In the Icy Grip of Death

By Frederick Painton

As the wintry sun sinks, Armenia's capital takes on the eerie cast of a medieval town under siege. Life in Yerevan has reeled backward, like a grainy black-and-white film, toward a barbaric era of ethnic and religious war -- an apocalyptic time when death becomes humdrum, the threat of disease is ever present, and nothing matters but daily, primal survival.

Along empty, unlit streets in the gathering gloom, sleighs rasp over the ice. They carry branches lopped off trees that now stand like amputees in mute supplication to the heavens. Soon this last source of fuel for the city's l.5 million hungry, freezing residents will be gone, and the suffering will intensify.

For the family of Suren Pogosian, that is unimaginable. Smoke gusts into the air as Pogosian, 68, opens the hatch of the tiny iron stove he has welded together and feeds in a few more bits of wood. His wife and teenage son, joined by some neighbors, huddle around, their eyes fixed on the bubbling pot of potatoes that will make the day's single meal. The stove provides the only heat the apartment has had for two years.

This is a place where electricity is available only a few hours a day, telephones work intermittently if at all, and two gallons of gasoline costs more than the average monthly salary. The daily ration of nine ounces of bread is less than the amount allotted workers in Leningrad during the German siege in World War II. Food -- what little is available -- sells for double the exorbitant prices charged in Moscow. Schools have closed. Many hospitals have no hot water, electricity or heat and are turning the sick away.

According to government estimates, 30,000 people could die this winter from cold, malnutrition or starvation. Already the death rate has risen sharply as a weakened population succumbs to the diseases of deprivation; morgues are overflowing with corpses that relatives cannot afford to bury. Says Sarkis Abramian, the chief doctor at the central ambulance service: "The Armenian nation is on the road to destruction."

Armenians, though, are a people whose will to survive is too strong to submit to destruction. Their land, lying on the fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds, has been contested territory for centuries. The & Armenians survived the genocidal massacre of a million and a half of their people in 1915 by the Turks. In 1988 an earthquake killed 25,000 and left tens of thousands homeless. At about the same time, Armenia became embroiled in an undeclared war with neighboring Muslim Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. The fighting has claimed 2,500 lives so far, and no settlement is in sight. On both sides the dispute has fired the same kind of atavistic enmity that is tearing apart other former Soviet republics and the Balkans.

As the conflict escalated, the Azeris imposed a blockade on Armenia, cutting off oil and gas lines. A crucial gas pipeline in Georgia, the neighbor to the north -- where minority unrest also sputters unchecked -- was blown up this month for the third time, reducing the flow of gas to a trickle. Loans from Russia and some international aid that managed to bypass the blockade have saved Armenia from total collapse, but because of the power shortage only six of 400 factories are operating.

In this hour of trial, many citizens blame the government of President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, elected when the republic declared independence from Moscow in 1991, for the economic collapse. Many agree with engineer Arthur Verdian that "a government whose people are starving does not have the moral right to rule." Others believe it is time to find a compromise over Nagorno-Karabakh. "We have to stop this war by any means," says Armen Arutunian, a doctor. "The world community should intervene. There already have been too many victims, so many losses." Antigovernment demonstrations are on the rise, but the President has little room to maneuver. A militantly nationalist opposition, supported by the several-million-strong Armenian diaspora around the world, rejects the slightest concession over Nagorno-Karabakh, even to arrange a cease-fire. The Azeris have proved just as unbending.

Rarely have Armenians felt so abandoned. Says Khachig Stambultsyan, a parliamentary Deputy: "The entire world is watching with its arms folded while we die of cold and hunger." Russia could probably provide more assistance, but President Yeltsin, for all his sympathy for Armenia, clearly is not about to get caught in a war in the Caucasus, especially at the risk of alienating his own country's Muslim minority.

Ter-Petrosyan's attempts to improve relations with Turkey, still regarded by Armenians as the true historic enemy, have produced few results -- if only < because Ankara wants to avoid offending Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking fellow Muslim country. The U.S. has barely begun to address the complexities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, let alone Nagorno-Karabakh. Says former Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, an Armenian American: "This is not the first difficult, cold winter for Armenians, but there is an unfortunate sense among the people that they have been abandoned to their fate."

With reporting by Ann M. Simmons/Yerevan