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For now, the relief effort appears not to have won over new middle-of-the- roaders in Iran so much as it has revived the festering internal conflict over how to deal with the West. Kamal Kharrazi, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, took the unusually conciliatory step of asserting that Iran's tragedy "may create a better atmosphere for relations between the Iranian and American peoples." But lawmakers in the hard-liner-dominated Parliament sharply warned that American aid would not buy better relations. Dismissing U.S. assistance, the radical newspaper Jomhuri Islami declared in an intemperate editorial, "Our people, even under the rubble, chant 'Death to America.' " At Friday prayers, Rafsanjani rebuked the paper, saying, "We should be thankful to those foreigners."
In truth, compared with the $34.5 million raised to assist victims of the 1988 earthquake in Armenia, which killed 25,000, the $4 million in private American contributions that reached Tehran last week has been puny -- for understandable reasons. Memories of the hostage crisis and anger over the continued detention of six Americans by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon are still too strong for most U.S. citizens to overcome.
Given the relatively paltry amount of U.S. aid, "one shouldn't have extraordinary expectations about the political payoff," says Shireen T. Hunter, the Iranian-born deputy director of Middle East studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. On the other hand, U.S. donations, public and private, comprised a fifth of the $21.8 million in total international aid received by Iran last week, and the pace of private American contributions is accelerating. What's more, notes the U.S. official, "with the history of our relations, I would think the Iranians might find it amazing that they got donations at all." Appreciation might eventually translate into better relations, but that process, like the very efforts to rebuild the shattered lives in Iran's northwest, will proceed slowly, one painful step at a time.