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  • Rebuilt Armenia stands as example

    Kansas City Star , MO
    Jan 30 2004

    Rebuilt Armenia stands as example

    Tsunami responders can learn lessons from '88 earthquake

    By MARK McDONALD Knight Ridder Newspapers


    SPITAK, Armenia - When rescuers pulled victims from the rubble of the
    sugar factory in Spitak in 1988, the corpses seemed like ghastly,
    crimson ghosts.

    The bodies were covered with an awful goo, a coagulated mixture of
    blood and powdered sugar.

    The earthquake that crushed the sugar plant also destroyed every
    other factory in this mountainous patch of northern Armenia. The
    6.9-magnitude quake flattened schools, churches, homes and hospitals.
    More than 25,000 people died. Half a million were left homeless.

    The 1988 disaster was hardly on the scale of last month's Asian
    tsunami, but the grief and horror were the same. So was the
    international response - massive, immediate, global and heartfelt.

    But despite the huge donations and many successes, post-earthquake
    Armenia could serve as a cautionary tale for the tsunami region: 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 Spitak 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 dwindled or disappeared almost as soon as they started. When the
    news media move on, aid missions often do the same.

    That didn't happen in Armenia, government officials, diplomats, aid
    workers and survivors agree. After 16 years, international relief
    efforts continue, many of them generous and effective.

    A housing program under the U.S. Agency for International Development
    ended only last month in Gyumri. The Peace Corps has 85 volunteers in
    Armenia, several U.N. programs remain active, and dozens of
    international 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 the hardscrabble village of Shirmakoot,
    the epicenter of the quake. `We're finally starting to breathe.'

    An estimated 20,000 people across the quake zone still occupy the
    metal shipping containers known here as `domiks.' The containers once
    held emergency provisions that came from abroad. Now people live in
    them.

    Only one of Spitak's factories is back in business, and it employs
    only a small fraction of the people it did before.

    Some aid workers complain that some people still expect handouts.

    Spitak lost 5,003 persons to the earthquake, nearly a fourth of its
    population. The quake struck Dec. 7, just before noon, when children
    were in school and most adults were working at the sugar plant, the
    elevator factory, the leather tannery or the sewing collective.

    International aid poured in. The grand 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.

    `The whole world helped Spitak,' Asatryan said.

    Today, Spitak's new neighborhoods are known as the French, Italian
    and Uzbek districts, commemorating the countries that financed them.

    The immediate U.S. response was a planeload of search-and-rescue dogs
    and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Va. American tents, heaters,
    food and medicine soon followed. Trauma counselors also arrived,
    along with some teachers of transcendental meditation.

    Today, Armenia is one of the largest per-capita recipients of U.S.
    government aid in the world, reportedly second only to Israel. A
    large and influential immigrant population in the United States helps
    drive those government appropriations.
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