BAM, Iran, 5 January 2004 — Iran said yesterday nearly 2,000 young children rescued from the Bam earthquake and thought to be orphans won’t be released to adoptive parents until state officials are sure their natural parents are no longer alive.
An estimated 1,800 children, some just a few months old and others up to about age 10, were found without parents or relatives in the chaotic hours after the Dec. 26 quake destroyed the ancient city and killed at least 30,000 people.
Iranian officials said they had been flooded with requests from people around the world eager to adopt orphans after seeing broadcasts of heart-breaking images of frightened children and cherub-faced babies.
“The priority is to give the orphaned children to family relatives,” Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari said.
“But other people will also be considered if they are qualified,” he added. “First we have to wait for a period of three months before releasing any orphans for adoption.”
He told a news conference in Tehran another government minister eager to adopt an orphan himself had urged him to cut through red tape and ask the welfare organization to allow him to quickly adopt a child. The minister was not identified.
“There are a lot of requests from families around the country,” Lari said. Officials from the state welfare organization said yesterday that at least 2,500 families in Iran had offered to adopt children. But there have already been several cases where missing, and presumed dead, parents of children taken to a makeshift orphanage outside Bam had later been found alive.
Sometimes the parents had been injured and taken away from Bam for treatment or otherwise got separated from the children in the quake’s turmoil. Most of the children have been transferred to a state shelter in Kerman, 180 km north of Bam. “We have had a number of cases in which at least one of the parents of children we thought were orphans have been found,” Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani told Reuters. “We have to wait to be absolutely certain.” The quake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, killed about one-third of the ancient Silk Road city’s population and destroyed an estimated 90 percent of the buildings in Bam, which is 1,000 miles southeast of Tehran.
International relief workers have flooded the country to search for survivors still pinned under the rubble and set up temporary shelter for the thousands displaced. The whereabouts of thousands of people is still unknown.
“We are not 100 percent sure if these children are orphans because their parents might have been only injured and taken to other cities for medical care,” said a senior official of Iran’s state welfare organization, which is in charge of the orphans.”
A spokeswoman for the state welfare organization in Tehran said they had also received calls from as far away as Canada, Australia and the United States offering to adopt orphans.
The 97-year-old woman who was plucked from under a pile of dust and bricks on Saturday, was said to be in good health despite her ordeal and having suffered fractured limbs and dehydration.
After eight days and nights trapped under the rubble of her home in the earthquake-hit city, the first request of Shahr-Banu Mazandarani was for a cup of tea, aid staff said yesterday. “I am very cold. Can I have a cup of tea? “ Denis McClean of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) quoted her has saying to her rescuers.
“Has there been an earthquake?” he quoted her as asking the female Iranian Red Crescent worker who found her, Zohreh Shaahyar. Dr. Paul Odberg of the Norwegian Red Cross told reporters that the life of the old woman, now a national celebrity, had been saved by “so many remarkable coincidences.” “They saw her hands sticking out of the rubble and they thought she was dead but when they tried to pull her out they found she was alive. She was trapped in her bed,” Odberg explained.
