BAM, Iran, 3 January 2003 — Residents of Bam were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives yesterday, a week after a massive earthquake shattered their city, now that virtually all of the 30,000 or so dead have been buried and the official mourning period is over. Relief workers turned their attention to building more permanent shelter for thousands of Iranians whose homes were razed.
After days of clearing away rubble and frantic searching for bodies among the ruins, the rhythm of life was slowly returning to normal after the tragedy. Only 24 hours earlier, the streets were still clogged with hundreds of lorries and pickup trucks, piled high with the flotsam of wrecked homes, heading out of the city, while people from outlying areas continued to flow in looking for emergency assistance.
A week on from the disaster which saw the ancient mud-brick citadel and walled city of Bam flattened by the quake that Iranian seismologists put at 6.3 on the Richter scale, estimates of the death toll were still unclear, with 30,000 seen as the most probable.
Some 40,000 homeless survivors are still sleeping rough in tents set up amid the rubble. The Iranian Red Crescent had begun bringing in 250 beds to the hospital to accommodate patients transferred from field hospitals in the surrounding area, opened by foreign aid organizations.
Fifty beds were already in place, UN official Jesper Lund said. “The foreign-operated field hospitals are starting to be dismantled. The Hungarians are leaving today, the Belgians are going tomorrow. In a month, they will all have left.”
Hopes of a thaw in diplomatic relations with the United States in the light of American aid were quickly dashed by President George W. Bush in a speech in Texas. Bush said he had temporarily eased restrictions on sending money and sensitive equipment to Iran “to be able to get humanitarian aid into the country,” not to send a signal to Tehran.
And he made clear that, if the Islamic republic wants better relations, it must turn over any followers of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden it has in custody, abandon its alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, and embrace political reform.
US Sen. Elizabeth Dole and a member of Bush’s family will head a humanitarian mission to Iran if it gets the green light from Tehran, the Washington Post reported. The delegation, which US officials stressed would be humanitarian not diplomatic, would nevertheless be the first public US official visit to the Islamic nation since 52 Americans were kept hostage in Iran for 444 days following the 1979 Revolution.