Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Armenia: Two Decades After Devastating Earthquake, Thousands Of Disp

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Armenia: Two Decades After Devastating Earthquake, Thousands Of Disp

    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.
Working...
X