7,000 More Quake Victims Evacuated : Armenian Children, Mothers Join Exodus to Neighboring Regions

While rescue teams continued their dogged search of the rubble in northern Armenia, hoping to find more survivors of last week’s devastating earthquake, Soviet authorities Tuesday evacuated more than 7,000 children, their mothers and elderly people from the region.

The families boarded trains for rest homes, health resorts and recreation facilities in neighboring regions. About 24,000 people had left in previous days, and preparations were being made for as many as 40,000 others to leave later this week.

The exodus, although meant to be temporary, could total more than 100,000 by the end of this month, and for a people so closely bound to the soil of their homeland, it naturally deepens the tragedy of the most destructive earthquake Armenia has suffered since its old capital, Ani, was destroyed in the 14th Century, never to be rebuilt.

Combing Through Buildings

The official death toll from last Wednesday’s magnitude 6.9 earthquake is now 55,000, with as many as 5,000 bodies being found each day as the rescue teams comb through the collapsed buildings of the region’s cities and towns and begin to move into the countryside, where the scope of the devastation and the number of casualties are still unknown.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev again urged the search parties, most of whom are numb with fatigue, to continue looking for survivors who may be buried beneath the rubble. Some people were found alive under the debris of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake 13 days later, he noted.

“Every hour is precious,” Gorbachev told Armenian leaders in a weekend meeting, which was reported in Tuesday’s edition of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda. “The experience of Mexico shows that the rescue work must continue.”

Even as the government prepares to evacuate as many people as possible from the quake-struck region, “The most urgent task is to help find and save those buried alive,” Lev Voznesensky, chief of the Council of Ministers’ information department, told reporters here Tuesday. “We will not give up looking.”

The Soviet teams, many of them recruited from the country’s coal mines, are being assisted by experienced search-and-rescue groups from Austria, Britain, France, Italy, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, West Germany and the United States, many of which use sniffer dogs trained to search for earthquake and landslide victims as well as high-technology devices such as infrared detectors of body heat and ultra-sensitive microphones.

Hundreds of cranes, excavators, bulldozers and other heavy construction equipment have finally been deployed through most of the earthquake area, according to Soviet officials, and the search for those still buried beneath the collapsed buildings has been intensified to make up for time lost at the outset because of poor organization.

13,000 Bodies Found

Voznesensky said that about 5,400 people had been rescued in the past six days and that 13,000 bodies were recovered from the rubble of collapsed buildings. In earlier reports, the official news agency Tass had suggested that 18,500 people had been rescued without indicating that more than two-thirds of those pulled from the rubble had already died in the virtual avalanche of stone and concrete.

The total number of injured is 13,000, half of whom are still hospitalized in Yerevan and in specialized hospitals in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and other major centers.

The government’s resettlement plan is to move into temporary quarters around the country as many as 100,000 people, all homeless as a result of the earthquake, while their communities are rebuilt.

Tass said that a “psychological barrier” was broken Tuesday with people who at first refused to abandon the ruins of their homes--and the relatives and friends still buried beneath the debris of the earthquake.

“This measure has now been accepted by the majority as the only reasonable one,” Tass said, describing the willingness of people to accept temporary resettlement.

Some may return in the spring to Leninakan, Kirovakan, Spitak and the other hard-hit cities and towns of northern Armenia, but many may be away as long as two years, even if the reconstruction goes according to the present schedule.

Their resettlement has already prompted rumors in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, of a secret Kremlin plan to shift significant parts of the republic’s population to faraway corners of Siberia and Central Asia and thus weaken the resurgent Armenian nationalist movement.

Another rumor, stemming apparently from the spontaneous offers of adoption for the earthquake’s thousands of orphans, suggests that the Kremlin is attempting to steal the youth of Armenia and raise them as Russians in an alleged effort to “destroy the Armenian nation.”

Although firmly denied by Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and other senior government officials, these and similar rumors persist, fanned by supporters of the ultra-nationalist Karabakh Committee, which is demanding the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian region of neighboring Azerbaijan.

Seven members of the Karabakh Committee have been detained for 30 days under emergency regulations that permit arrest and administrative punishment without charge, and the government has warned that it is prepared to take even more severe measures if the nationalists continue their protests, which have kept Armenia in political turmoil for most of the past year.

“We know these plans will cause some controversy--resettlement always does,” a government official commented Tuesday. “But we have tried to be realistic. What sense does it make for families to live in tents in the snow when we have good, empty housing? Why should children, who are the future of any nation, go to school in cold huts when they and their teachers can be accommodated in proper facilities?

“More than anything else, we are working to ensure the survival of the Armenian nation--its culture, its language, its religious beliefs, its traditional way of life, its vital sense of community--by keeping mothers together with their children, teachers together with their students, families together with their neighbors at a time of great, great national catastrophe. . . . We want to maintain, not destroy, the community.”

Although tent cities are being erected by the army around Leninakan, Kirovakan and the other hard-hit cities, the weather in northern Armenia will soon be too cold--well below freezing with snow on the ground--for families with children to live in tents.

And only a fifth of the tents sent to the region to shelter 300,000 of the estimated 500,000 homeless have been erected so far, according to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, which warned Tuesday that those who survived the earthquake might now die from the cold.

Under plans first outlined by Gorbachev over the weekend and elaborated on Tuesday by Premier Ryzhkov, who heads the government’s relief effort, most women, children and the elderly are to be evacuated while able-bodied men remain to rebuild the region’s cities and towns in a two-year reconstruction effort.

Within the next week, as many as 70,000 people will be moved, Ryzhkov said, after those members of their families who died in the earthquake have been buried.

More than 50,000 places have already been prepared in the country’s vast system of sanatoriums, rest homes, children’s camps and similar medical and recreational facilities, and officials have said confidently that they could double or even triple that number on a week’s notice.

“These people are not in exile--nobody will be forbidden to return home,” Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief Foreign Ministry spokesman, commented. “The goal is to build a home for them to return to as soon as possible.”

Under the preliminary reconstruction plans, different regions of the Soviet Union, particularly its constituent republics, will undertake to rebuild various areas of the worst hit area, which is 50 miles in diameter, at a cost expected to be more than $8 billion.

The emergency airlift of relief supplies to Armenia from around the world continued Tuesday in spite of two plane crashes earlier in the week that killed 85 people. Both crashes apparently resulted from poor visibility--and the intense congestion of the airspace over Yerevan and Leninakan.

The Soviet Union has received assistance from 53 countries, according to a Foreign Ministry spokesman.