Ana Hartoonian can do little but watch carefully as her two small sons, bundled in layers of clothing, warm their hands above the only heat source in their icy apartment: an electric hot plate.
A few blocks away at the American University of Armenia, administrator Ashot Ghazarian has discovered that keeping the bathroom lights on night and day will stop the toilets from freezing solid.
And at the Republican Hospital across town, where patients now must arrange for their own drugs, Dr. Vartan Hagopian performs complicated operations while hoping there won`t be another power failure before he sews up the patient. The hospital has neither anesthetics nor pain-deadening morphine, Hagopian said.
Armenians struggling to keep warm and fed during one of the coldest winters in memory have had to deal with the added burden of a blockade imposed by neighboring Azerbaijan in a centuries-old dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous Armenian-populated enclave inside Azerbaijan.
Since Sept. 12, Azerbaijan has stopped trains carrying food, fuel and other necessities from entering land-locked Armenia.
Oil and gas pipelines crossing the Caucasus Mountains through Azerbaijan to Armenia have been severed. Another pipeline bringing in natural gas from Russia is being tapped by Georgians suffering shortages of their own. The threat of civil war in Georgia makes future supplies even more uncertain.
”It (the city) is in a catastrophic situation,” Yerevan`s mayor, Hampartsoum Kalstian, said last week as the temperature dipped to 10 degrees. Kalstian had returned to his office from a tour of several city districts where the supply of water to homes and power stations had been interrupted overnight by frozen pumps and water mains.
Throughout this city of 1.4 million, illustrations of hardship and inconvenience were visible everywhere.
”Our people are able to live with this. We know it`s not the government`s fault,” said author Vardges Petrossian. ”There is an Armenian proverb: `Hope outlives man.` In other words, Armenians would die before they give up.”
At least 80 percent of the factories and industrial shops are closed and all construction has ceased because of the disruption of energy supplies, raw materials and spare parts.
Officials estimate that 1 million tons of consumer goods and industrial and medical supplies that would have filled 28,690 rail cars were stopped by the blockade.
Meat production is reported down 1,800 tons and milk 1,200 tons.
Only 48 percent of public housing is being heated, and then only for a few hours each day. Hotels and restaurants are without heat or hot water. Hospitals have frequent power failures.
”We`ve become accustomed to talking at the table looking through the fog from our breath,” said a Yerevan journalist.
Officials say 50 to 55 deaths are being reported each day, compared to 40 to 43 last winter.
All of the city`s schools and other educational institutions have been closed for lack of heat and won`t reopen until the weather warms up toward spring.
Officials have announced that Yerevan`s electrical power would be shut off for eight hours each day, up from four hours earlier in the week.
The mayor said only 2 million cubic meters of natural gas is coming in daily through neighboring Georgia, but Armenia needs 15 million cubic meters a day.
Automobile traffic is at a virtual standstill, and buses run infrequently because of lack of gasoline and spare parts.
And one of the blockade`s more emotional calamities can be found atop Tsitsernakaberd Hill: the eternal flame commemorating the death of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the Turkish deportations of 1915-1918 has been snuffed out for lack of fuel.
”Incredible,” said Hovik Eordekian, an editor whose family had sought sanctuary in Lebanon. ”It`s the first time since it was lit in 1965 that the flame has gone out. It`s a dramatic symbol of the blockade.”
Despite the hardships, there were few signs of unrest.
”Armenians are a far-sighted people,” said Ara Sahakian, secretary of Armenia`s parliament, noting that people did not want to add to the government`s crisis. ”They are patient. But there is a limit.”
Dr. Hagopian said his patients try to comfort him when he laments the lack of heat, the power outages and shortages of medicines. ”They say-on the operating table-`Don`t worry. Things will get better,` ” he said.
The parliament has been preoccupied with passing laws relating to Armenia`s status as a independent state for the first time since 1828, when eastern Armenia became part of the Russian empire and western Armenian remained under Turkish control.
Armenia became part of the Soviet Union in 1920, but was the first to rise against Soviet power in 1988 when an estimated 1 million Armenians demonstrated in Yerevan after a series of attacks on Armenians in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait.
Some foreign aid has reached the capital by air. Some $1.5 million worth of aid, the first of a promised $15 million U.S. aid package, was flown to Armenia earlier this month.
A Boeing 707 jet chartered by the United Armenian Front arrived recently carrying 40 tons of medical, agricultural, construction, electrical and food supplies valued at $698,253. It was sent by groups in the United States and France.
An Armenian scientist called Azerbaijan`s blockade an attempt at
”economic genocide.” And an educator called it ”criminal behavior” but said he wasn`t surprised.
”After the earthquake in 1988 (which claimed 25,000 lives and left 500,000 homeless), we shipped prefabricated housing through Azerbaijan. But we found the Azeris had smashed much of it,” he said.
”It was useless-and these were houses intended for earthquake victims.”
