LONDON, DECEMBER 6, NOYAN TAPAN.
How does a country recover from natural disaster? Seventeen
years ago, Armenia suffered an earthquake similar in scale to
that which struck Pakistan this month. The world rallied round
and aid flew in but, as Jonathan Steele reports, the legacy of
the tragedy still remains
Jonathan Steele
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
The Guardian
"It was Margaret Thatcher who broke the news. Waking up in
his New York hotel suite, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was
handed a telegram from the prime minister, telling him that a
massive earthquake had struck the Soviet republic of Armenia
while he was asleep. The death toll was thought to be enormous.
Britain sent its sympathy and would do anything necessary to
help.
The date was December 7 1988. Gorby was at the peak of his
power. An international superstar admired by millions around the
world, he had just delivered one of the most remarkable speeches
the United Nations had ever heard, calling for an end to the
cold war and announcing the unilateral withdrawal of half a
million Soviet troops from eastern Europe.
That morning he was due to say goodbye to Ronald Reagan and
meet his newly elected successor, George Bush Sr. Immediately
after their photo-opportunity with the Statue of Liberty in the
background, however, he cut short his transatlantic trip and
flew home.
The Moscow-based western press corps that had travelled to
the UN with Gorby rushed to Kennedy airport and went back too. A
day later we were in Armenia, picking our way through the rubble
of the devastated city of Leninakan and watching helpless
survivors search for loved ones in the ruins.
The earthquake was as lethal as the one that hit Pakistan
11 days ago. Striking at 11.40 on a weekday morning, it too
buried thousands of children as their schools tumbled around
them. Dozens of tower blocks collapsed, crushing mothers and
infants. Between 10% and 15% of Leninakan's population of
220,000 died outright. Adding this toll to the thousands killed
in smaller towns nearby, the casualty figure was on a similar
scale to the Pakistani disaster, with perhaps 40,000 dead and as
many as 150,000 left homeless. Two-thirds of the Armenian
victims were under 18.
Last week I was in Leninakan again, to discover how a
community recovers from a tragedy of this magnitude. What
lessons could Pakistan learn from Armenia's sputtering
reconstruction process, which, 17 years later, has 3,500
families in the city still living in "temporary accommodation" -
a euphemism for shacks, metal containers and disused railway
wagons?
"It's not just Pakistan which has to think this through. So
does New Orleans," says Steve Anlian, director of the Armenian
branch of the Urban Institute, a Washington-based thinktank
which devised the US government's earthquake recovery programme.
"Decisions taken in the first few days are crucial."
Huge natural disasters produce a familiar cycle. A week or
two of harrowing TV pictures and charity appeals, an outpouring
of international and local generosity, a handful of media
follow-ups six months later and a few more on the first
anniversary. Then oblivion. Stricken communities struggle to
their feet, largely on their own. Leninakan, which has since
reverted to its pre-Soviet name of Giumri, is no different.
A generation of children unborn when the earthquake
happened are growing up unaware of what their parents went
through. Even among the adult survivors there are fissures
between those with memories of the disaster and those with none.
"My husband was a conscript in the Soviet army and away in
Georgia when it struck. When I start talking about it, I can see
from his eyes that he doesn't understand," says Ribsime
Bichakhchyan, a local paediatrician. "I was 16 at the time and I
still remember the screaming when our school shook and fell
around us. I begin to cry when I think about it. You can never
forget."
Whether they were on the spot on the fateful day or not,
everyone in Giumri lost at least one relative. Stories of
bereavement are never far from the surface. "My sister was at
school and my father was at work in a factory. It took nine days
to find their bodies," says Fatima Vartanyan, who attends a
clinic four times a week to relieve the stress she still
suffers.
Ashot Simonyan, the taxi driver who took us to the hillside
where thousands of Giumri residents are buried, many in unmarked
graves because their bodies were too broken to be identified,
suddenly announced: "That's my brother and his family." We
followed his finger to a headstone on which were etched the
faces of a handsome dark-haired man, his wife, and a little
girl.
"Officially, 20,000 people in Giumri died, but the real
figure was probably closer to 30,000," says David Sarkisyan, the
local chief prosecutor, as he drove us round the town. Almost as
an aside, he added: "My sister was buried on what was meant to
be her wedding day. The restaurant and everything had been
ordered."
At the time of the earthquake, Sarkisyan was a young police
detective. "Many people didn't report the deaths of relatives.
