The other homeless

Press, 28 December 1988, Page 13

The other homeless

The massive Armenian earthquake, with its terrible human toll, came at a time when other troubles persist in the region. ANDREW WILSON reports from Moscow.

Victims of human violence in the Caucasus have set a special refugee aid committee a relief task unprecedented since World War 11. As thousands from both sides streamed over the ArmenianAzerbaijan border before the horrific earthquake, the affair took a new and sinister turn with an announcement that the army was using helicopters to lift Azeri refugees out of Armenia. The same helicopters had been lifting Armenians out of Azerbaijan. The army said the lift had become necessary because fleeing Azeris were obliged to use mountain passes that had become unsafe, clearly from attacks by Armenians. More than 48,000 Armenians have fled into Armenia from Azerbaijan. At least 40,000 Azeris are officially reported to have arrived in Azerbaijan from the opposite direction. Including unregistered

arrivals, the total of both sides temporarily homeless is likely to approach a quarter of a million. Among them are Armenians who have fled from Azerbaijan into neighbouring Georgia. Many of those who have passed through hastily improvised reception centres had only the clothes they stood up in. Many Armenians were bundled into buses by local officials and driven to the border without even a suitcase.

Arriving in Moscow, two Armenian sisters, aged 22 and 12, described how the injured had been brought “naked and covered in blood” into the tem-

porary safety of Kirovobad’s Armenian quarter by armoured personnel carriers.

They said rapes had been committed on girls as young as eight. Plane tickets from Kirovobad to Moscow had been sold for four times the usual price. There is still no certainty about the total number of dead, still put officially at 28. But a statement to the Supreme Soviet by Moscow’s special envoy to the area, Arkady Vosky, that the disturbances “threatened relations in the area” showed how close the situation may have come to local civil war. Armed Azeris roam the Cauca-

sian hillsides in self-styled partisan groups. Foreign reporters are strictly excluded from the area. The deaths of soldiers (still put at three) have highlighted the courage of Soviet troops defending their fellow citizens. The army was first to provide the public with news of what happened in Kirovobad. As at Sumgait in February, sheer hooliganism appears to have been behind the worst excesses on the Azeri side. Soviet newspaper correspondents have since noted an overtly religious element. “Izvestia” reported a portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeiny being held among the first crowds gathered in Baku. Another picture was of Akhmed Akhmedov, the young Azeri sentenced to death by the Soviet supreme court for his part in the Sumgait killings. Copyright London Observer ft