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'Our Children Are Dead,
Our Grief Is Endless'

By James Astill in Bam


The Guardian
03 January, 2004

A little more than a week ago, the two rows of mud and clay brick houses facing each other across a narrow sandy track was home to about 50 families. Edalat Alley was a typical middle-income street in the Iranian tourist town of Bam, housing civil servants, shopkeepers and teachers. Many were related to each other, having moved in together 15 years ago when the houses were built.

Though a bit better off than most Iranians, the alley's residents shared many of their troubles. About a quarter of the men were unemployed, forcing many young couples to crowd into relatives' houses. Heroin addiction, the scourge of the Baluchi people of eastern Iran, was rife.

But in 16 seconds on December 26, that small world was obliterated by an earthquake. Fewer than 10 of the alley's several hundred residents are still alive, and most of those have been dispersed to hospitals across Iran. As for the rows of neat houses, they are two mounds of dust, bricks and broken furniture. They end together in a bigger heap of bricks, concrete and twisted metal sheets: the remains of an orphanage where 54 girls perished.

Hamideh Khordoosta, 22, was not in the house she shared with her husband - who is also her cousin - and a dozen other close relatives when the earthquake struck. She was staying with friends on the city's outskirts, having left her husband to his opium pipe in disgust.

Sitting amid the wreckage of the family's house, in a dusty brown headscarf and baggy jersey, Hamideh ticked off the relatives she had lost in the rubble: her grandmother; her sister; a dozen aunts and uncles; and most of their children. Her husband survived, though he is now paralysed with a broken back.

"Our sisters are dead, our children are dead, our parents are dead, our grief is endless," Hamideh says, wiping away tears with a corner of her scarf. "This is what it means to be lonely, having no one to share your sorrow."

Early efforts to quantify the devastation of Bam have produced horrifying results. The registers record that 28,000 of the town's 80,000 people are dead and buried. The total death toll, including victims in nearby villages, could climb to 50,000, according to the government's estimate, the highest in any earthquake for 25 years.

But global statistics do not describe the most bitter fact of the calamity: the near-complete eradication of countless communities of families.

"The sheer concentration of death is mind-blowing, it's unprecedented," says Rob Macgillivray, emergency co-ordinator for Save the Children, and a veteran of numerous earthquake disasters. "Communities have been virtually wiped out, whole extended families have been completely annihilated."

Several factors meant that the quake, which measured a relatively modest 6.8 on the Richter scale, caused maximum carnage. One was its timing, at 5.10am, on a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, when most of the townspeople were still in bed. Another, the most important, was the nature of Bam's construction - it is built mostly of mud bricks that crumbled to suffocating heaps of grey powder, leaving no pockets in which trapped survivors could breathe.

The third factor was a consequence of the calamity. Most of the city's decision-makers, including every senior officer except the governor, and four out of seven senior Red Crescent officials, were killed, making the emergency rescue and relief operation slow to begin.

As the sole male survivor of a family of more than 200 people, Hamideh's husband is now rich, having inherited several houses and orchards across eastern Iran. Still she refuses to return to him: "I will not cheat him or myself, because I do not love him," she says. "You cannot stay in love with an addict."

This leaves no one to share her grief or the agony of her week-old memories.

"I was pulling people from the rubble, but they were dead or dying all around me, people were dying everywhere," she says, then sobs uncontrollably as she remembers pulling her neighbour's three-year-old daughter from the debris. The child's back was flayed, and when Hamideh poured antiseptic onto the wound, the girl went into a convulsion and died.

"For the first two days, there was nobody helping us," Hamideh adds. "The government said it was helping people but these were empty words. We had no one and I'm not a doctor. How could I know what to do with the child?"

Blame


Virtually all of Bam's survivors blame Iran's unpopular government for reacting slowly to a disaster it should have foreseen. Dissident politicians and journalists have fanned the flames, accusing the government of having no contingency plan.

But, according to UN officials in Bam, and the evidence of its emergency response, the government did have a plan, which the Iranian Red Crescent carried out well in the circumstances.

Despite the slow start, within 24 hours of the quake, several thousand Red Crescent volunteers from across Iran were dispensing blankets and food in Bam. More than 90,000 tents were distributed within four days. University language departments emptied across the country, as students rushed to Bam to interpret for the 34 foreign rescue teams arriving to comb the rubble.

"The Red Crescent has been outstanding, absolutely first class," says Ted Pearn, chief of the UN team co-ordinating foreign rescue and aid groups in Iran. "I'd rate them one of the best organisations I've come across in my career. They took the bull by the horns, they welcomed international assistance. Overall, the whole operation has worked extremely well."

According to Mr Pearn, the international response was also sufficient.

Most of the rescue teams arrived hopelessly late, with only a handful - including four from Britain - arriving within 48 hours of the quake, when survivors are most likely to be found.

But in the event, it mattered little. The teams rescued only one survivor from Bam's dusty rubble. Dozens of miraculous rescues have been reported, but only one of them has been officially confirmed.

Foreign aid followed, with earthquake-prone Turkey the most generous donor. "There's a tremendous amount of aid already in the country or on its way," Mr Pearn adds. "The biggest need now is information, on how many people are dead, on how many are in need."

The assessment is proving tricky, because most of Bam's survivors have left the city, back to the villages their families left a generation ago.

On Jamalidin Street, at the end of Edalat Alley, Mohammed Musafa, 37, was preparing to leave for his parents' village of Darestan, 20 miles away. The possessions he had scavenged from the wreckage of his home were loaded into a pick-up truck. His brother, his sister, their children, his wife and more than 100 of his relatives were dead.

"I have nothing to stay for," says Mohammed, a secondary school teacher about to become a peasant farmer. "I will return when the city is rebuilt."

Across the road, tunnelling through the rubble of his family home in search of a carpet, Ali Rezah Mehri, 25, had no plans to leave or to remain. Ali's parents, brother, sisters, brother-in-law and four nieces and nephews all died. He survived because he was up early on December 26, driving his new Peugeot taxi. He used it to take his family's corpses to the cemetery. Someone stole the car while he was there.