Rail Chokehold Forces Armenia to Fight for Life

The railroad station where trains used to whistle by with food and other precious cargo is ghostly quiet. Somewhere over the brown hills of Azerbaijan, which rise just beyond this grape-growing village, thousands of Armenia-bound rail cars have screeched to an unscheduled halt.

In its moment of national liberation, land-locked Armenia must scramble just to survive. “When they close down the railroads, Armenia gets nothing,” said Babken Araktyan, the deputy chairman of Armenia’s Parliament.

Armenia is on the wrong end of a rail blockade--an on-again, off-again move by neighboring Azerbaijan sparked by a bitter ethnic conflict. The punishing embargo has brought construction to a halt, hobbled factories, played havoc with airline schedules, slowed ambulance service and cut into refugee aid.

Indeed, life in Armenia--where national elections are scheduled Wednesday in the wake of the republic’s declaration of independence from Moscow last month--has taken on a wartime flavor.

Since September, street lights have been blacked out for hours each night; electricity is now shut off part of the day, even in high-level government offices. People often sleep at the airport before managing to get on a plane with a full load of fuel.

“We’re thinking of building a power station to supply the Parliament building,” Araktyan said.

Yet no response to the blockade has prompted as much soul-searching as the government’s quiet policy of pursuing trade links with Turkey, accused of a vast genocide against the Armenian people early in the century. With no fanfare, rail service between the two countries has increased steadily this year, and Armenian leaders have signaled their interest in gaining access to a Turkish port on the Black Sea.

“Normalizing relations with Turkey, and also Iran, would give us a chance to solve this problem,” Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosyan told The Times in an interview.

The view is hardly unanimous. “Armenia serves human values by refusing to do business with Turkey,” declares Henry Grigoryan, a philosophy professor.

From the Baltic states to Poland to Armenia, areas once under Soviet domination are struggling to assert long-suppressed national desires. In this biblical land--snow-capped Mt. Ararat, where Noah’s Ark is said to have come to rest, can easily be seen over the horizon in Turkey--the course of foreign relations is one of many urgent questions.

Armenia is trying to build a whole new system of free enterprise. It is hurrying to develop a new sector of small business and will soon finish rules allowing large, state-run factories to jump into the free market. Farms are being privatized at the fastest pace of any current or former Soviet republic.

The sharp break from decades of Soviet central planning gives encouragement to many Armenians, who share a long history of tragedy and persecution.

“My father was born in Syria, and I was born in Beirut,” said Arsen Arzrouni, who recently moved to Yerevan from Lebanon to open a new office for the family trading business. “My children,” he added with pride, “will be born in Armenia.”

Yet these historic shifts are occurring at a time of national sacrifice rather than euphoria, with much agonizing over how to respond to the blockade.

A key problem is geography: Armenia has no outlet to the sea. Railroads are its lifeline, and most of them--carrying 80% of the country’s imports--wind their way through Azerbaijan. The other neighboring republic, Georgia, is the only other Soviet route.

Increasingly in the last few years, Azerbaijanis have squeezed the lifeline. Armenian minorities living in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani minorities living in Armenia both have been victims of interethnic violence since the late 1980s, souring relations between the governments. Much of the tension surrounds Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan that wishes to rejoin Armenia.

The current blockade started in September, with officials of each country providing totally different accounts of its causes.

Rauf Achundov, an Azerbaijani government spokesman in Moscow, maintains that residents of his republic are stopping trains on their own, not at government orders. That view is hotly contested by Armenians.

What is clear is that the blockade is taking a toll, depriving tiny Armenia--population 3.3 million--of sorely needed energy, food, building materials, medicine and factory equipment. In a typical case, a recent flight to Moscow took off for the two-hour trip without enough fuel; it was forced to make an unscheduled landing in the Caucasus.

Not surprisingly, industry in this mountainous country has been hit hard.

At the Yeraz light truck factory, the main assembly line has ground to a halt. Windows and engines crafted by plants on Russia’s Volga River are caught up in the blockade. More than 30% of the work force, normally 2,500 people, has been laid off.

And in Yerevan’s largest emergency hospital, a shortage of working ambulances means it can take up to 40 minutes for medical aid to arrive.

“We’re used to pressure, but the situation is getting worse and worse,” said Ara Minosyan, general director of the medical center. “We’ve got medicine stuck on the railroad in Azerbaijan. Soon even bandages will be in short supply.”

The troubles are in vivid display at a canning factory in Octemberyan, a village 15 miles outside the capital city of Yerevan.

A group of men hangs around the parking lot, with little to do besides tell each other stories. They are fruit vendors, frustrated that the factory won’t buy their products.

Arsen Eorchyan, 28, said he had been waiting two days to sell the truckload of peaches he had hauled in from the countryside, but had yet to get an offer. “We’ve gotten used to such conditions,” said the bearded, hazel-eyed refugee from Nagorno-Karabakh.

