Binding Effect : Pain of Loss Helps to Heal Armenian Rift

With a simple gesture, two archbishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church made the enormity of last week’s earthquake clear to the 300,000 Armenians in California, the largest colony outside the Soviet Union.

They sat down at the same table in a Hollywood parish hall and called on Armenians to help the homeland.

For more than 50 years, such a meeting was unthinkable. One prelate is loyal to a branch of the church based in the highlands of Soviet Armenia, the other to a pontiff in Lebanon. The split is not over religious beliefs, for both wings practice the orthodox Christianity that has guided Armenians for 1,600 years. The schism is over politics--no trivial matter in a community with three active political parties in Los Angeles alone.

But this weekend was no time for politics, the rival prelates agreed.

Once again, the 20th Century had dealt cruelty to the Armenians. As many as 100,000 were dead, more than 500,000 without shelter from the harsh winter in the Caucusus Mountains.

This in a land of fewer than three million, the last native Armenians in what was once a thriving civilization. Clothing, blankets, medical supplies, doctors, money and prayers were all desperately needed.

“Our gathering today is to put aside our differences,” said Archbishop Vatche Hovsepian, primate of the Western Diocese of the branch based in Echmiadzin in Soviet Armenia, and host of the Friday night meeting at St. John Armenian Cathedral.

“I pray for the dead, but today we are here to do our best,” said Archbishop Datev Sarkissian, prelate of the Western Prelacy of the branch based in Antelias, Lebanon.

The best has been pretty good. The two church leaders and their supporters agreed that former state Assemblyman Walter Karabian should coordinate relief efforts in the Armenian community. They also consented to test their new friendship and meet again tonight.

In an outpouring that shows how successful the Armenian community has become, leaders of one church said Friday night that $3 million in pledges had been received.

By mid-day Saturday, more than $200,000 was collected at an Armenian school in Encino. A six-hour telethon on KSCI-TV, Channel 18, drew $2.9 million in pledges despite airing in the early morning Sunday.

“We pray, we cry. We try to do something,” said Arpi Mihranian, a nurse at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, who spent her Saturday evening stacking bills and sorting boxes of coins brought into the Hollywood Armenian Center.

Cause of Reawakening

Amid the tears and anguished phone calls halfway around the world, Armenian leaders are already talking about the good that may come from the tragedy.

The chilling reports of leveled villages and buried children 10,000 miles away seem to have reawakened Californians of Armenian descent to their people’s place in history. For them the quake was not in the Soviet Union. It was in Armenia.

“The tragedy has had a binding effect,” said Richard G. Hovannisian, assistant director of the Near East Center and professor of Armenian history at UCLA. “The political boundaries are secondary to the historical, cultural bond of people.”

Ancient Armenia had the misfortune to sit astride the trade routes to Asia. Isolation in the mountains proved no protection, and Armenia has been ruled by some of history’s most ruthless conquerors--Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks and now the Soviet Union.

But Armenians don’t need to look very far back in history to find their blood spilled.

“The 20th Century has been very unkind to Armenians, possibly the most tragic in their centuries of existence,” said Richard H. Dekmejian, chairman of the department of political science at USC. “It’s as if they are people God forgot.”

Half of all Armenians in the world were slaughtered by Turkish Muslims at the start of World War I in the century’s first attempt at genocide. Armenians have tried to call attention to the killings, but the world’s attitude was summed up by Adolf Hitler in 1939: “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?”

Stalin massacred more than 100,000 Armenians. More recently the civil war in Lebanon and the Islamic revolution in Iran have cost Armenians their lives. This year, Armenians have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced by ethnic strife in the Soviet province of Azerbaijan, a Muslim enclave bordering Soviet Armenia.

Aram Hovsepian, a 24-year-old clerk at the Kroun Market on Vermont Avenue, knows the history. He also knows the customers who come into his store, in the section of East Hollywood some call Little Armenia.

“In the whole world we are not too many, and every one counts,” said Hovsepian, who came to Los Angeles from Lebanon in 1978. “This will unite our whole people together.”

Little Armenia has seen the arrival of about 10,000 new emigres from Soviet Armenia this year, allowed to join their families here by a new, freer Soviet policy on immigration.

Armenians who came earlier from Lebanon and Iran have settled in other parts of Los Angeles County, especially Glendale, where English language classes have waiting lists and the public schools are desperate for teachers and classroom aides who speak Armenian.

For local Armenians, news of the quake’s devastation has come excruciatingly slow. Many said they will always recall when they realized how bad it was.

Berdj Karapetian, the 32-year-old chairman of the Armenian National Committee here, remembers that the first reports had the quake damage centered in Turkey. He was busy organizing rallies to coincide with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s New York visit, to bring pressure on the Soviets to help Armenians in Azerbaijan.

“By noon, we were getting worse reports,” Karapetian said. “We frantically tried to contact people. It was clear by evening that it was the worst disaster we knew.”

