Armenia’s Quake Recovery Slowed by Ethnic Conflict

In a former sugar beet field on the outskirts of Leninakan, 127 tall cranes stand ready to build a new town for those left homeless by last December’s devastating Armenian earthquake.

Along the main road, Moscow construction workers will build one neighborhood. Nearby, Siberian construction teams will erect another, and farther away, teams from Leningrad, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar and Gorky, from Latvia, Uzbekistan and the Ukraine, have planted stakes marking the ground for the buildings they will erect. Around the edges will go small “villages” of homes donated by Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Switzerland and other countries.

But only here and there across the vast construction site is there any movement, any work under way. Throughout northern Armenia, the great effort to rebuild the earthquake zone within two years has slowed when it should have accelerated.

Most Armenians blame the construction holdup on the neighboring southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, which began delaying shipments of construction materials over the summer and then imposed a complete blockade on Armenia a month ago, halting deliveries of food and fuel.

Here in Leninakan, one of the worst-hit areas, construction efforts are nearly paralyzed.

In the city’s new northwest district, a dozen cranes at most are working, pouring cement or lifting steel building forms into place. A few trucks meander along the dirt roads, but most of the 24,000 builders, gathered here from around the Soviet Union and half a dozen countries in Europe, are idle.

“Half a million people are homeless, and instead of moving into a high tempo of work, we are stalled, stopped almost completely,” Akop A. Boyadzhan, the chief of the city’s construction department, said, his voice tinged with anger and despair. “We have lost weeks and weeks of valuable construction time, and winter is nearly here.”

The quake, on Dec. 7, took an estimated 25,000 lives.

“The whole world has come to help us, but the Azerbaijanis are trying to strangle us,” Yuri S. Mkhitarian, a senior official of the Armenian State Construction Committee, said in Yerevan, the capital. “This is barbarism--a hatred so deep that they will do anything to increase the suffering of our people.”

The blockade, launched by the Azerbaijan Popular Front with apparent backing from Azerbaijan’s government, is intended to force Armenia to abandon efforts to annex Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Christian Armenians in Muslim Azerbaijan. Eighty-five percent of Armenia’s freight and almost all of the materials needed for reconstruction in the earthquake zone, as well as food for the builders, goes through Azerbaijan.

Under orders from Moscow to end the blockade, Azerbaijan has released several thousand of the more than 30,000 railway cars of freight that had been held there for as long as a month. Many of these contained construction materials for Leninakan.

Deliberately Damaged

But there is still little fuel for the vehicles that unload them, Armenian officials said here and in Yerevan. Much of the freight has been deliberately damaged--water poured on bags of cement so that they arrive as solid blocks, window and door frames bent out of shape, toilets and wash basins smashed.

Frustrated organizers have turned to the air, trying to bring in building supplies by plane. On Oct. 20, an Ilyushin 76 carrying supplies from the Volga city of Ulyanovsk crashed into a mountain 12 miles from the Leninakan airport, killing all 17 aboard.

The main result of these delays, Armenian officials say, is that another year and perhaps more--beyond the two years originally projected--will be needed to rehouse the people of Leninakan.

“Three years--we will need at least three years,” Spartak N. Petrosyan, first secretary of Leninakan’s Communist Party committee, said. “We were among those hit the very hardest by the earthquake, but the goal of rehousing everyone within two years was ambitious and probably just achievable. We have lost more than a month of good weather with the blockade. Now, that two-year goal is completely out of reach.

“This greatly prolongs the suffering of our people. We still have 37,000 families without housing, a third of them living in tents, the rest in makeshift shelter, and that means two out of three people in our city are without proper housing. The shock, the agony of the earthquake, continues for them, day after day.”

Leninakan officials said that, with the delays over the summer and the blockade for the last month, the construction teams will be able to complete only two-thirds of the 8.6 million square feet of new housing that the city had planned upon by the end of the year.

“We are woefully behind the timetable we set ourselves,” Petrosyan said in an interview. “And right when we were ready to shift the reconstruction to a high tempo and take off . . . we have been brought to a standstill by this blockade.”

Discouraged by the delayed shipment of building materials and the sabotage of their equipment and supplies as the cargo passed through Azerbaijan, many of the foreign construction teams left for home or reduced their ranks here.

