: The bodies were covered with an awful goo, a
coagulating mixture of blood and powdered sugar.
The earthquake that crushed the sugar plant also destroyed every
other factory in this mountainous patch of northern Armenia. The
6.9-magnitude quake flattened schools, churches, homes and hospitals.
More than 25,000 people died. Half a million were left homeless.
The 1988 disaster was hardly on the scale of last month’s Asian
tsunami, but the grief and horror were the same. So was the
international response – massive, immediate, global and heartfelt.
But despite the huge donations and numerous successes,
post-earthquake Armenia could serve as a cautionary tale for the
tsunami region: Even the most heavily financed and best-intentioned
relief missions can be derailed by the aftershocks of economic
crises, corruption, politics and war.
“The people in the tsunami, their pain is our pain,” said Asya
Khakchikyan, 70, who lost her husband, daughter and granddaughter in
the Spitak quake. “When I see the faces of those poor people in Asia,
I see the faces of the ones I lost.”
Other disaster zones have had bitter experiences with relief efforts
that dwindled or disappeared almost as soon as they started. When the
news media move on, aid missions often do the same.
That didn’t happen here, government officials, diplomats, aid workers
and survivors agree. After 16 years, international relief efforts
continue, many of them generous and effective.
A housing program under the U.S. Agency for International Development
ended only last month in the shattered city of Gyumri. The Peace
Corps has 85 volunteers in Armenia, several U.N. programs remain
active and dozens of international agencies and private foundations
continue to work in the region.
“We haven’t recovered yet, but at least say we’re no longer dying,”
said Albert Papoyan, the mayor of the hardscrabble village of
Shirmakoot, the epicenter of the quake. “We’re finally starting to
breathe.”
An estimated 20,000 people across the quake zone still occupy the
metal shipping containers known here as “domiks.” The containers once
held emergency provisions that came from abroad. Now people live in
them.
Only one of Spitak’s factories is back in business, and it employs
only a small fraction of the people it did before.
Some aid workers complain that some people still expect handouts.
Spitak lost 5,003 people to the earthquake, nearly a fourth of its
population. The quake struck Dec. 7, just before noon, when children
were in school and most adults were working at the sugar plant, the
elevator factory, the leather tannery or the sewing collective.
Spitak Mayor Vanik Asatryan said every house and apartment building
in his city collapsed – all 5,635 of them. Other towns and villages
also were reduced to rubble.
“Everyone,” he said, “was homeless.”
Asatryan and others praised the quick response of the Soviet
government – Armenia was part of the Soviet Union in 1988 – although
communist construction teams inexplicably began putting up row upon
row of low-quality, concrete apartment blocks, exactly like the ones
that had just collapsed.
International aid also poured in. The grand total after 16 years is
difficult to estimate, although government officials suggest it could
be close to $2 billion, half of what’s been pledged for tsunami
relief.
“The whole world helped Spitak,” Asatryan said.
Today, Spitak’s new neighborhoods – built to exacting new codes – are
known as the French, Italian and Uzbek districts, commemorating the
countries that financed them.
The immediate U.S. response was a planeload of search-and-rescue dogs
and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Va. The plane took off without
a flight plan, and U.S. officials weren’t sure it would be allowed to
land in Soviet territory or that the rescuers, who had no visas,
would be allowed to get off.
American tents, heaters, food and medicine soon followed. Trauma
counselors also arrived, along with some teachers of transcendental
meditation.
Today, Armenia is one of the largest per-capita recipients of U.S.
government aid in the world, reportedly second only to Israel. A
large and influential immigrant population in the United States helps
drive those government appropriations.
Armenian-American businesspeople also donate heavily. The Lincy
Foundation, underwritten by the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, has been
particularly effective in building housing, roads and tunnels in the
quake zone.
Aid workers grumble that the deluge of assistance created a caste of
“professional victims” hooked on handouts. One former Red Cross
worker said residents would become enraged when he was a day or two
late delivering free medicine.
“They think all the world owes them everything,” said Yulia Antonyan,
a program officer at the Eurasia Foundation. “People will sit around
a table saying this country gave us too little or the Uzbeks build
bad buildings.”
The cash-strapped Armenian government has been hard-pressed to create
housing, jobs and development programs on its own.
Tens of thousands of former factory workers, for example, now rely on
small subsistence plots of potatoes and cabbage. The soil is thin,
the winters are brutal and freak summer hailstorms wrecked the wheat
harvest for two years running.
The hollow shells of ruined factories add a ghostly gloom to the
area, and only one of the Soviet-era enterprises has managed to
reopen: Asatryan, Spitak’s mayor, got a World Bank loan to
resuscitate the sewing collective, and he has 250 employees stitching
military uniforms for the Dutch, British and Americans.
Before the quake, however, the sewing factory had 5,000 employees.
Two-thirds of local adults are still unemployed, and the average
salary is about $2.50 a day.
“I feel completely abandoned by the government,” said the widow
Khachikyan, who subsists on a $13 monthly pension, half of which she
spends on an asthma inhaler. She picks wormy apples from a nearby
park and lives in a metal trailer left behind by the Italians.
“I’ve been in this domik for 15 years. They keep saying they’ll give
me an apartment, but they never do.”
She managed a shrug and a wheezing laugh, and said, “I guess they’ll
give me an apartment when I die.”