The news hit hardest in Little Armenia, an area of Armenian apartment houses near the junction of Vermont Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, where many people have deep ties to the homeland.

Contact With Cousins

“I have more than 40 relatives in Leninakan, the children and grandchildren of my mother’s brother,” said H. Tony Tarikyan, 65, Istanbul-born proprietor of Tarikyan’s Grocery, a Vermont Avenue shop that smells of pistachios and coffee beans.

“Only last week, when we had our 5-point earthquake here, my cousin called from Leninakan to ask are we OK. I told him that we are used to it, not to worry--and now the same thing happened there, only bigger.

“I tried to call to check many times . . . but there are no phone lines,” said Tarikyan, who came to Los Angeles 20 years ago after 25 years in Romania. Leninakan, Armenia’s second-largest city, was described as 80% destroyed.

For those from the homeland, the news reports have left many questions unanswered. What of their own village? What of the nuclear power plant that was built by the Soviets near the capital of Soviet Armenia, Yerevan, over the objections of Armenians, and rumored to be providing power across the border to Turkey?

Armenians have pleaded for years that the plant be dismantled because of earthquake danger. The absence of any news of radiation burns or evacuations is being taken as a sign that the plant is intact.

“Thank God, because otherwise it was going to be like Chernobyl,” said George Apelian, manager of the Grand Canyon Buffet, a Newhall restaurant, who volunteered his services in Hollywood Saturday night.

Source of Enmity

For some, the quake has increased resentment of the Soviets despite the rescue efforts launched by Gorbachev. The enmity goes back to Stalin’s decision to let the Muslims in Azerbaijan annex an Armenian province.

The Soviets are blamed for denuding the homeland of trees, building nuclear power plants, and now for ignoring calls by Armenian residents to raise the building standards. Many of the homes that collapsed were built with stone roofs, many of the dead and injured crushed by crumbling buildings.

“If they wanted to find a bag of cement they couldn’t find it,” said Vram Kasparian. “That’s why the buildings were so weak and they fell down in the earthquake. For the last 70 years (the Soviets) just built tanks.”

His father, Harout Kasparian, born in Greece to survivors of the Turkish slaughters, lived in Armenia from 1947 to 1967. “Our people were Christians more than a thousand years ago, when the Russians were still living in the trees,” he said angrily.

Author Michael J. Arlen said the reports of a bad earthquake that reached him on the East Coast seemed remote, minor. When the enormity struck him, he said it was like when he first comprehended AIDS. “I felt inexpressible sadness,” he said.

Arlen grew up English in a household that ignored his father’s Armenian roots. Arlen’s book, Passage to Ararat, is the story of his search to understand what it is to be Armenian.

Meaning of Survival

“I don’t think that they are ill fated--they are remarkable . . . that they are still here as a people,” Arlen said. “If you have existed on the planet in collective form for 3,000 years, you are bound to see a lot of ups and down. Here in this country we toss around the word ‘survivor’ for those who make it through fall term at school, or getting through a traffic jam. But the fact is, for most of the world surviving means something very different.”

For the Armenians, survival has often meant emigration. There are two Armenian cultures in the world--the two to three million who remain in Soviet Armenia, and the three million Armenians dispersed around the globe in other parts of the Soviet Union, in Lebanon, in Brazil, in France and the United States.

The first Armenians in California came from Canada and eastern mill towns. They settled in small farm towns around Fresno--Parlier, Dinuba, Fowler--and founded Yettem, which became the first American town settled entirely by Armenians. Its name means Eden in Armenian.

Unlike many European immigrants in the early 1900s, the Armenians came planning to stay. They were fleeing massacres and held no hopes of saving enough money to return home. They bought land. In Fresno they began growing grapes and produced two of the heroes to Americans of Armenian descent--the late author William Saroyan and Kirk Kerkorian, who owns 80% of MGM-UA Communications.

Hero in Statehouse

Another hero for many is Courken George Deukmejian, born in New York of Armenian parents and elected governor of California in 1982 with more than 20% of his campaign financing coming from Armenians.

“We are going to overcome the complex of being a tiny nation,” said John Kossakian, an activist with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, one of three political parties active in the Los Angeles area.

“We are going to realize that after the loss of 100,000 of our compatriots we’re still going to live as a nation and survive. That’s going to be a huge psychological challenge to the Armenian community, and one of the good products of this earthquake.”

At Fashion of Europe, a boutique in an all-Armenian shopping center on Hollywood Boulevard, the Christmas business was almost non-existent. But Yerevand Gafafyan, from the Armenian capital of Yerevan, says he doesn’t mind.

“Everybody now has just one goal, to help Armenia. That’s it. No matter whether they’re from Iran or Greece or wherever. Just one thing--just to help Armenia wherever they can.”

Times staff writers Doug Smith, Carol McGraw, Mathis Chazanov and researcher Doug Conner contributed to this article.