Armenians in L.A. Join in Relief Effort for Refugees

Stepping up relief efforts to their ancestral homeland, 10 major Armenian groups in Los Angeles on Friday announced the formation of a joint council to provide humanitarian aid for fellow Armenians victimized by strife in Soviet Azerbaijan.

The Save Armenia Council said it initially hopes to raise $3 million to aid Armenian refugees who have fled Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia, and to also provide support for Armenians in the blockaded region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian region inside Azerbaijan.

Despite the efforts of Soviet troops to put down the violence, “things will remain tense for quite a while to come,” predicted Kevork Santikian of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, one of the 10 groups in the council. “Attacks will continue against Armenians just because they are Armenian.”

Armenians portray the violence in Azerbaijan as a relapse into the centuries-old persecution of Armenians by Turkic-speaking peoples.

In a news conference at the Armenian General Benevolent Union in Hollywood, the council dramatized its appeal by showing graphic videotaped interviews with refugees, in the Soviet Armenia capital of Yerevan, who had fled pogroms--or mob attacks--in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku. Among them were a middle-aged woman who had been shot, an elderly woman who said her attack was “too horrible” to describe, and a man who had lost a finger and had his face burned when a homemade gasoline bomb exploded near him.

In addition to door-to-door fund-raising within the Armenian community in the United States, the Save Armenia Council said, it will also lobby the U.S government to provide humanitarian aid to Armenia and seek Soviet assurances that relief supplies will reach the intended destinations.

One destination is Yerevan, already strained with refugees from the massive December, 1988, earthquake that killed more than 25,000 people and left more 500,000 homeless. Another is Nagorno-Karabakh, where 160,000 Armenians have been isolated by a blockade by Azerbaijanis. Conditions there were described as critical, with food, drinkable water, gasoline, electricity and heating in short supply.

The council is collecting donations at the Benevolent Union offices, 589 Larchmont Blvd. Leaders said the relief effort may be coordinated with a continuing airlift by the United Armenian Fund. Using cargo planes chartered and paid for by financier Kirk Kerkorian, controlling shareholder of MGM, the United Armenian Fund delivered several tons of medical supplies, food and other goods in recent weeks--”a drop in the bucket” of what is needed, spokesman Harut Sassounian said.