Compensation was 500 roubles for loss of a life and 1,500 for
each surviving family member who lost their home. Can you blame
them?"
Newcomers to Giumri will see a town largely rebuilt. But
adult residents know the invisible sites of mass death. Pointing
to the new courthouse, built from pink tufa, the local stone,
Sarkisyan says two three-storey schools once shared this corner
of the town's main square. Eight hundred children died.
The earthquake was a colossal event for Armenia - and a
seminal moment for the Soviet Union and Gorbachev's reform
movement, perestroika. When a nuclear reactor blew up at
Chernobyl two years earlier, the old instincts initially kicked
in. Although the Kremlin was later forced to admit there had
been an accident, it let no foreign specialists in for months.
Not so with the Armenian earthquake. Gorbachev promptly
threw the country's borders open. International rescue teams,
British firemen with sniffer dogs and planeloads of aid poured
in. Instead of weeks of waiting, foreigners were given Soviet
visas on arrival. On the world's TV screens, the "faceless"
Soviet people were suddenly humanised. Support for perestroika
merged with sympathy for the thousands of shattered families.
Gorbachev's stock went up another notch.
In Armenia it was different. Ethnic nationalism had begun
to break through the veneer of multicultural Soviet harmony, as
Armenians and Azerbaijanis argued over who should run the
mountain territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Hundreds of thousands of
Armenians held unauthorised demonstrations in the capital,
Yerevan.
As we interviewed earthquake survivors a few months after
the protests, many denounced Gorbachev for bringing his Zil
limousine on a cargo flight so that he could tour the wreckage
in style. They were staggered when he wagged his finger on TV at
local communist party leaders, telling them to clamp down on
nationalism at this time of grief. He then ordered the arrest of
several leading intellectuals.
Gorbachev was disliked, but Armenians loved the Soviet
prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, who wept as he visited the
ruins and promised to rebuild Giumri within two years.
Construction teams from every Soviet republic set up in Giumri,
Spitak, and the other broken towns, bringing their own tents and
prefabs to sleep in. Fifty thousand workers were soon on the
job.
Western governments invested in quick infrastructure
projects to give themselves a distinctive profile. The British
put up a single-storey school, named after Lord Byron, which
Thatcher came to open in June 1990. Italy built a medical
clinic, Austria a hospital.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, everything
stopped. In Giumri they call them the "carcasses" - row upon row
of empty shells of housing blocks that were never completed. The
cranes were left behind as gifts, but the workers pulled out.
Newly independent Armenia had no budget to take on the job.
The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh became full-scale war. Turkey
and Azerbaijan blockaded the country. A severe energy crisis,
endless power cuts and severe food shortages prompted mass
emigration on the scale of the Irish potato famine. Around
700,000 people, or a fifth of the population, have left, mainly
for Russia, since 1991.
Outside the disaster zone, Armenians see the calamity of
December 1988 as just one of many shocks they have been through,
in contrast to the stability they knew in Soviet times. Even in
Giumri, its impact is fading beside the daily gloom of 60%
unemployment. The city used to have 46 factories serving the
vast Soviet central planning system. Only two are still open,
and even these only some of the time.
"My husband is away in Russia for weeks at a time on
construction sites," says Anna Tonoyan, a mother of two, who
lives in a flimsy cabin behind the bus station. "I've been in
these cabins for 17 years. We have no idea when we'll be able to
move." A teenager in 1988, she was at school when the earthquake
hit. Her parents were at work. The five-storey building where
they lived crashed to the ground. Because they lost no close
family, they were low on the points tally for rehousing and,
after a few weeks in tents like many other families, they were
given "temporary shelter" in a two-room cabin. They have a wood
stove for heating and an indoor tap and toilet - a luxury many
cabins are without. They added a porch themselves. The council
gave them a small grant to buy furniture and building materials.
The big change for Giumri came in 1998 when the
multibillionaire Armenian-American, Kirk Kerkorian, then owner
of Metro Goldwyn Mayer and several Las Vegas casinos, stepped
in. Kerkorian picked up where the Soviets left off. In the vast
suburb to the northwest of Giumri, where the "carcasses" stand,
he added a colony of four-storey blocks of pink tufa to rehouse
several hundred families in high-quality flats.
