ARMENIA: TWO DECADES AFTER DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE, THOUSANDS OF DISPLACED FAMILIES STILL WAITING FOR PERMANENT HOME
By Anush Babajanyan

EurasiaNet
Dec 29 2008
NY

A EurasiaNet Partner Post from Transitions Online

It’s a small structure in the middle of a field, seemingly
deserted. Only when you get close does it become clear that someone
lives here. Harutyun Gevorgyan moved to this makeshift house six
months ago after he married Manik, its owner.

Twenty years ago Gevorgyan lived with his first wife in an apartment
in Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city, but it was ruined in the
December 1988 earthquake that devastated the northwest corner of the
then-Soviet republic, killing 25,000 people and leaving hundreds of
thousands homeless.

Gevorgyan lived with a series of relatives until he met Manik, a
fellow street cleaner. Her family had not been offered a new home
after the earthquake. Like many in Gyumri, then called Leninakan,
they found shelter in domiks, small houses provided by the government
or built by the homeless themselves using wood, stones, or pieces
of metal found in the rubble of ruined buildings. These tnaks still
cover many parts of the city.

In the aftermath of the disaster the Soviet government promised that
the homeless would get new apartments within two years. Construction
began, but in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed; Armenia became
independent and lost its main source of aid. Two decades on more than
4,000 families in Gyumri are still waiting their turn to get a home.

"One of the reasons was the fall of the Soviet Union, and another
was the government that came afterwards," City Hall spokesperson
Lilit Aghekyan says to the question of why so many displaced by the
earthquake still do not have permanent new homes. But 20 years after
the disaster, the national government this year launched a construction
effort designed to provide permanent shelter for Gyumri’s remaining
homeless.

The War Hits Home

Aghekyan refers to the "negligence" of independent Armenia’s first
leaders, who, preoccupied with fighting Azerbaijan over the disputed
territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, let restoration of the devastated
quake area languish. Then-President Levon Ter-Petrosian’s government
concentrated the country’s resources on the war, ushering in what
Armenians recall as the "dark years" of little or no electricity,
heat, or running water.

After the 1994 ceasefire, restoring the Armenian economy took
precedence over delayed earthquake relief. By this time still-displaced
families had largely settled into their domiks, and into a routine
of petitioning the local authorities for help.

There are about 300 such households in the Fountain District, a former
park not far from the center of Gyumri that hosts one of the city’s
main concentrations of domiks.

Harutyun and Manik Gevorgyan live in one of the haphazardly sited,
closely spaced structures. Their house is a patchwork of sheets
of steel, heated, like many in the Fountain District, by a stove
Harutyun stokes not just with wood but with anything he can find that
burns. Smoke fills the badly-ventilated structure, mixing with dust
from the items brought in to be burnt. Harutyun cooks on the same
stove while his wife is out on her daily job as a street cleaner.

There are two rooms, a kitchen where the fire fodder is piled and
a bedroom with a narrow, partly broken bed. "Our house is in bad
condition," Harutyun says, "but there are houses in this district
that are much worse off."

Unlike the Gevorgyans’, most of the houses here have electricity,
but none has running water or sewerage. People bring water from
nearby springs and dig holes, screened by walls, outside their houses
for toilets.

"We eat and do laundry in the same room," says Geghetsik Gevorgyan
(no relation to Harutyun), who has moved from one domik to another
since the earthquake ruined her apartment building. With a pension
of $80 a month and a little extra money she earns working in a local
farmer’s fields, she maintains the thin-walled house and takes care
of her ill son.

Chichak Petrosyan lives alone in a one-room house piled with scattered
clothes and cardboard, but family members are always coming by to
help, and as we talk her grandson plays in the heaps on the floor. She
keeps doves in the one-room house, as well as a dog and cat. Outside
her relatives are doing laundry in the open air.

Petrosyan found this onetime ice-cream stand shortly after she lost
her home in the earthquake. She’s been living here ever since. She
has petitioned City Hall for a new home, without success. "I have
applied several times but received no reply," she says. "By now I
have almost lost hope."

Building Blocks

Since the quake an alliance of foundations and organizations headed by
the U.S. government aid agency USAID and including Armenian-American
billionaire Kirk Kerkorian’s Lincy Foundation has helped build 18,000
apartments for homeless families in Gyumri, but nothing has been built
by Armenian authorities since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Last
June, the national government announced an ambitious effort to resolve
the plight of the remaining homeless families within five years.

"Apartments for 3,000 families will be built in accordance with a
government program," City Hall’s Aghekyan says.

The first step was a contract with Yerevan-based developer
Glendale Hills to build at least 2,300 apartments in the Ani and
Mush 2 districts in the suburbs of Gyumri, where the Soviets built
apartments in first few years after the quake . Construction began on
the government-financed, 43 billion dram (100 million euro) project
in October and is slated for completion in 2010, with residents moving
in the following year.

The city received 4,284 applications from homeless families, and may
yet get more if the government agrees to extend the 1 November deadline
for 140 qualified families that were unable to apply "because they
are out of the country or other reasons," Aghekyan says. Those who
do not get one of the newly constructed flats will be eligible for
vouchers to purchase existing apartments on the outskirts of the city.

The help may come too late for Lena Atoyan, who is almost 80. She
does not expect to live long enough to move out of the tnak she has
shared with her daughter, Susanna, since the earthquake. "I am weak
and ill from living in this cold house all these years," says Atoyan,
who has been bedridden for months with a leg problem.

"I hope that at least my daughter gets some help or an apartment from
the government," she says. "It has been 20 years since we moved here,
and there is still no help from anyone."

Editor’s Note: Armenian photojournalist Anush Babayanjan reported
and for this article.