World Mobilises To Help Iran In The Aftermath Of The Disastrous Earthquake by The Age / The Independent 11:41am 28th Dec, 2003   28 December 2003    "Brick by brick, body by body, the full horror of Bam emerges" by Angus McDowall. ( Published by The Independent / UK).    "This was the house where my daughter lived," said Maryam, a middle-aged woman adrift in the sea of rubble that was Bam. On a white bedstead behind her were four blanketed shapes: the bodies of her daughter and three grandchildren.    Only one old man was pulled out of the house alive. "I live elsewhere, but I came to visit my only son. Now he is dead," he said, bursting into sharp wails of grief.    Twenty-four hours after the earthquake struck, the stillness of death hung over Bam yesterday. As Iranian officials talked of the toll reaching 40,000, the world was mobilising to help, with the scale of the disaster overcoming international suspicion. President George Bush said: "The thoughts of all Americans are with the victims and their families at this time, and we stand ready to help the people of Iran." For its part, Tehran said it would accept aid from any country except Israel.    International rescuers with sniffer dogs began arriving in Bam during the day after landing at Kerman, the provincial capital. But at dawn yesterday, only the Iranian Red Crescent and small teams of soldiers and Islamic militiamen were working with spades and pickaxes to search the rubble for survivors. Hope glimmered when an old lady was pulled out. However, the winter nights in Kerman province are bitterly cold, and many will not survive.    Bodies wrapped in blankets or polythene sheets lay in twos or threes along the streets and back alleys of the town. I saw a car driving slowly across a roundabout, the bare feet of a corpse pointing stiffly from the open boot. Almost every house in the centre had been razed. To the north the historic clay citadel of Arg-e Bam that had defined the pretty oasis city for 2,000 years was completely destroyed, its domes shattered.    "Hossein, Hossein, Hossein," screamed a hysterical man standing in a cluster of family members, sobbing and crying over their dead. They were so overcome with grief that the bodies lay uncovered all around them in the street. Another man, wrapped in a blanket, beat his head and wailed, pointing to the shrouded figures of his wife and child at his feet.    As keening rose through the mists of dawn, the faces of citizens registered numbing shock. Small groups huddled around fires or picked through the rubble that was their homes. Others sought to escape the hellish new world they had woken up to: I saw a woman dressed in bright red and yellow garments singing to herself and dancing in circles in the road.    The scale of the devastation was terrifying. Entire streets had been flattened, leaving an endless expanse of rubble. Many roads were blocked. The bottom half of a gateway was all that remained of a mosque, its glazed blue tiles sparkling against the grey dust of the ruins. Amid the destruction were images of calm: a plastic flower hung forlornly on the only surviving wall of a house. In another ruin stood a large metal bookcase, a little dusty but undamaged. Many of the city's small palm groves remained miraculously intact between piles of dust and debris. Some even had goats grazing beneath roofs of green fronds.    It was not difficult to imagine how attractive this little city had been less than 48 hours earlier, with mud and brick houses softened by irrigated gardens, and streets lined with eucalyptus and orange trees. "This was such a beautiful town," said a tearful volunteer. "But now look: it is 100 per cent destroyed."    The only working mechanical digger I saw was dangerous: its brakes did not work, and a man ran ahead clearing traffic.    "The biggest problem we have is getting people out from the rubble," said a doctor at an emergency medical relief tent. "We just don't have enough aid workers." A local volunteer said it would take months to recover all the bodies of the dead.    Bam's two hospitals were destroyed in the quake, killing many of the city's medical personnel. The doctor said the injured were no longer being taken by road to Kerman, the nearest major town, 60 miles away. Now they were driven to the airport and flown by plane or Chinook helicopter to Yazd, Shiraz and even Tehran.    The route between Kerman and Bam was jammed with traffic as the relief operation gained momentum and local people flocked to help search for survivors. Food, water and heating were the main needs of the distraught survivors of Bam, but they were still fixated on the dead.    Maryam looked numbly at her three surviving relatives. "We don't need money," she said. "What we need is for them to come and take away our dead children."    Geneva. December 28, 2003. ( Published by the Age).    Dozens of countries yesterday dispatched doctors, rescue workers with sniffer dogs and medical supplies to Iran, to help in the aftermath of the disastrous earthquake that killed more than 20,000 and left tens of thousands wounded or homeless.    The first relief supplies, from Britain, Germany, Russia and Switzerland, were flown into south-eastern Iran early today.    Rescue teams from several dozen countries had started arriving at the quake scene in the devastated ancient city of Bam, the United Nations announced, and a large UN cargo aircraft carrying aid equipment was due to leave on Sunday.    The transport plane was to fly from southern Italy carrying 40 tonnes of tents, tarpaulins, blankets, generators and water purification tablets, donated by Italy and Norway.    The Red Cross in Geneva appealed for almost 10 million euros ($A16.87 million) to provide aid to some 200,000 people over a six-month period.    The earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale hit south-eastern Iran early yesterday, killing at least 20,000 people and entirely destroying the mud and clay Silk Road city of Bam.    Iran said today it would accept aid from all foreign countries except Israel following the quake - the world's most serious since 25,000 people were killed in the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2001.    