Two years later, USAID (the United States Agency for
International Development) arrived. Adopting a strategy
recommended by the World Bank, it invoked market principles as
much as charity. It gave needy families vouchers called housing
purchase certificates. Worth anything from $3,000 to $7,000,
they guaranteed payment for any house or flat that a family in a
shack hoped to buy. Sellers who wanted to leave Giumri or move
to a smaller place suddenly found buyers where, before, there
had only been poor families with no cash. "We wanted to get away
from the exclusive focus on supply-side solutions, just building
new units. We thought of ways of increasing supply without using
a hammer or chisel," says Anlian, who worked with USAID.
The programme also brought in seismic experts and put money
towards repairing and reinforcing several Soviet-era blocks of
flats. Kerkorian's scheme and USAID initially clashed. Families
hesitated before taking vouchers because they hoped to get a
better-quality Kerkorian flat. The mini-boom caused by pumping
back building workers' wages into the local economy raised
overall demand and sent flat prices up, so that the vouchers did
not go far enough. USAID had to add more money and revalue them.
The Urban Institute managed to persuade Kerkorian's people
to repair property as well as build new structures. Anlian is a
firm believer in a mix of recovery options, with a preference
for redeveloping a disaster-ruined town rather than starting a
new one on a distant site. "Most people want to stay in their
home communities," he says. Repairing houses is usually quicker,
too. "If the Pakistanis are only going to look at rebuilding,
it'll take a long time."
Gagik Manoukian, Giumri's deputy mayor, agrees. He was a
senior communist official in 1988 and remains a loyal party
member. The tasks you have to do in the first post-disaster days
- rescuing survivors, treating the injured, burying the dead,
providing tents and food for the homeless - are obvious, he
maintains, and it clearly helps if you have big cranes, as the
Soviet Union did.
"It's not good to move to a new site," he says. "People
will come back anyway to their old town centre. That's what our
experience shows." With the compensation money they got from the
Soviet budget, some earthquake survivors built houses in nearby
villages. "Forty per cent are empty now. People returned to
Giumri. They would rather be in shacks than be so far away."
He sees other lessons for Pakistan. Number one: give
survivors long-term help, such as reduced prices for gas and
electricity - not just one-off lump sums in compensation. Number
two: take the local climate into account. "The Russians built
housing for us made with concrete panels and flat roofs. They
did not realise we have snow and hard winters. The Kerkorian
places are made of stone and warmer," Manoukian says.
One gap Armenia was unable to fill, and Pakistan may be in
no better a state to do so, is stress counselling. Around 230
doctors, surgeons, psychiatrists and psychologists from 12
countries rushed to Armenia. Therapy focused on distressed
children. One study, a year after the earthquake, showed 58%
were terrified by any loud noise, and 26% tried to avoid school
for fear that it would again become a place of death.
Psychiatry in the USSR was an undeveloped science, officially
associated with Freud, Jung, and other unsound theories of human
behaviour.
"There was almost no one here involved in psychotherapy,"
recalls Nelson Shakhnazaryan, a veteran social psychologist.
"People came from abroad and the diaspora. They organised play
therapy, drawing, recounting experiences in groups. Some of our
experts were taken abroad for training. But Armenians are quite
materialistic, and many survivors just wanted tablets. I
remember one new centre's experience. On the first day there was
a long queue. On the second there was hardly anyone. Word had
gone out that the doctors just listened to people talk."
Shakhnazaryan puts great store, in any disaster recovery,
on morality - a sense of solidarity from other people's
generosity, plus, most importantly, honesty at the top. "It's
crucial for survivors to see and feel that reconstruction is
being done fairly and properly. There will always be complaints
of corruption, but it's vital to avoid corruption on a major
scale," he says.
The huge outpouring of aid from the rest of Armenia and
overseas was a boost to morale in the early days. The diaspora
has also been a huge help. With its feudal system, Pakistan has
home-grown and foreign millionaires, if not many on a Kerkorian
scale. Will they come forward now?
The most basic necessity in rebuilding people's lives is
the simplest and the hardest - the hope and confidence that come
from a sound economy. Giumri is still enjoying the fruits of the
post-1998 construction boom, and it is not yet over. Kerkorian
and USAID have plans to house another 2,500 families in the
coming years, raising hopes of an end to Giumri's "temporary"
shacks.
For now, Giumri's graveyard of destroyed factories is as
vast as the cemetery on the hillside beyond, and almost as sad.
Manoukian is succinct in his appraisal: "Provide work fast.
That's the best earthquake relief".