Iranians Struggle as Some Speak of Rebuilding Bam
January 05, 2004
The Washington Post
Karl Vick
BAM, Iran -- The road to Bam is littered with the detritus of desperation. At a rest stop along what centuries ago was a main artery of the Silk Road, used hypodermic needles betray the highway's current infamy as a route for smuggling raw opium from Afghanistan, 200 miles to the east, across terrain that alternates desert pan with mountain ridge.
The wrecks on the roadside suggest a sharper trauma. In the frantic scramble to find medical attention for more than 10,000 people all hurt at once, the highway north from Bam became a drag strip, cars and trucks passing frantically -- and not always making it back into lane -- in a 140-mile sprint to the nearest hospital in Kerman, once known as "the heart of the world," now a provincial capital.
The hospitals in Bam were flattened, as was the rest of the city, an ancient place sketched by the Silk Road trade route over a half-dozen centuries and, on the day after Christmas, erased in a matter of seconds by an even older, roughly parallel line: a fault in the earth.
Iranian officials are not certain how many people were killed in the earthquake, when one plate beneath the surface abruptly moved northwest and the other due southeast. But more than 30,000 bodies have been buried so far in what had been a boomtown of perhaps 100,000 people.
"It's not worth living here," said Reza Miri, his artificial leg squeaking as he walked over the rubble of his street, where steel gates remained on their hinges but the houses behind them had disappeared.
In this city, turned into piles of rubble, only the size of the heaps denotes relative wealth. Luxury homes collapsed as thoroughly as the one-room estate Maryam Abbasnejad's father had built by hand, and where he died with his wife, on their side of a blanket hung to divide the tiny living space in half. Maryam, 10, alone survived, with a broken arm and purple bruises down one cheek.
Aid Distribution Uneven
In Miri's neighborhood -- working-class, by the size of the piles -- survivors fended for themselves while a dozen young Iranian Red Crescent volunteers killed time watching traffic three blocks away.
"I'm a war veteran, and I haven't seen one of these damned people come and help us," Miri said, cursing the helicopters circling overhead, air cover for another Iranian official touring the city.
A neighbor tugged free three red carpets, rolled them up and piled them onto a metallic gold Camaro; they fit nicely on the fastback. Around the corner, a baby goat stood bleating in the cab of a loaded pickup.
Five days after the quake, the city was emptying out. But not entirely.
"Our neighbors went to villages to stay there for shelter, but we have no car to go in," said Birjan Mohammadi, a woman in her fifties. She squatted on a mound of bricks and watched dusk gather toward another night that she and her grandchildren -- a beaming little girl of 5 or 6 and her little brother, standing side by side -- would spend sleeping atop the rubble that had crushed their parents. On the ground were empty plastic bottles of Ashi Mashi cola and empty tuna tins.
"We sleep outside in the open air," the woman said. "It's freezing cold."
The relief effort was far from uniform, officials have acknowledged. Iran's first responder in disasters, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was on the scene within hours, and by all accounts took matters firmly in hand, airlifting 4,000 wounded residents to hospitals across the country in the first 24 hours after the quake. But distribution of the torrent of aid that arrived in the ensuing days was uneven at best.
"Look out!" a bystander yelped, as another bit of largess was tossed off the back of a passing truck last week. Aimed at a row of tents that a displaced family had erected at the curb of a main street, the packet whacked a journalist in the head and flapped onto the asphalt. Batool Shahrokhi picked it up -- a lacy tablecloth, tightly bound in plastic -- and kept talking.
A moment later, she dropped it and grabbed her weeping husband as the ground rumbled. Another aftershock.
"We have nowhere to go," she said, shrugging.
A Frontier Outpost
Two days after the quake, men armed with sticks looted aid trucks on the main road into town, on a stretch where soldiers were posted the next day. Miri, the veteran, said he saw a man making off with a trailer of donated canvas tents, announcing that he would sell them in Sistan-Baluchistan, the frontier province that borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the tribes that overlap among the three countries boast a cheerful disregard for international protocols.
