Philadelphia Inquirer , PA
Feb 7 2005
A cautionary tale about disaster relief
Armenia, hit by a quake in ’88 and swamped with aid, still struggles.
By Mark McDonald
Inquirer Foreign Staff
SPITAK, Armenia – When rescuers began pulling victims from the rubble
of the sugar factory here in 1988, the corpses seemed like ghastly,
crimson ghosts, covered with an awful goo, a coagulating mixture of
blood and powdered sugar.
The 6.9-magnitude earthquake that crushed the sugar plant also
destroyed every other factory in this mountainous patch of northern
Armenia. It flattened schools, churches, homes and hospitals, killing
more than 25,000 people and leaving half a million homeless.
The 1988 disaster was nowhere near the scale of the Dec. 26 tsunami,
but the horror and grief were the same.
So was the international response – huge, immediate, global and
heartfelt.
But despite the donations and many successes, post-earthquake Armenia
could serve as a cautionary tale: 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 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 quickly dwindled or disappeared. When the news media move on,
aid missions often do the same.
That did not happen in Armenia, government officials, diplomats,
aid workers and survivors say. After 16 years, international 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 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, mayor of Shirmakoot village, the quake’s
epicenter. “We’re finally starting to breathe.”
An estimated 20,000 people in the quake zone still live in metal
shipping containers known here as domiks. The containers once held
emergency provisions that came from abroad. Only one of Spitak’s
factories is functioning, employing a fraction of the numbers it
used to.
The quake struck just before noon on Dec. 7, 1988, when children
were in school and most adults were at work in 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 – all 5,635 of them – collapsed. Spitak lost 5,003 people,
nearly a quarter of its population. Other towns and villages also
were reduced to rubble.
“Everyone,” Asatryan said, “was homeless.”
Asatryan and others praised the quick response of the Soviet
government – Armenia was part of the Soviet Union in 1988 – even as
communist construction teams inexplicably began erecting row upon
row of low-quality concrete apartment blocks exactly like the ones
that had just collapsed.
International aid poured in. The total after 16 years is difficult
to estimate, although government officials suggest it could be close
to $2 billion, half of what has been pledged for tsunami relief.
Today, Spitak’s neighborhoods – built to exacting new codes – are
known as the French, Italian and Uzbek districts, commemorating the
countries that financed them.
The United States also dispatched assistance, despite Cold War
tensions.
“This was the first time we offered and the first time they accepted,”
said John Evans, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia. In 1988, he helped
scramble relief supplies from his post on the State Department’s
Soviet desk in Washington. “It’s not too much to say it was historic.”
But the initial success encountered new challenges in the mid-1990s,
as Armenia endured terrible seismic shifts on the political and
military fronts.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, along with much of Armenia’s
economy and government services. The concrete apartment towers remain
unfinished and empty. “Soviet promises were not kept,” Asatryan said.
Skirmishes with Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh erupted into a war that drained resources until a
1994 cease-fire.
Aware that rebuilding efforts had stalled, USAID started a housing
program in 2001, awarding cash vouchers to 7,000 displaced families.
Today, Armenia reportedly is second only to Israel as the world’s
largest per-capita recipients of U.S. government aid. A big,
influential immigrant population helps drive those appropriations,
as Armenian American businesspeople donate heavily.
Still, 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 deliveries of
free medicine were a day or two late.
“They think all the world owes them everything,” said Yulia Antonyan,
a program officer at the Eurasia Foundation.
The foundation’s country director, Ara Nazinyan, said it had been
“a major problem to prevent this dependency on aid.”
“But right after a disaster, people need fish,” Nazinyan said. “You
can’t say to someone, ‘Stay hungry while I teach you how to fish.’
Humanitarian assistance is necessary.”