Officials in Tehran also stressed the need for dogs and aid equipment - medicines, blankets and tents - rather than foreign volunteers.    The Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it would require 20,000 large tents, 30,000 plastic tarpaulins, 200,000 blankets and 30 kerosene generators.    A UN team was waiting in Kerman, 200km north-west of the centre of the disaster, to receive and coordinate relief teams and supplies.    Aid workers and equipment will then be dispatched across the region in consultation with local authorities, Moulin said.    The UN said the teams would include medical staff and specialist teams who would work with sniffer dogs to help pull survivors from the rubble.    "To our knowledge, there are currently teams from around 20 countries on the ground or about to arrive," Madeleine Moulin, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told AFP.    Russia was sending 120 aid workers, Denmark 55, South Africa 50, and Germany 40, she said. Other countries dispatching aid and relief workers included Algeria, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, Britain, China, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States.    The European Union announced it had nearly tripled its humanitarian aid to 2.3 million euros ($A3.88 million).    By today, Iran's neighbour Turkey - also prone to earthquakes - had sent dozens of rescuers and medical workers and tonnes of humanitarian supplies.    Jordan was preparing to send a military field hospital to Bam, while a Jordanian humanitarian organisation was organising a shipment of food supplies, tents, blankets and medecine.    Sixty French civilian and military relief workers left to set up a field hospital and another plane carrying 34 tonnes of French aid was to leave later in the day.    South Africa was sending 70 rescuers and four sniffer dogs, while Luxembourg dispatched a five-strong dog handling team as well as two planes it said could be used as an airbridge between Bam and neighbouring airports.    Spain will send water purifiers worth $US300,000 ($A408,329), Poland 28 rescuers with six sniffer dogs, while Kenya and Sri Lanka both sent an unspecified quantity of tea.    Up to 120 Austrian rescue workers were to leave Vienna for Iran today, in addition to the experts and sniffer dogs already on their way there, with three transport planes to fly in the necessary equipment.    In Scandinavia, Sweden was to send today 13 tonnes of material, blankets and tents, enough for 2,000 people, as part of a $US385,000 ($A524,023) aid package, while the Red Cross was preparing to dispatch water purifiers and hydraulic engineers.    A Kuwaiti medical team will leave for Iran tomorrow to provide medical assistance to victims of the quake and will take with it quantities of medicines and medical equipment.    Offers of aid also flowed in from across Asia, where many nations have been hit by devastating earthquakes in recent years, including neighbouring Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Australia, China, India and Japan.    - AFP    " Human tragedy forces US to rethink hard line" by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles. (The Independent).    If there is some small consolation to be had in the horrific loss of life from the Iranian earthquake, it is that the disaster is likely to strengthen the growing ties between Iran and the outside world and further rein in the US neo-conservative hawks itching to deal with the Tehran mullahs the way they dealt with Saddam Hussein.    Images of the levelled city of Bam were displayed on the front pages of US newspapers and played prominently on the 24-hour cable news channels, eliciting sympathy from even the most hard-hearted of commentators. President George Bush, who lumped Iran with Iraq and North Korea into the "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address two years ago, issued a statement from his Texas ranch expressing his condolences.    "Laura and I ... are greatly saddened by the loss of life, injuries and widespread damage to this ancient city," the statement said. "The thoughts of all Americans are with the victims and their families at this time, and we stand ready to help the people of Iran."    In Iran, the moderate president, Mohammad Khatami, immediately opened the door to foreign aid and rescue workers. "The disaster is far too huge for us to meet all of our needs," he said.    Among the first countries to respond were Russia, which sent search experts and doctors yesterday morning, Italy, France, Turkey and Jordan. The Czech Republic offered aid, as did Germany, Spain and Belgium. Although the United States was slower to mobilise, firefighters from Los Angeles - which has the largest population of Iranians of any city outside Tehran - assembled a rescue team and said they were ready to leave any time.    Such an expression of international solidarity is likely to make hardliners nervous, in both Iran and the US. The "axis of evil" rhetoric, exacerbated considerably by concerns surrounding Iran's atomic energy programme, has already had to be toned down in the wake of the recent anti-proliferation deal whereby United Nations inspectors will be allowed to make unannounced visits to Iran's nuclear facilities.    Like the Iranians, the US establishment is split into moderate and hardline factions, with Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, working hard to achieve détente with Tehran while neo-conservatives mutter darkly about striking Iran before the Iranians have a chance to launch a "terrorist" strike against the US.    Quiet diplomacy by Mr Powell over the past few months risked being undermined by new contacts developed between the Pentagon and the Iranian exile Manucher Ghorbanifar, best known as the middleman in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages fiasco in the 1980s. Mr Ghorbanifar gave his Pentagon contacts information - deemed shaky at best - about Saddam smuggling enriched uranium into Iran.
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