Georgia: Funding for Quake Victims Inadequate

The Tbilisi authorities have agreed to spend millions of dollars to rebuild areas of the Old Town destroyed by earthquake nearly three years ago, but residents rendered homeless by the quake say it is too little too late.

The city’s budget, which was approved last month, provides 11 million US dollars for a new rehabilitation programme, which will include the construction of new and temporary homes and the repair of damaged ones.

The earthquake shook Tbilisi late in the evening of April 25, 2002 and measured six on the Richter scale. Three people were killed and countless were injured, while thousands of building throughout the city were either destroyed or damaged.

However, the amount allocated in the budget will be sufficient to provide new accommodation for around 800 families – a fraction of the 22,000 families eligible for government assistance.

Nonik Sirumian and his family have been living in a half-destroyed house since the earthquake struck. They have spent the past thee years appealing to the authorities for help and trying to get a new property to replace their wrecked home classed as “third category” - among the most badly damaged and the highest priority for repair work.

When the quake hit, the Sirumian family was at home. One major load-bearing wall collapsed, burying Nonik's sister Anna in the rubble and almost killing her. They were unable to afford any repairs on the century-old building, which has been slowly crumbling ever since. Only around two-thirds of the house is now habitable.

"I have a wife and a child, who is only two months old. And we all live together with my parents, sister and 81-year-old grandmother,” he said.

"Even if they do give us a flat, we will lose all our furniture and belongings as they would have to be carried out over the wooden veranda, which is too unstable and would collapse under the load.”

According to official Akaki Gongladze, an expert commission looking into the effects of the earthquake classified around 5,000 homes as being “third category”. Around 14,000 are in the second, with a further 5,000 in the first or least serious.

Zurab Akhmeteli, chair of the city’s housing rehabilitation centre, told IWPR that the number of families benefiting from the programme could be increased if private investors were willing to work with the authorities on a co-financing basis.

As well as one-off assistance payments from private investors to individual victims in the immediate wake of the disaster, the authorities transferred around one-and-a-half million dollars to a state fund to finance rebuilding and rehabilitation.

Akaki Gongladze, who heads the fund, said that of this amount, around half a million dollars was used to carry out rehabilitation works, with the rest being used to buy 346 flats. The process of handing over the new properties was held up, however, because 37 of the applicants were taken to court after they were found to have been unaffected by the earthquake, he said.

The city’s record in dealing with the earthquake victims has been criticised by opposition politicians, who say the funds provided are inadequate.

"The initial [city budget] plan was to provide 15 million dollars in support of the [rehabilitation] programme, however in the last moment it turned into a far smaller figure," Giorgy Mosidze, chairman of the city parliament’s New Rights faction, told IWPR.

In the meantime, those who were left homeless by the earthquake complain they have been waiting three years for proper assistance.

Rheumatologist Luiza Okroshidze and her family live in a ward of Tbilisi’s Neurology Institute, together with more than 150 families who lost their homes. She set up the Earthquake Victims’ Union NGO last year to lobby for greater assistance from the authorities.

“Some of our houses could still be saved. If only the city authorities would give us the building materials, we could carry out the necessary repairs ourselves,” she told IWPR.

Fellow activist Guliko Archvadze criticised the authorities for spending money on grand municipal events while so many earthquake victims remained homeless.

“What do we need the mayor's expensive shows for? He spent more than 165,000 dollars on the New Year street gala alone,” he said bitterly. “It would have been more fair if that money had been used to bring relief to at least some of our lives."

Nata Alapishvili is a correspondent of the Black Sea Press news agency in Tbilisi.