The fruit canning factory has cut 500 jobs from its 1,500-member work force this year, largely because jars and lids--made in Russia and the Ukraine--are on trains stranded over the border, said Levon Unanyan, plant manager.

Yet in a back room of the factory, Unanyan has a surprise.

The space--not much larger than an average American living room yet crowded with a piano, tricycle, pop posters and a line of laundry strung over a refrigerator--is home to nine Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku.

These days, it’s not so strange to live inside a fruit-canning factory in Armenia. An estimated 76,000 Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan--almost one-third the total--are piled into hotel rooms, dormitories and other makeshift quarters like these, according to government officials.

The blockade, which seriously cuts supplies of cement, has slowed the pace of building refugee housing.

“This is the place where we’re going to die,” said Ivan Arzumanyan, 62, one of three generations who live in the factory apartment inside a small administration building.

Not everybody is fatalistic. Hopefulness about what independence will bring Armenia remains strong.

Although the precise timetable is not clear--neither Moscow nor other nations have recognized Armenian independence, as they have the Baltic states’ break from the Soviet Union--freedom would enable Armenia to forge its own foreign policy and cultivate ties that have lain dormant for many years.

Iran, for instance, has expressed interest in buying Armenian textiles, and Armenian officials are eager to buy natural gas from Iran, according to government officials.

Then there is the matter of Turkey, the most sensitive issue of all.

Armenia’s large neighbor to the west is accused of exterminating more than 1 million Armenians in 1915 and afterward, a charge accepted by many historians. Turkey does not acknowledge officially that genocide took place. Even now, the people of Armenia, which became the world’s first Christian nation more than 2,000 years ago, often refer to Azerbaijanis as “Turks,” a word that encompasses all their Islamic enemies.

A beleaguered Armenia joined the Soviet Union in 1920, after Turkey had conquered the country’s west and continued to menace its territory. “It was a matter of choosing the frying pan or the fire,” explains Richard G. Hovannisian, associate director of UCLA’s Near Eastern Center. “They chose the frying pan.”

Today, Armenian leaders increasingly view Turkey as a source of food and other products for their ailing economy, not to mention a permanent fact of life in the region. They are cautiously trying to build a new relationship with their more powerful neighbor, based on economic self-interest.

In the last year, for example, train service has gradually increased from about one train every few weeks to about one a day, according to Ashot Manuchazian, minister of interior affairs. An official Turkish delegation visited Yerevan a few weeks ago to discuss trade possibilities. And Armenia has signaled its interest in leasing space at a Turkish port on the Black Sea, such as Samsun, Trabzon or Rize, Ter-Petrosyan said.

But even pragmatic ties are controversial. For many Armenians, wounds from Turkey have yet to heal.

“Some people in the diaspora don’t really like this policy, but we’ve broken the psychological barrier here in Armenia,” the president maintained in the interview.

Chain-smoking from a gold cigarette holder, he made it clear that he was referring to economic contacts with Turkey, at least initially--not a full range of diplomatic relations.

“It’s not necessary to set conditions for such (trade) relations,” he continued, speaking in a small office outside the chambers of Parliament.

“We’ve lived in a close neighborhood for thousands of years, and we will keep on living with them for thousands of years,” Ter-Petrosyan said. “Despite the differences between the two states, we have to find our mutually profitable interests and establish normal economic relations. It’s profitable for both sides.”

You can see the unprofitable state of Armenia’s trading at the railway station at Sadarak, a sleepy border site where Armenian and Azerbaijani representatives met earlier this month in an futile effort to ease tensions over Nagorno-Karabakh.

As recently as August, two dozen trains chugged through here ever day. Now, the tracks are silent. The only activity: two men helping themselves to a sack of fertilizer in an abandoned freight car. A few steps up the road, Soviet soldiers occupy a border checkpoint, peering over barbed wire into Azerbaijan.

“There’s almost nothing to do,” said Grach Sinonyan, a manager at the train station, in a small office buzzing with flies.

For all the problems brought by the blockade, it seems that many Armenians would rather avoid doing business with Turkey all together, despite Ter-Petrosyan’s comments to the contrary.

“I have many opportunities to make business in Turkey, but I don’t take them,” said Arzrouni, the businessman who arrived from Lebanon. “To the diaspora, it’s unimaginable.”

Ashot Abrahamiam, president of a group of newly private food enterprises, has similar reservations. “I simply cannot forget what happened to my relatives.”

Others nearby, including an economist and philosopher, nodded their agreement. They were sitting in the lobby of the Armenia Hotel, a shabby palace of peeling wallpaper and broken door locks, packed with refugees, businessmen and a smattering of soldiers.

Outside, the street lights of Yerevan would soon blink off, food-starved restaurants would close up early, street vendors with little to offer would fold their tables--and Armenia would settle in for another evening behind the blockade.