US quake assistance arrives

A US-chartered plane carrying 45 mt of humanitarian assistance for victims of last week's devastating earthquake in northwestern Iran arrived in the capital, Tehran, on Tuesday afternoon, a UN official confirmed to IRIN. This is the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution that Tehran, which has no diplomatic ties with Washington, has accepted humanitarian governmental aid. "This is the first donation that we have received specifically for our earthquake response," Luc Chauvin, a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative in Tehran, told IRIN. "We welcome this substantial donation from the US government, which is well needed in the field," he added. UNICEF will hand over the aid to the Iranian Red Crescent Society and the Ministry of Interior and monitor its distribution. Some 237 people were killed and more than 1,300 injured when the quake hit 70 villages in the provinces of Qazvin, Hamadan and Zanjan on 22 June. Measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale, the tremor destroyed 2,000 ha of farmland. According to Chauvin, on board the plane arriving from Pisa, Italy, were 12,000 hygiene kits, 5,000 blankets, two water-treatment units, each capable of providing water for 10,000 people, as well as six 10,000-litre water bladders. The goods, which were valued at US $300,000, came from the governmental United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Chauvin explained that the DC-10 plane, which belongs to Das Air, a small airline registered in the US operating in Africa, had a crew of Ugandan nationals on board. UNICEF has already donated 20 mt of humanitarian aid placed in the country for the Afghan crisis as part of the effort and is continuing to provide assistance to victims. "We have sent another mission to the affected quake area to continue supporting people there," he said. Experts in the region have called the move a step in the right direction, but remain cautious about future relations. "It is an opening as such, but a very limited opening," Samina Ahmed, the director of the Pakistan and Afghanistan project of the International Crisis Group, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. She added that so long as Iran was what she described as "lumped" in the category of undesirable states, progress would be slow. "According to the Bush government, it [Iran] has been included in the 'axis of evil' and those states who are harbouring terrorism," she explained. However, she believed that the gesture of providing aid was a good one. "I do think it makes a difference when humanitarian aid is offered. It helps to build bridges, and this is one bridge that needs to be desperately rebuilt," she added.