This has given Bam a reputation as a frontier outpost, the last place firmly controlled by Tehran on a road leading into a desert where anything might happen. Three weeks before the earthquake, suspected drug smugglers kidnapped three Europeans bicycling east from Bam. They demanded $6 million in ransom, but released the three without receiving any money.
"Bam is a strategic point in the country, a forefront against wicked people, bandits and drug traffickers, and therefore it must be reconstructed at any price," a former Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, declared in a visit to the stricken city Thursday.
Reconstruction, however, is a dicey subject.
Most of the people killed in the earthquake perished in their beds, crushed in an instant by the weight of the mud bricks forming the domed roofs that were the pride of Bam.
Refined over 2,000 years, the local architecture guaranteed a cool refuge even on the hottest days, and rendered the tree-lined streets of the modern city a vibrant living version of the famous citadel of Bam, an outdoor museum that has drawn thousands of tourists a year to the largest mud-brick edifice in the world, just outside town.
"There is some discussion of trying to relocate the city," said Hossain Jafari, a U.N. disaster official in Iran. "They will do micro-zoning studies to see what is the best place and design a new city."
It would not be the first such attempt to start over here.
In 1932, the municipality of Bam was officially moved from the vast, visually arresting complex of mud houses at the foot of the citadel to its present location a few miles north. The move freed the majestic ancient site for preservation -- already plans are underway to repair the heavy quake damage -- but offered residents a less certain future.
The 'New Citadel'
In the years before the quake, Iranians knew Bam for delicious dates, assorted citrus and dope.
"I went into Bam to buy some opium, but couldn't find any," a taxi driver from Kerman said Tuesday night. The surprise evident in the announcement has translated into desperation among the 20 percent of Bam's population older than 15 who are addicted. The Associated Press reported that emergency supplies of methadone and codeine were being rushed in to tide them over.
The rate of drug use follows from proximity to smuggling routes, but also from economic disappointment. In 1993, with much fanfare, the central government created a "Special Economic Zone," dubbed the "new citadel," on Bam's northern boundary.
The results were mixed at best. Factories appeared. So did people looking to work in them. Mohammad Ali Mo'einfer, an expert in human geography, estimated that 100,000 Iranians migrated to Bam in search of work, doubling the area's population in the decade before the quake.
"They were, of course, not rich enough to care about the kind of accommodation they were choosing," he said. The housing boom that ensued produced homes no more likely to be up to code than the government buildings that collapsed with them, including both of the city's hospitals.
But the largest factory, built to assemble automobiles for South Korea's huge Daewoo conglomerate, ended up producing only car seats and smaller parts for export. Layoffs left much of the population struggling even before their homes were destroyed.
From his tent on the street, Mohammad Mozhdehi could see what remained of his. It hung there, a second-story apartment broken in half and showing its naked kitchen to passing traffic. Mozhdehi moved closer to a fire fueled by salvaged 2-by-4s and cabinet doors. He had lived with his wife, who died in the quake, above a shop in the city's main business district, the only neighborhood where reinforced construction kept at least a wall or two standing. The result was private spaces suddenly exposed: a living room wall with a gilded clock still keeping time, a tiled bathroom with a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini scowling over the sink.
No Reason to Remain
On the street, the exodus continued at traffic circles where grassy centers had been turned into campgrounds. Heavy trucks carrying aid jostled with pickups laden with household belongings and an Iranian sedan called Pride, with its entire back half squashed but the wheels turning.
Just before the main highway, they all stopped at the last checkpoint. Residents need written permission to leave the city. They received it in a shattered police station, where two officers with batons were chasing two prisoners across a parking lot.
"I'm a teacher!" one of the prisoners yelled.
"You're a thief!" an officer yelled back.
At the station, Majid Fakhri, hollow-eyed but stoic, clutched his permission slip.
At 32, he was a widower.
"I lost all my family," he said. "More than 10 in all."
He was about to leave for the home of relatives elsewhere.
"There is nothing left to remain for," Fakhri said. "Now the main thing is the reconstruction."
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