by Roman Rollnick
YEREVAN - Not long after dawn Jean-Paul Elmassian of the French Red Cross was standing knee-deep in snow staring sadly at the monument to 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Turks in 1915. For the first time in over 70 years, the "eternal" flame was no longer burning.
After a breakfast of black tea and stale bread in the freezing dining room of Yerevan's once stately Hotel Armenia, a place without running water or electricity where he has lived for weeks, his day started with a visit to the memorial park.
There had been reports that desperate people were cutting down the trees. He wanted to see how quickly this last source of fuel was being depleted, and he admitted that he was devastated at what he found.
In the park on a hilltop overlooking the snowbound, dying city, its lights out weeks ago, men and boys were slowly hacking at the last trees to take as much firewood as their sleighs could manage, dragging off branches that would keep their families warm for another night, to cook another meager meal, to boil snow.
Once even these specially planted trees were gone, the suffering in the city of 1.7 million would intensify dramatically. Jean-Paul made a note: Kerosene would have to be shipped in urgently.
"How would we cope in Western Europe if we suddenly found ourselves without heat, light, petrol, working hospitals?" he asked. "And here the temperatures throughout winter range between minus 10 C and minus 20 C for days and weeks on end."
In such cold, every movement is painful, every venture outdoors is for survival only, and more and more people who trek further afield each day to cut trees now have frostbite that they cannot treat.
Elmassian, a highly qualified economist who gave up a well-paid job with an American firm, now spends most of his waking hours wading through the snowdrifts to seek out those most at risk - the children huddled together for warmth at the city's main orphanage, hospital staff running out of essential drugs and anesthetics, mothers with young babies or elderly people too weak to fend for themselves.
For someone who has brought relief to people in the heat of war in Lebanon, Cambodia and Afghanistan, and helped alleviate the plight of starving people in Africa, this compassionate man regards each crisis as a new challenge and goes out of his way to show a personal interest in the dying, starving and other desperate people he meets. He always tries to learn the local language. Now he manages a budget of several million dollars as the French Red Cross official in charge of all the former Soviet Republics. He remembers how terrified he was when snipers kept shooting at him while he tried to get help to some wounded people in Afghanistan.
He will never forget the deformed child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster or the three months he spent in one of Rumania's most dirty, and destitute orphanages. On the first day, two children vomited on him, and others threw food in his face while learning how to eat with cutlery. But he cleaned the excrement off the floors and walls with chlorine, put posters up "to give them something exciting to ponder, to dream about" and ensured that Red Cross food, clothing and medicine would be delivered.
Unlike journalists who visit such places for a few hours or a few days at the most, he often lives in them. "I see myself as a citizen of the world. Religion doesn't interest me and emotion doesn't come into it either. French intellectuals and academics are renowned for the way they articulate and groan about the ills of the world. It is more important to try and do something," he says.
Then he cut the conversation short. Armen Kostadian wanted a lift in the white Red Cross van to show him how he had to climb 11 floors to his flat because the lifts no longer work. Inside, he found Kostadian's wife and 10-day-old baby. Like tens of thousands of people across the city, the Kostadians were living and sleeping in the kitchen near a crude wood stove connected to a chimney of tin cans. They had already burnt some of their furniture. The other rooms were frozen, an icicle hanging from the living room lamp.
Would the baby survive the winter? Jean-Paul gave them words of encouragement, and again, he noted down that the parents of small babies in that particular unpainted, soviet-built block would have to get Red Cross milk urgently. One of his assistants would have to visit every household to assess their requirements.
Many people in the building worried about crime at night in the dark streets. With nine out of ten people surviving on a daily diet of bread and water, would it turn into something more apocalyptic as Yerevan grew more desperate.
Less than 10 percent of the working population still have their jobs, and the price of a tank of petrol has shot up to the equivalent of a month's pay. "In the six years I have been doing this emergency work, I have found that when you give people hope, things improve quickly. The most important thing for people like me is to keep an open mind and to be sensitive," he said. "How would Europeans or Americans feel if the Senegalese started coming in from West Africa to teach us?"
It was already early afternoon, and an icy breeze whipped the powdery snow into his face. Only one family had been visited, and in that time, the van's fuel tank had frozen. It took two hours with burning branches to coax it back to life. It seems incredulous that the war with Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabagh - the first and almost forgotten conflict of the post-Communist era - had brought this huge city hundreds of miles away to a stop through the sabotage over the border of the country's main gas lifeline.
"It is not my role to comment as a neutral Red Cross representative, but it really bothers me that the West lacks the political will to do something, to take a deeper interest in this crisis. I have learned not to get upset when I cannot get much done. It is so difficult here."
For Armenia, which claims its place in history as the firstly officially proclaimed Christian nation in the year 301, 1993 is now being compared in hardship to the 1915 massacres and to 1988 when 25,000 people died in an earthquake. In a country where the lights in every town and city have been out since January, the winter is even worse for the half million war and quake refugees.
And before it grew dark, Jean-Paul had to visit a prison in Ashtarak, an hour's drive from Yerevan, where whole families of war refugees are crammed in freezing cells designed for one or two prisoners. The 29 families needed blankets, fuel for their stoves, medicine, milk powder, bread, plastic sheeting to place over the barred, but open windows. The list seemed endless and the frozen ice-logged plumbing had burst weeks before.
Mothers and children seeking help tugged at Jean-Paul's clothes, and the pitch darkness of the cells was as unsettling as the stench of human waste. Again he was reassuring and he promised relief within a couple of weeks.
"This is a place where you cannot just make a quick call and sort things out. The phones are down, so I will have to ask special permission again of the post office for use of their only satellite phone. That will involve a whole morning."
Another frustration is that neighboring Turkey, which is blockading the country, does not allow aid flights to Armenia over its territory, forcing pilots to use the longer, thus more expensive route over northern Europe. Bumping back over the poor roads through a snowstorm to Yerevan, he planned to write a full report that night. As is the case most days, there had not been time for lunch, and after a meager supper of a piece of fried fish, he tried to write at the dinner table in the light of a candle. But before it died out he stood up, exhausted, saving just enough of the flame to brush his teeth and shave with the half bottle of mineral water he had saved.
