ULL AULSVUUAUUVLALULLVIMAD/ JTL LLL AVIEULVAN, QUT AU VAE URDU AUAD | A ATABO UTA APOIO UVES World Continued from page 1 hundreds of Soviet soldiers, and recently- arrived volunteer brigades from every republic. Armenians struggle to clear the wreckage alongside Latvians, Kazakhs, Russians, Ukrainians and Uzbeks. Most of the foreign teams, which played an important role in the first days, have already left this area. In Yerevan airport we met the French special rescue force waiting for a plane to take them home. Their dogs, utterly exhausted and curled up on the floor, are credited with saving hundreds of lives. Yuri Belanushkin is a young Red Army artillery officer who has suddenly been thrust into an unexpected role. Arriving in Spitak on the evening of the disaster, he was assigned to command one of the town’s five hastily designated “sectors” of rescue oper- ations. Now, looking somewhat bleary-eyed, he commandeers a car to take me and Carl Bloice of the U.S. People’s Daily World around his sector, which includes Spitak’s former sugar refinery and a large residential area. . “We want you to see everything and tell the world about it,” he says. “Seeing every- thing” turns out to be a wrenching, almost unbearable experience. On what was once a street corner is a kindergarten whose roof collapsed during the quake, killing 15 child- ren. Outside, the playground is eerily intact, but strewn with pieces of paper: bending down, I realize — in a_ heartbreaking instant — that they are children’s finger paintings. At the sugar refinery, workers in respira- tors are still pulling corpses out of the rub- ble. More than 100 perished here. One who survived was our driver, Grisha Sukyaran. He was at his work station when the world turned upside down. The floor caved in, swallowing up his workmates, but the part underneath him miraculously held firm. Grisha rushed home, only to find his entire family — eight people — dead. “Of course in the beginning plenty of mistakes were made” in organizing the rescue work,” says Belanushkin. “Who could have been prepared for a disaster of this magnitude?” We could still use more heavy equipment, we particularly need tents and emergency shelters. But we’ve got light- ing installed, we’ve built emergency latrines throughout our sector. We've got enough medicine, food and clothing, though there are some people hiding in the ruins that we still can’t reach.” There are looters too. Walking alone through the ruins, Carl and I came suddenly upon a man rummaging through the remains of a grocery store. He was looking for “spices,” he said, then took off. In Spitak, as everywhere, catastrophe seems to have brought out the best in most and the worst in some. Others — many of them — _appear to be still in shock. In Spitak’s former stadium, hundreds of coffins are stacked, red ones for children, black ones for old people. From there they make a brief journey to the emergency morgue and cemetery nearby. Bodies that can be identified are properly buried with full ceremony. Whole bodies that cannot be identified are buried in single unmarked graves. The rest is placed in common pits. This is a horrible aspect of the situation, but the work here is unavoidably rushed. Already a certain stench hangs over Spitak, and the threat of epidemic is real. “We are doing everything we can to say farewell in a proper way to the dead,” says Belanushkin. “This is especially important 6 « Pacific Tribune, January 16, 1989 TASS PHOTO — A. KARAPETYAN Vision of disaster remains as Armenia begins to rebuild FROM MOSCOW for Armenians. But now, increasingly, our duty is to the living.” On Dec. 17 in Spitak it had already been two days since anyone had been pulled alive from the rubble, and the chances of finding any more were dwindling fast. “At some point, soon, we shall have to begin clearing the wreckage in earnest,” says Belanushkin. “We have to reconstruct. People desper- ately need new homes. Spitak must live again.” All of Spitak’s injured have been airlifted TASS PHOTO — KHACHATRYAN, M. KALANTAR out by the helicopters that fly in and out of Their city in rubble aro und them (above) residents of Spitak await relocation following the earthquake. At top, bring a survivor out of the ruins at Leninakan. the stadium. Buses arrived several days ago to take the women and children for distribu- tion to hotels and sanitoriums around the country. Still, some people, living amid the wreckage of their homes, just won’t leave. The earthquake meted out its violence unevenly. Barely 15 km from Spitak is the much larger centre of Kirovakan, popula- tion 160,000, plus an unknown number of refugees from ethnic conflict in nearby Azerbaijan. Although early reports claimed Kirovakan destroyed, the city actually escaped the worst, with 50 people dead and five buildings collapsed. Many people, uncertain of the structural reliability of their homes or fearful of new earth tremors, are living in tents here, but there is nothing like ‘the total cataclysm that envelopes Spitak. Here there is a constant stream of buses coming from the stricken zone — involving three other large towns and 120 villages — loaded with evacuees. I climbed aboard one and talked with Leyla, a teacher who is taking about 50 children from Leninakan to stay in Gagra, Georgia, for the next six months. “There we will live in a CPSU resthouse that has been turned over to refu- gees,” she says. “We'll continue all our schooling there, and things will be as nor- mal as they can be.” Most of the kids are with their mothers. Some aren’t. Also in Kirovakan, I ran across one of those jarring contradictions that are becom- ing almost commonplace in the Soviet Union today. Drawn up in the town’s cen- tral square is a military ambulance unit of — the Israeli army. Under strict instruc- tions from their own government “not to talk to anyone, especially journalists,” the Israelis stand by their vehicles in self- conscious groups while, from a short dis- tance, a crowd of Armenians gapes at them with the same rapt attention they might accord to visitors from Mars. Back in Yerevan, where the earthquake did little damage and caused no casualties, _ the signs are all of Armenia’s other troubles. Armed soldiers and riot police are every- where. Tanks and armoured cars command the bridges and dominate the major inter- sections. Yet the city is peaceful: the immen- sity of the tragedy seems to have driven all but a tiny handful of Karabakh activists — at least for now — into a thoughtful silence. On the evening of Dec. 17, the General rescuers Secretary of the International Red Cross, Per Stenbeck, who is in Yerevan with a team of aid specialists, met with journalists to urge the international community to shift its priorities on assistance to Armenia. “‘Nlow the emergency phase is over,” he said. “What is needed now are long-term rehabilitation projects. There still seems to be pressure from some aid organization to send the wrong things. Here there is already enough plasma, enough medicine, food and clothing.” Contrary to some reports, he said, Red Cross specialists have thoroughly investi- gated and found that the aid so far donated to Armenia from around the world has been used efficiently and effectively. Now the needs have shifted to reconstruction and rehabilitation, he said, but they are no less crucial. “We can say that through this tragedy, with the level of co-operation that has been achieved, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Red Cross have become a full member of the international humanitarian commun- ity,” he said. “In the past the USSR often gave assistance to others in need, but to be fully humanitarian means also to receive.”