Armenia

Real lives

Armenia's disintegration blackens outlook for its children

© UNICEF/Armenia/Weiss

19 March 2001 -- Post-earthquake, post-war, and post-Soviet Armenia is a country beset by aftershock: Its citizens are leaving in droves, and its children are bearing the brunt of failure.

Naira Avetisyan's memory of the Armenian earthquake: "I will never forget the smell of sugar mixed with blood. All these horribly injured people on the helicopters, covered with coagulating sweet liquid, the streets filled with sugar."

It was midnight, 7 December 1988, the first night of many airlifts to come, and as a young medical intern Naira was airlifting casualties in military helicopters from the ruined town of Spitak for treatment in the capital. "Many just died during the flight. We had no drugs. There was nothing left in the town, nothing apart from bodies and grieving people."

The once prosperous manufacturing town of Spitak was at the epicentre of an earthquake that killed 25,000 people in this southern Caucasian country a dozen years ago. Around 16,000 people perished in Spitak as flimsy Soviet apartment buildings caved in on one another and the town's sugar processing plant imploded in a cloud of white icing sugar and concrete slabs.

Today, the rebuilt quarters of Armenian towns are reminiscent of the help that poured into the country at the time - the Italian, French, and Uzbek quarters, the Czech School, the Italian hospital, the British Lord Byron School. The world gave generously to pull people from the rubble, to clear the shattered buildings and to rebuild houses.

But there is something unchanged about the brooding groups of unemployed and unshaven men hugging every corner of every town and village in this region, as if the earthquake had occurred only a year or two ago: The growing malnutrition; the desperate poverty; the flimsy metal huts that house half the population in towns like Spitak; the general lack of security that seems to pervade daily existence for most people: all these factors conspire to give an atmosphere of numb shock and sadness.

Yet Armenia receives one of the highest levels of American government aid, second only per head of population to Israel. And it is clear from what one writer has called the "enclave development" of wealthy suburbs of Armenia and the banks, restaurants and car showrooms of downtown Yerevan, that a portion of the population is benefiting from the corruption and cronyism that typifies Armenia, along with many post-Soviet societies.

© UNICEF/Armenia/Weiss

People are escaping

From a population of 3.5 million in 1989, it is thought that somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million people have left the country to try their luck abroad. This includes around half of the 300,000 Armenian refugees displaced from neighbouring Azerbaijan during the three year war fought between these two southern Caucasus countries as the Soviet Union disintegrated. The fertility rate of women has plummeted to less than half it's 1990 rate. Towns and villages are recording zero or negative birth rates. Women are choosing to terminate pregnancy in unprecedented numbers. One aid worker identified a woman who had had almost 40 abortions. People exchange air tickets to Moscow for their apartments.

Preliminary indicators from a UNICEF-conducted nutrition survey in Armenia suggest that malnutrition has tripled to 12 per cent of children up to the age of five, reaching almost one fifth among Armenia's huge refugee population. Stunting is easy to ascertain from the ages of abnormally short children.

Gohar says she would leave Spitak, and Armenia tomorrow if she could, and if her husband was willing to abandon his ailing parents and impoverished family. She admits that with a husband earning $80 a month she is "one woman out of a thousand in this country, but I would leave tomorrow if I could. I'm so tired of my life." The flimsy and cramped box hut in which she lives, built as temporary refuge after the earthquake, was where her young child was killed, scalded to death by a pot of boiling water overturned from the clumsily constructed stove that sits in the centre of the room.

Gohar suffers from a rare genetic disorder, and was meant to be receiving drugs for free, but a medical system in a state of collapse has meant demands for payment for the treatment, which she cannot afford. Nor can she afford the increasing demands of a disintegrating education system for her two step-children.

For the first time last year, Armenia's government funded less than 30 per cent of the nation's health budget. The education budget has been reduced to a quarter of its 1990 level. One hospital director freely admits that patients are illegally charged for drugs, "since that is the only way that we can afford to keep our doors open."

The steep increase in maternal mortality is directly attributed to reduced health expenditure. Teachers and health workers report of intermittent salaries for the past two years. "Nothing this year. Paid for the month of January last year. And up to August of 1999," says the director of the Gyumri district maternity hospital Dr. Felix Grigorian. "The whole health system has collapsed." Malaria has re-emerged in Armenia for the first time in 30 years, with 2000 cases reported in 1999 (some even on the outskirts of the capital city of Yerevan).

The United Nations says that one third of Armenia's population is living in "extreme poverty," surviving on less than $1 per day. More than two thirds of the population is classified as "poor." An estimated 20 to 30 per cent of the population is unemployed. When work comes, it is often short-term, badly paid, with long hours and no weekends, often for months on end.

The country relies on remittances from families working abroad. Families are divided by husbands working in Russia, who as often as not never return. According to the International Organization for Migration Armenia has now become a point of origin, rather than just a transit point for prostitution. Women are reported by families and their children as working as "maids in rich houses," or "Moscow," or "on sewing contracts in Istanbul," all probable euphemisms for sex work in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Although no one will say it to her, an aid worker admits that orphanage-bound Lilit's mother might well number amongst those women.

UNICEF Communication Officer Gohar Khojayan says that, "The education and health sectors are falling apart, but there is a limit to what we can do." Underpaid, demoralized, and outmoded teachers are using decades-old books to teach children in rotting buildings with no school supplies from the government. Parents are expected to pay for admissions to university. The government's concept of education reform is to divest itself of responsibility for pre-school education and children's institutions by handing formal responsibility over to penniless district councils.

Organizations like UNICEF are struggling to meet the demands of increasing numbers of marginalized people. "More and more people are falling through the system," says Gohar. UNICEF has maintained the immunization of children, one of the few sectors of the health system to advance in the past five years, and due to lack of funding is concentrating on advocacy for schools and institutions for disabled and abandoned children. "We carry a lot of weight here because we have been consistent and successful with our programmes, but we have to be realistic, living with the constraints of a society in crisis, where enormous changes are taking place."

Gohar sighs. "Not that realism is helpful for children. Ten years of neglect is a short time for a state, but a lifetime sentence for a child."