Help Was Too Slow to Arrive, Iranians Say

By the glow of a campfire in a makeshift tent village, Abas Barkhordor Baravati and his neighbors wrestled with the truth of their demolished homes and began to vent their frustrations.

At first, they spoke in murmurs, but their anger began to rise. Their meager belongings -- salvaged from flattened homes -- had been looted, they said. Relief supplies were slow to arrive. And government officials seemed callous about their suffering.

Baravati felt insulted because relief workers nonchalantly tossed food to villagers.

“We’re not animals,” Baravati said, in front of a cluster of tents erected in front of his devastated village outside Bam.

Four days after a magnitude 6.5 earthquake flattened this ancient desert settlement, victims began to ponder their losses. Family members, neighbors and friends who were still missing were being written off as dead. People like Baravati and his neighbors, who have lived here for generations, began to wonder where they would live.

The Iranian government said that 25,000 bodies had been buried, almost all of them in mass graves. Estimates suggested that the death toll could double because many people are believed to be buried in their collapsed homes.

Amid the rising frustration of earthquake victims, Iran’s top leaders on Monday toured the disaster area, promising to restore Bam -- famous for its 2,000-year-old citadel -- to its former glory.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wields ultimate power in this theocracy, said Bam will be rebuilt “stronger than before.” Last Friday’s quake crumpled virtually every building.

A few hours after the ayatollah’s visit, President Mohammad Khatami toured the area amid reports of scattered looting and complaints by victims that food and relief supplies were being distributed unevenly.

“The scale of the catastrophe is so big that whatever has been done is not yet sufficient,” Khatami told reporters. “I hope more and more aid will arrive in coming hours.”

The government was criticized -- even in the state-controlled media -- for being too slow to respond.

“Will it be business as usual after officials put small bandages on deep wounds and leave the scene?” asked a front-page editorial in Monday’s Iran Daily, an English-language Web site of the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Some critics charged that the country was poorly prepared for the temblor, despite Iran’s long history of earthquakes and traditional use of brittle construction materials. Many structures in Bam are hundreds of years old and built with brick and mud. There were also widespread complaints that the country had too few rescue dogs trained for sniffing through the rubble.

The flurry of visits and criticism came as rescue workers were abandoning efforts to find survivors under the rubble of bricks and concrete.

“I think there is no hope of finding live people. We have to help find the dead,” said French rescue worker Michael Descloux, watching a backhoe tug at the wreckage of a house where a woman and her 9-month-old daughter were thought to be buried. Rescuers had already unearthed the corpses of the woman’s husband and a second daughter, who was in first grade. The chances for locating survivors has grown so dim that United Nations officials stopped asking for more teams of search and rescue dogs.

Yet there were some bright spots. The Red Crescent said searchers had found a 6-month-old girl alive in the arms of her mother, who was killed by falling debris. Her protective embrace saved the child, who was discovered 37 hours after the quake.

Tahereh Taherian, a 45-year-old woman, said she had lost 60 family members in the quake. “God is testing us,” she said. But, she added, “I’m thanking God because one of our sons has been left alive.”

Throughout the city, residents wandered like zombies. Scores of the injured, many with broken bones and cuts, were treated in a tent next to the runway of Bam’s airport. The more severely hurt were loaded onto Iranian military helicopters and flown to hospitals elsewhere.

On the edge of town, the grim but urgent work of burying the thousands of dead in mass graves took place in a vast dirt field next to the main cemetery.

A dozen tractors dug at the earth to make new graves as an endless procession of pickup trucks arrived, each one heaped high with bodies, wrapped in blankets.

Dozens of Islamic clergymen arrived here from around the country to preside over the assembly-line burials. They offered prayers as the bodies were wrapped in white sheets.

Traditional burial rites, such as the washing of corpses, were being suspended because the number of victims was too overwhelming, said one of the mullahs, Ali Akhbar Sarshar.

Near a mass grave, a young man with a spray canister strapped to his back squirted disinfectant into the air, thick with the odor of decomposing flesh.

Sarshar said he had buried about 150 bodies and consoled countless relatives who came to the graveyard in a desperate search for loved ones. Mostly, he said, he recommended patience.

Meanwhile, early Monday, an Air Force C-17 plane from Charleston, S.C., landed at Kerman, about 100 miles northwest of Bam, carrying 68 medical experts and 40,000 pounds of blood and other medical supplies, the Pentagon’s joint transportation command said in a statement.

The United States, still called the “Great Satan” by Iran’s fundamentalist hard-liners, broke off diplomatic relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. President Bush named Iran in his “axis of evil” last year.

Over the weekend, other U.S. military planes ferried many rescue and relief experts and tons of medical and humanitarian supplies into Iran from stocks in the United States and Kuwait, the statement said.

The planes were the first U.S. military aircraft to land in Iran since the end of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1981.

A spokesman could not say how much the assistance cost or whether there would be more airlifts.

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters that the United States was prepared to send more aid if needed.

Times wire services contributed to this report.