The Impact Of Natural And Human-Made Disasters In The Caucasus

"Mommy! Mommy!" -- a voice of a child was coming out of the opening -- "let me out please, I've always been a good boy . . ." "Please, go to sleep, dear": what else could this desperate mother have said, mad with fear, while on her knees amidst the ruins of their former house? . . . One could observe such scenes on December 7, 1988, when one of the most devastating earthquakes pounded Armenia -- the South Caucasus republic of the former Soviet Union. The center of this disaster was the village of Nalband; it disappeared entirely. The earthquake affected 40% of Armenia's territory and a million of its inhabitants; 31 cities and 342 villages suffered heavy damage, 18% of the country's dwellings were annihilated . . . This natural calamity came in the background of another disaster, this one created by the ethnocentric nationalists. The cruelties that occurred in the Caucasus, and in many other places of the world in the last couple of decades, remind us that humankind has the capacity to behave in very destructive ways.