After the earthquake

"You really do value life in an entirely different way after an operation like this, and you see what's im­portant and what really doesn't matter/'

On 7December 1988 there was an earthquake in Armenia, in what was then the USSR. About 25,000 people lost their lives.

The very next day, the SRSA had begun planning an operation there, at the request of the Swed­ish Ministry of Defence. The day after that, the USSR sent a request for help.

By Saturday 10 December, the Swedish team was in Leninakan, following an eight-hour wait for visas at Moscow airport.

"The old buildings were more or less still standing, but all the more recent architecture had collapsed. The situation was chaotic. As soon as our convoy of trucks arrived in the main square in Leninakan, people started trying to steal their contents. The drivers had to de­fend the vehicles with iron piping," recalls Gunnar Frycklund, who, with his wife Yvonne, participated in the operation as a dog handler. Several international organisations were present in Leninakan to conduct search and rescue work, but there were no government of­ficials to meet and coordinate the arriving teams.

"Some areas were probably searched several times and others not at all," says Yvonne Frycklund

Wherever the team went, peo­ple begged them for help to find missing friends and relatives. Op­posite our base camp there was a textile factory where the local peo­ple thought there might be some survivors, so it was natural to start there.

"I sharpened my senses as I entered the factory with the dog, filled with a sense of gravity. But the dog just turned and looked at me as if to say 'what on earth are you doing?'" remembers Gunnar Frycklund.

"Then I realised that it was still a game for the dog. And that when I was that serious I wasn't the same dog handler anymore."

THE TEAM DID NOT FIND any Survivors in the textile factory. They headed towards the town centre and their search proved more fruit­ful there.

"We passed a house that was still under construction, and people told us there was no point searching there since no-one had moved into the house yet. But the dogs were clearly interested and wouldn't give up," remembers Yvonne Frycklund.

Nine metres down in a lift shaft they found 14 construction work­ers who had survived. It was a wonderful moment.

A TOTAL OF ABOUT 450 people were brought out of the rubble of the town alive. There is no data available on exactly how many were saved as a result of the Swed­ish operation, as the team's responsibility focused on searching, not on rescue work.

the Swedish team soon noticed that their dogs had skills that other teams lacked. The French and Swiss teams had mountain rescue dogs that picked up the scent of survivors, corpses, and items of clothing alike, just as mountain rescue dogs are trained to do.

"They came and asked us to bring our dogs to help them de­termine whether the people their dogs had found were alive or dead," recalls Yvonne Frycklund.

the Swedish rescue dogs were trained for civil defence purposes, like searching for survivors in the aftermath of urban bombings. In practice that meant searching through collapsed buildings where there could be survivors in un­derground shelters or under piles of rubble. The Swedish dogs had never found dead people before, and when they encountered that situation they each reacted very differently.

"We were pretty harsh. There was a collection point for coffins beside our base camp, and we took the dogs to the coffins so that each handler would find out how their dog reacted. That was how we learned to distinguish between the dogs' signals for survivors and dead bodies," says Gunnar Frycklund.

The conditions in Leninakan were gruelling. The team slept in Swedish military tents, and had to gather timber from the rubble to build fires to keep warm. The temperature hovered around zero. They cooked their freeze-dried food with mineral water, which was the only water available.

"In those conditions we were lucky to have each other. We were the only couple in the team," says Yvonne Frycklund.

ONCE THEY CAME HOME from the 10-day operation, fatigue set in. Upon arrival in Sweden the dogs were placed in quarantine for four months, causing great frustration among the handlers as they had hoped the SRSA would manage to negotiate exemption from quarantine. This had proved impos­sible.

All the team members also saw a psychologist.

"That was really helpful. For us it was particularly useful to find out that we could get sudden delayed reactions."

"At home on New Year's Eve, we started to argue and it almost reached the point of broken crockery. Suddenly we realised that this was our delayed reaction, and we were able to laugh about it instead," recalls Gunnar Frycklund.

"When I got back I read a headline that said 'Catastrophe! Petrol prices soar' and it seemed unbelievable. You really do value life in an entirely different way after an operation like this, and you see what's important and what really doesn't matter," says Yvonne Frycklund emphatically.

ALMOST ELEVEN YEARS LATER, the Frycklunds were asked to participate in the SRSA search and res­cue team following the earthquake in Turkey in August 1999. They didn't hesitate for a second.

"I have never regretted partici­pating in this kind of work, not for a moment. It's given me an entirely

different perspective on life," says Gunnar Frycklund.

"When I see similar incidents on television now, I see them in a completely different light. They seem so real that I can almost smell it."

_{A GENDER PERSPECTIVE IS NECESSARY}

Without a gender perspective, assist­ance for those affected by disasters and conflicts risks missing half of the population. In practical terms, this could involve dealing with mines beside a well where women collect water, or a shortage of cooking equipment, or lo­cating a group of women in the rubble following an earthquake.

The differing social roles of men and wom­en - in terms of responsibility, tasks, rights and responsibilities - can cause them to be affected in different ways by disasters and conflicts. That's why international operations need a gender perspective. An important element of this is ensuring that there are women participating in the work and being involved in decisions at every stage of an operation - planning, imple­mentation, and evaluation.The SRSA works to ensure that its operations reach all of those affected by disasters and conflicts.

"The gender perspective is necessary to ensure that the SRSA provides balanced assistance through high quality, effective operations,"says Susanne Kozak, gender advisor at the International Department of the SRSA.

UN Resolution 1325 acts as a guiding light for the SRSA's work on gender. It highlights the importance of women's participation in conflict resolution and decision-making on reconstruction of a society after a conflict. The resolution also mentions the vulnerable position of women in conflict situations, and the international community's responsibility to counteract this. In practical terms, this means that women must be given the opportunity to express their problems and needs, and to participate in finding solu­tions to these problems.