Deadly Earthquake In Iran, Associated Press, May 11 

QAEN, Iran (AP) -- Convoys of buses, trucks and pickups rushed volunteers over narrow dirt roads Sunday to the remote mountains of northeastern Iran, where the death toll from a powerful earthquake reached 2,400 people -- and was still climbing.

More than 155 aftershocks shook what was left standing, forcing tens of thousands of people to camp amid the rubble in the streets of stricken villages. Forty-thousand people were left homeless...

At least 6,000 people were injured in the magnitude-7.1 earthquake that struck Saturday near the town of Qaen, 70 miles west of the Afghan border...

In the villages, temperatures dropped to 41 degrees overnight, but then soared to 84 in the day, raising concern that bodies under the rubble might begin to rot and spread disease.

Most of the villagers in the region are subsistence farmers who either tend camels or sheep or grow wheat and saffron. Many of the injured appeared weak and malnourished.

 

Maryam Rajavi Extends Her Condolences To Earthquake Victims, Iran Zamin News Agency, May 11 

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the Iranian Resistance's President elect, extended her condolences to the bereaved people of eastern Iranian provinces, in particular, the residents of Qa’en and Zirkouh, on the tragic earthquake which shook these areas. Mrs. Rajavi wished them patience and strength.

Mrs. Rajavi called on the nation to use every possible means and rush to the aid of the quake victims, away from the plunder and pillage of the regime’s agents. She asked Iranian families living in other regions to adopt the children who became orphaned in this incident.

Overview 

Bonn Mots

The New Republic, May 19

 

Since Germany reunited in 1990, the only sore point in German-American relations has been Bonn's cozy relationship with Tehran. That relationship, the U.S. government hopes, has been damaged by the finding of a German court on April 10 that the Iranian leadership plotted the 1992 assassination of four Kurdish exiles at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant... As a result, American officials and the press are trumpeting the dawn of a new era, in which formerly squishy Europeans, led by Germany, discover the virtues of the American tough line. Don't believe a word of it. Apart from a few gestures made for public consumption, no serious changes are being contemplated by Bonn. Quite the contrary. The German government, which was surely aware that Iran had engineered the murders, believes its only failure was in not exerting enough pressure on the Berlin court to avoid the indictment of Iranian officials. Far from breaking off the official policy of "critical dialogue" with Iran, Bonn remains unwilling to countenance criticism of it...

... To maintain the fiction that Germany is not unilaterally elevating commerce above human rights, Kohl is using the European Union to provide cover. Indeed, in Luxembourg on April 29, at a special European Union meeting of foreign ministers, Germany pushed through a decision to return ambassadors to Iran...

The advances that Germany has made toward Iran have not been confined to the economic sphere. The German and Iranian intelligence services have cooperated with one another closely. In October 1993, as the Mykonos trial was just getting under way, the German intelligence chief Schmidbauer hosted the Iranian cleric and chief of intelligence, Ali Fallahian, for a two-day visit; Schmidbauer escorted Fallahian on a tour of the Bonn federal chancellery and intelligence headquarters at Wiesbaden. Though German prosecutors wanted to arrest Fallahian, Kinkel and Schmidbauer balked, and Fallahian held a news conference in the Iranian Embassy in Bonn to brag about the "technical help" provided by Germany to Iran--help that included electronic spy equipment... According to the August 1, 1996, Jane's Intelligence Review, Germany has even winked at Iran's use of its Bonn embassy as its nerve center for terrorist operations; thirty of the ninety employees at the embassy work on a heavily fortified third floor, tracking Iranian dissidents across Europe... One reason Germany is unwilling to reconsider its Iran policy may be that the United States has not seriously pressured Bonn to change it. In a talk on April 18 to the Arthur F. Burns association, Kinkel pointed out the inconsistency of American ties with China and boasted that, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Bonn, she "didn't tell us to cut off ties." Nor has the State Department made Germany's ties with Iran a priority: the highest official responsible for monitoring Germany and Iran is Robert Deutsch, a director of northern Gulf affairs in the bureau of near eastern affairs. The emissary sent in mid-April to coax the Europeans into taking a tougher stand on Iran was Peter Tarnoff, a former undersecretary of state who now holds no official post and even less influence with Albright.

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