Soviet Armenia’s year of faith, hope and charity

Press, 13 December 1989, Page 20

Soviet Armenia’s year of faith, hope and charity

A year after the earthquake, RUPERT CORNWELL, of the “Independent,” visits Spitak and looks at Armenians’ attempts to come to terms with its effects.

AT LEAST the new cemetery here is in perfect order. It climbs in tiered rows up a hard, bare hillside above the old stadium where a year ago were piled thousands of waiting coffins. As kids kick a ball around, snow is settling outside on the aftermath of disaster.

The graves, each with grey granite headstones, are countless. Some are engraved with portraits of the dead, as finely detailed as a studio photograph. They are said to cost relatives up to 8000 roubles (about SNZ2SOO) apiece from specialist stonemasons in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, some 95km away. Others bear only names carved in the swirling Armenian script, and a scattering, of fresh flowers. However, one thing they all have in common: the date of December 7, 1988.

A year ago, the great Armenian earthquake all but wiped out Spitak. Of the 25,000 lives it claimed, 10,000 or more were in this small town of 50,000 people, previously notable mainly for a sugar refinery and a successful minor league soccer team. Today it and the stricken towns nearby are trying, with small success, to begin a new life. It is easy to criticise what has been achieved so far. In two years everyone would have a proper home, the Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Nikolai Ryzhkov, once promised. No-one in the region is inclined to believe him. “We’ll be living like this for five years yet,” predicted Mr Gagik Simonyan, who used to work at the Elektron factory in Kirovakan, an industrial town of 150,000 people squeezed into a narrow valley some 30km east of Spitak. Today the plant remains part closed for safety reasons, and Mr Simonyan, like thousands of other workers, has no proper job. Most of this time, however, has been spent cobbling together a makeshift bungalow out of whatever materials were to hand — hardboard, odd planks and linoleum — next to the five storey building where he used to live.

reason amenities, if not fissured walls, are still normal. Others are packed into great compounds of converted containers, their green and blue paint in garish contrast with the weathered ochre-pink tufa traditional to the area. Only a fortunate few are already installed in a new village of little white chalets, built by the Yugoslavs, perched above the town. But forests of cranes behind ramparts of shifted rubble testify to the work being done. On a late Sunday afternoon in November, the pot-holed main road back to Spitak was choked with lorries. According to the Armenian finance ministry, out of 1.4 billion roubles allocated thus far for reconstruction, half have been spent. Not much perhaps, when set against the total estimated earthquake bill of 8 billion roubles: or against the fact that of the 500,000 people made homeless last December 200,000

or some 40,000 families, will be spending their second winter in containers and tents. But the two month rail blockade imposed this autumn by neighbouring Azerbaijan bit deep. At one point, all work virtually stopped for want of materials. When they did arrive, they were often useless. Bags of cement had been ripped open and drenched in water en route by Azeri extremists, prefabricated sections had been broken. Even so foreign aid, however generous, has only provided 10 per cent of new homes, whatever the impression to the contrary left by the media. True, Spitak’s smartest building is the 150-bed hospital provided by the Norwegian Red Cross, an outpost of Scandinavia a couple of kilometres or so south of the old town. Its reception rooms are on wrecked Shaumyan street were put up in just six weeks by a firm from Tam-

In terms of lives, Kirovakan suffered far less than Spitak, perhaps 3000 dead in all. But half its housing is technically uninhabitable. Mr Simonyan, along with -his mother, sister, brother-in-law and nephew, lives in three tiny rooms. Winter, with its intermittent 20 degree frosts is already settling on the town, but his new home has no heating. Water has to be fetched from his old flat, where for some

bov in central Russia. The village of handsome two-storey houses taking shape opposite the hospital is the work of Uzbeks in Soviet Central Asia. So much for the myth that Christian Armenia is anathema to every Muslim in the land.

The deepest scars are personal, both psychological and physical. Spitak, the planners say, will be razed to the ground and a new town built around the Uzbek settlement. But people have no wish to live there. “The site they’ve chosen is windy and dirty,” said Mr Grachik Beidzyan in the two-room pre-fab supplied by the Armenian Government and erected in what was his garden. “This is my land. I don’t want to move. I’ll defend it to the end.”

His three teen-age children miraculously survived the earthquake. But he was so seriously injured that, at the age of 39, he will never work again. His sister

and her two children died. Today an old-fashioned tinted photograph of them, with black ribbon across its corners, hangs on the wall next to a scarred but lovingly polished wooden cabinet. Some carpets and a couple of beds were all that could be salvaged from his former home. The remnants of that lie 10 metres away — a heap of grey rubble in which, for some reason, a bare electric light burns in the midday sunshine. Others face still harder readjustment. In Kirovakan, 2000 children have been treated at a special centre for psychological trauma. They are encouraged to exorcise the terrible scenes they saw by painting pictures of the earthquake, or by constructing toy houses from building bricks. Then there is Gayanneh from Leninakan, another town levelled in the earthquake. She is 23, but sitting in a wheel chair in the Red Cross physiotherapy centre in Yerevan she looks 15. Gayanneh’s spine was crushed by fallen masonry. She will never walk again. Her own husband and daughter, aged three, survived, but she lost both her sisters, as well as four nephews and nieces. Enduring shock is imprinted upon her frail, lost features.

There may be thousands like Gayanneh. Some have had the luck to be sent to America or Western Europe for treatment. For them too, however, final homecoming will be a harsh moment.

An Armenian family is a mutual support mechanism of a type long since vanished in the comfortable West. But love alone cannot cope with permanent disablement, requiring regular medical monitoring. “There is no welfare system here as you or I know it,” says Dr Vernon Hill, an Australian spinal injury specialist who now heads the centre. “A wheelchair wouldn’t last a year in Spitak. And there are no spare parts. It sounds crazy, but a puncture in one of their tyres is a real problem for us.”

It sounds like — it is — familiar condemnation of all that is wrong with the Soviet system. But Armenia will survive the earthquake, as it hs survived other trials which might have destroyed less resilient nations. For that it can thank the sheer humanity of its people. Mr Gagik Beidzyan lost so much but as his family spread the table of welcome for the sudden visitor from afar, his face lit up. “I have my children. I am a millionaire."-