DIPLOMACY / IRAN AND THE WEST : Pride, Paranoia Almost Enough to Bar Quake Relief

The killer earthquake that flattened homes and shook down mountainsides in northwest Iran exposed the political fault lines in Tehran before the first big aftershock.

For a country constricted with pride and paranoia, the prompt offers of relief aid from the West drove a chasm between the insular radicals and the pragmatic camp of President Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The anti-Western radicals immediately smelled a conspiracy, a foreign attempt to deliver political influence along with doctors, bandages and plasma, to press open the doors of this loner country under the cover of calamity.

“We can cope on our own,” the Ayatollah Abdulkarim Moussavi Ardabili, former chief justice, insisted at Tehran University’s Friday prayers, the day after the earthquake struck last week. “We don’t need help.” The confusion of signals delayed some relief planes for more than a day.

Political cudgels were raised in the press and the Parliament, particularly on reports of the first relief shipments from America and Britain, which remain in official Iranian parlance the “Great Satan” and the protector of apostate author Salman Rushdie.

“We hate having relations with those countries,” declared one parliamentary deputy, “because what they did to our nation was worse than an earthquake.”

Flat rejection of any contact with the United States, supporter of the fallen monarchy, is the badge of political honor in revolutionary Iran--and Rafsanjani, in his year in office, has backed the line. His country’s economy, racked by eight years of war with Iraq, is unlikely to be righted without Western investment, but the president says no to American business.

The radicals espouse total self-reliance, defending a revolution that was built on the hard rock of fundamentalist Muslim opposition to creeping Western culture.

In the decade-long rule of the Islamic Republic, isolation from the West has been tested by the need for weapons during the war and for postwar investment and by the related problems of Iran’s outlaw image through its influence on captors of Western hostages in Lebanon.

Now, an earthquake has brought Western relief workers and the Western media back into Iran in large numbers. Acceptance of aid was an important signal, Western diplomats here said, and the political test is whether to show gratitude for the help. Rafsanjani’s pragmatist Cabinet ministers gave a guarded yes.

“Their presence was useful,” Interior Minister Abdullah Nouri said. “If new relief teams are willing to come to Iran on humanitarian grounds, they are welcome.”

The other side of the coin, the one the radicals fear, was underlined by visiting French Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Kouchner.

“Of course, the goodwill gesture being shown by France and other countries will have favorable effects in future relations of these countries with Tehran,” he told the Tehran Times, adding that the outcome may prove “a blessing in disguise.”

It has been a faint sign that the division between the pragmatists and the radicals here has been affected, if the editorial war between the two camps--which is where ordinary Iranians watch the struggle--is the measure.

The radical policy position was laid down by the newspaper Jomhuri Islami: “Suspicious hands are being stretched toward our nation, (and) the criminal U.S. government is on top of it all. . . . Even under the rubble, our people chant ‘Death to America’ and demand that the Almighty cut off U.S. hands.”

Responded an editorialist of Kayhan International, which usually leans to the hard line: “Having lost families, wives, children . . . their whole belongings, (Iranian quake victims) would not be in a position to say down with this or that. . . . It is very selfish of a newspaperman to sit in his air-conditioned office in Tehran, with his family intact, to ask survivors to say ‘Down with America.’ ”

WHERE HELP IS COMING FROM More than 26 nations have sent aid to Iranian earthquake victims. Here are some of the donations: Bangladesh, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Greece, Holland, India, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Turkey and Yugoslavia are among other nations that have donated. European Community: (Western European nations; includes nations below) $1.2 million in aid Britain: Rescue personnel France: Rescue and medical personnel; 205 people West Germany: Relief teams; over 100 tons of supplies United States: $761,000 in supplies sent by government; $1.7 million donated privately Vatican: Pope John Paul II; undisclosed sum from personal funds Saudi Arabia: 16 planeloads of supplies Soviet Union: 100 doctors; 10,000 tons of food, clothing, equipment Japan: Over $2.8 million in supplies; medical and rescue squad

Sources: Tehran Radio; Us. State Department; Wire Services.