As Rebuilding Lags, Armenia Quake Victims Are Losing Hope

When heavily laden trucks rumble by in the street outside, the children in Karush Pogosyan’s family run for shelter. Usually, two dive under the bed, a third hides in a wooden wardrobe and the fourth, a cousin, runs about frantically, uncertain where she will be safe.

“The earthquake--they remember the earthquake,” Pogosyan said simply, recalling the Dec. 7, 1988, temblor that devastated Leninakan and a wide area of northern Soviet Armenia. “We all remember the earthquake, in fact, and for us the suffering it brought continues, day after day.”

Pogosyan and his brothers, Gevork and Hoganes, and their wives and two of the older children are living in a tent on one of Leninakan’s tree-lined boulevards. Most of the children have now been sent to a government vacation house to spare them what Karush Pogosyan calls “the misery of being a refugee in your own city.”

“More than half a year we have been living like this,” he said, gesturing around an army tent furnished with an assortment of beds, tables and chairs as well as the wardrobe salvaged from the wreckage of their homes.

“There are eight of us here, with just a plastic basin for washing, a camping set for cooking, a floor that turns into mud with the rain, no lock on the door. . . . This is not life--it’s an existence but nothing more.”

520,000 Armenians Left Homeless

The earthquake left more than 520,000 Armenians homeless, and the reconstruction is proceeding far more slowly than they and the government had hoped. President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s promise that all would be rebuilt within two years appears over-optimistic, and government engineers talk of perhaps five years, even with extensive assistance from other parts of the Soviet Union and foreign donors.

The slowness of the redevelopment effort is draining away much of the hope that the victims had retained through the first few months after the quake, and a social pathology is developing as they remain unhoused and unemployed, their families divided and the future uncertain.

“We are facing another winter without a home, and I don’t know how we will make it,” Gevork Pogosyan said, despair creeping into his voice. “Some people have managed to get (construction workers’) cabins, and those are all right for a small family. We would need a couple, and I don’t know where we could get them. I just don’t know how we will make it through another six months, let alone another year or two.”

The boulevard where the Pogosyans and perhaps 60 other families are living in a collection of army tents, portable cabins, shanties and even a few yurts , the circular felt tents of Mongolia, has taken on the look and smell of a refugee settlement.

Block-by-Block Demolition Efforts

Down the street are the shattered ruins of apartment houses where they once lived. Demolition is proceeding block by block, adding to the number of people on the streets as the ruins in which they were living are leveled.

The querulous temper and soul-destroying malaise, typical of long-term refugees, are both growing. The gratitude of surviving an immense tragedy is being succeeded by concern over their future, along with a helplessness and then by a bitter anger that the authorities are doing too little to assist them.

Everyone has been sheltered, fed and clothed, but their lives remain in such disarray that few, particularly in Leninakan, appear to have much hope for the future.

Dr. Armen L. Goenjian, a Long Beach psychiatrist who has been working with mental health specialists here to help people cope psychologically with the earthquake and its aftermath, said the housing crisis has become the main concern.

“Psychiatric care and construction now overlap,” he said. “What people need to be reassured of, for their well-being and to regain their hope for the future, is immediate housing, and they won’t have that at the pace at which the reconstruction is proceeding.”

For family oriented Armenians, the loss of their homes was more than the loss of shelter, Laura Vartanyan, first deputy chairman of the Armenian Children’s Fund, said, because it also meant the loss of the family’s cohesion.

“Armenians draw strength from the family--children from their parents, parents from the children, everyone from the grandparents,” she said. “The family is always a source of hope for the future, of wisdom in difficult times, of belonging when modern life is so full of alienation. . . . The family for us is the center.

“But with more than 25,000 people killed in the earthquake, we have that many families that are deeply grieving. We also have perhaps 100,000 other families without housing, tens of thousands of families in which the women and children have been sent around Armenia and around the Soviet Union. This provides them with the shelter they need, but it means that as a family they are divided. In its aftermath, the earthquake for us as a nation remains a crisis because of the danger it poses to so many of our families.”

Officials Divided on Response

Armenian officials are divided on whether to house as many people as possible in quickly built, prefabricated houses and then proceed with an orderly but slower reconstruction, or whether to press ahead with the whole redevelopment effort, even though it might leave some families housed in shacks, shanties, portable cabins, dormitories, school buildings and even tents for several more years.

“There is no point in putting up more temporary housing only to replace it in a year or two or three--that is a loss of time as well as money,” Yuri Mkhitarian, a senior official of the Armenian State Construction Committee, commented in Yerevan, the capital.

“People must realize that we lost more than 11% of the republic’s housing in the earthquake, plus a lot of enterprises and community facilities, and we will not replace those overnight. The whole situation is critical, not only housing.”