“For a time, we were not sure that we would be able to feed them,” Mkhitarian said. “I don’t blame them for leaving. I just hope they will come back to finish these schools, clinics and the other facilities they began.”

Leninakan’s reconstruction, like that of the rest of the earthquake zone, has been beset with problems from the very beginning.

Even with a massive national effort and large-scale foreign assistance, the two-year timetable for rebuilding the region that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev set as he toured Leninakan was never realistic.

“Gorbachev was right to say two years--we needed the hope that gave us then,” Petrosyan said. “And we did have hope that we could at least rehouse everyone within two years.

“But reconstruction of Leninakan, and all that entails in terms of rebuilding infrastructure and industry, is likely to take a decade. Eight to 10 years were needed to rebuild most foreign cities that have been devastated by major earthquakes, and we think that reconstruction of the old city here will also take 10 years.”

Reconstruction, Mkhitarian said, is “not just housing, bread stores and schools but shopping centers and theaters, factories and roads, medical clinics and even government offices.”

And the cost of reconstruction, originally put at the equivalent of $16 billion, is rising as projects are approved.

‘Entire Fabric of Life’

“We are talking about re-creating the entire fabric of life--that’s how extensive the destruction was,” he said. “Communities are built up over decades, and they cannot be replaced in a couple of years.”

Although 12 to 18 months were required for a seismic survey of the region and for the planning and design of the new, earthquake-resistant communities, Armenian officials found themselves pushed hard to meet the deadline set by Gorbachev.

“With this political pressure, expedient decisions, not careful, were made sometimes,” Boyadzhan acknowledged. “We expropriated this sugar beet field, for example, although it was our best agricultural land with wonderful topsoil. We accelerated construction of the first buildings before we had completed all the planning. And some buildings went up before we had the utilities and other infrastructure to support them.

“A lot of the decisions that were made in the past nine months can be criticized, and are being criticized, as rushed or poorly thought out. . . . But we have not compromised on what is most important--ensuring that the new buildings can withstand future earthquakes of the same or even greater magnitude.”

With assistance from all over the Soviet Union, Armenian officials have assembled a daunting amount of construction equipment here and are setting up plants for cutting stone, manufacturing door and window frames and supplying other building materials. Plans call for enlargement of the construction force to more than 60,000 workers next year.

“One of the biggest problems we have faced has been the organization and coordination of such a major undertaking,” Petrosyan said. “But the task before us was formidable. Before the earthquake, we had a population of 232,000, and despite the fact that we will face more earthquakes in the future, we expect all those people to return to our city and . . . virtually all will need new housing and communal services.”

Planners were bitterly divided over the best way to proceed in Leninakan, and their quarreling added to the delays in reconstruction.

The city’s chief architect was forced out when he opposed the use of the sugar beet field for apartments and homes for about 100,000 people, arguing that the agricultural land was too valuable and that more seismic studies were needed. He was partially vindicated and is now overseeing a supplementary project of homes being built south of the city.

“There were great arguments back and forth, and everyone wanted to do the right thing,” Petrosyan said. “We had to think of the people--they had to live, and the reconstruction had to proceed. The experts wanted the optimum; we had to consider the realities.”

Specialists have also vigorously debated what type of construction will prove most earthquake-resistant. Some believed that prefabricated panels could continue to be used--even though structures built that way suffered the greatest damage in the earthquake. But those favoring the system in which each wall and floor is cast individually have now prevailed. And in place of nine- and 10-story buildings will be ones no higher than four or five stories.

Armenian officials have also been determined to install the most modern systems and equipment available to them in Leninakan and most of the smaller towns.

“We don’t want the old or the inferior,” Petrosyan said. “We want to look toward the 21st Century; we see no point in building a 19th-Century city. . . . Regrettably, this makes the task harder.”

And there have been endless problems uniting plans done by so many different architects and in coordinating the work of more than 200 different building teams.

“Every little detail represents a real or potential problem,” Boyadzhan said. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, has been simple or straightforward.”

The special commission established by the central government and the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo under Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov has severely criticized the rate of construction several times this year--even before the blockade paralyzed the work.

The reconstruction has proceeded faster in many outlying villages, where residents, mostly farmers, have been provided with stone, cement and other materials and have been able to rebuild their own houses over the summer.