But the need for housing is undeniably urgent, according to Goenjian, Vartanyan and others concerned with the social and psychological rehabilitation of the victims as well as the physical reconstruction.

“Although there was the shock of the earthquake and everything that happened then, most people had a high degree of expectation that things would settle down, and many in fact believed they would quickly resume their previous functions,” Goenjian said.

“This is not happening--whether the expectations were realistic is another question--and so there is a kind of psychological ‘aftershock,’ if you will, and it is a growing problem. Psychological morbidity will increase if families remain separated and if families remain away from their homes for a prolonged period.”

Goenjian has urged the authorities to reunite families and to provide ways for them to take part in the reconstruction of the earthquake zone, particularly in their villages or neighborhoods.

Most of the population in the earthquake area, which included Armenia’s second-largest city, Leninakan, the towns of Spitak and Kirovakan and about 60 villages, are suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, according to Goenjian and Armenian health workers.

“There are recurrent fears of the earthquake being repeated,” Goenjian said. “People re-experience the earthquake, sometimes every day. They are easily startled, any noise from a passing truck, flickering lights or an unexpected vibration--and the tremors are continuing in the area--will trigger these fears.

“There are a whole series of problems, those usually associated with post-traumatic stress syndrome, including insomnia, nightmares, apathy, detachment, avoidance behavior, as people attempt to protect their psyches from further damage and traumas. Children suffer from regression, including stuttering, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking. There is increased alcoholism, chemical abuse, aggression. . . .

“The majority of the population, in short, suffers from mild to severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. Thirty percent of the population suffer significantly as well from grief depression, in which they have a sense of hopelessness, guilt, a wish to die.”

Double Trauma for Some

The most vulnerable are the children, the elderly, those who were buried in the rubble, who lost limbs in the disaster and who handled corpses. There are also those, Goenjian said, who suffered from the “double trauma” of having fled in terror from anti-Armenian pogroms in neighboring Azerbaijan only to be caught in the earthquake here.

The problems appear most acute in Leninakan, which had a population of more than 330,000, and in the larger towns. In rural areas, farmers have gone ahead with the rebuilding faster, according to Armenian officials, and life is returning to normal there more quickly.

“We are optimistic,” said Albert Sarkisian, the 65-year-old patriarch of an extended family of nearly 20 people in one of Spitak’s outlying villages. “Our home was destroyed--a big, beautiful house of Armenian stone. Seeing those ruins was worse for me than the earthquake itself, because it was the house where I was born and lived my entire life. But we will rebuild.

“The authorities wanted us to leave--me because I am old, and the women and the children too. But we have a huge family, and we did not want to be scattered around the country like leaves. So we stayed here, and it was better for us that we did, staying together to rebuild.”

Goenjian, an Armenian-American, believes that short-term treatment by Armenian mental health specialists, who have developed special programs and are working with him and other Armenian psychologists from the United States, Britain and France, as well as the natural resilience of Armenians like Sarkisian will help most to recover.

“Armenians do not, by and large, have many mental health problems,” Goenjian said. “The family is a good support system for most day-to-day psychological stresses, but the earthquake crushed this natural support system. The mother, on whom everyone depends, has her own losses and cannot provide all the care to her children and husband, just as teachers in school cannot help the children as they usually do.”

Mental Health Problems

Given the extent of the disaster, he expects “significant numbers” of people to develop chronic mental health problems, including pronounced pessimism, depression, anxiety, psychosomatic illnesses, alcoholism and drug abuse.

“As an Armenian, I am worried about the long-term impact of the earthquake and the aftermath on the character of our people,” he said. “A very significant number of Armenians will be suffering from problems that will make it difficult to form the strong personal relations that are typical of our people, that will make them inadequate parents, that will increase chemical dependencies of various types, that will make them suspicious and anxious.”

Leonid Gozman, president of a new association of Soviet clinical psychologists, also sees serious danger of prolonged mental health problems among Armenians if measures are not taken quickly to overcome the present psychological and social problems here.

“Those who happened to witness the disaster, their relatives and, in fact, all Armenians had the feeling that the catastrophe was global,” Gozman commented in Moscow recently, warning that the problems should not be minimized and that government policies should take account of them.

“Even war veterans told me that they had never seen so many people perish so quickly. The earthquake took an appalling toll of lives in just about 20 to 30 seconds. From afar, you cannot even imagine the scale of this holocaust.”

And for many Armenians, some of whose parents or grandparents had fled from Turkey during the 1915 massacre of Armenians, this revived the fears, never forgotten, that despite a history that goes back centuries, they are in danger of disappearing as a people.

“Our Armenian history is one of pain, yes, but also one of achievement and one of joy,” Vartanyan said at the Children’s Fund offices, “and we draw tremendous strength from it. We have these inner resources that we must activate. We can survive; we will survive. And we must not give in to pessimism.”