By day the family are so insecure that they are afraid to leave the room. They fear returning to a house in case the roof falls in. Anyway, they cannot find reliable workers to rebuild their home because so many are opium addicts.

“Whenever we get some labourers round the first thing they ask is, ‘Where’s the nearest dealer and have you got some gas for the pipe?’ ” Fatime Tabakulinejad, a mother of six, says.

Her husband, Mustafa, 56, begins to cry. He is blind in one eye, wizened and gaunt, thin grey hair plastered on his scalp. In his hand is a photograph of a man with a full face, thick black hair and a steady gaze.

It was him two years ago. Before the earthquake.

“I can’t even think about it,” he whispers, “everywhere is a cemetery here.”

Bam was wiped out by an earthquake on December 26, 2003. Though measuring only 6.5 on the Richter scale, its epicentre was the ancient Iranian city. A third of the 100,000 population were killed and nearly 50,000 injured. Almost 5,000 children lost one or both parents. Surrounded by barren desert, the disaster made Bam a crucible of grief and trauma.

Eighteen months later, in spite of a huge international aid effort combined with the work of Iranian authorities, the aftermath has left the city listless amid a bitter harvest of opium addiction and depression, with many survivors preferring to live in prefabricated camps than rebuild their homes.

Opium use was traditionally acceptable in the city, a major route for traders from Afghanistan. Guests were invited to smoke with their hosts after eating, and opium pipes and charcoal were included in the wedding dowries of the wealthy.

The drug fitted in with the laissez-faire attitude produced by the hot climate. Then came the quake, and opium became a necessary anaesthetic for the broken survivors. “I had never smoked it before,” said Mansur Jorjandeh, 36, who woke in the quake to find himself buried to the neck in rubble, the bodies of his wife and five children trapped beneath him. “But now I use it for the pain. What can I say? I lost everything in my life in less than a minute.”

One official in Tehran has said that up to 80 per cent of Bam’s male population are now opium users. “And they don’t want the methadone offered by clinics. It’s acceptable to be an opium addict,” an aid worker in Bam said yesterday. Though the Iranian Ministry of Health, backed by Unicef, devoted huge resources to psycho-social programmes designed to alleviate the survivors’ trauma, their work was blunted by a delay in reconstruction that has left the majority of Bam’s houses, 85 per cent of which were destroyed, as piles of rubble.

Bam lies on a major fault-line, and rather than simply start rebuilding immediately, the Iranian authorities preferred to prevent a repeat of the disaster by producing a master plan using quake-proof measures. Though work has advanced significantly in the past three months, only 5 per cent of houses had been rebuilt a year after the earthquake.

Many survivors are still too horrified by their memories of being buried beneath rubble to contemplate living in a proper building yet, and the crowded confines of the one-room prefab huts, issued one per family, is having its own impact on the next generation, with children growing up with no concept of privacy.

“Even before the earthquake there were many addicts here,” Mohammed Musazadh, the director of Behzisti, an Iranian aid organisation in Bam, said. “But the drug was done in a private room. Now, in these one-room huts, everyone gets to experience opium and the children watch it being smoked as an acceptable thing.”

A huge number of survivors were poor tenants who owned no land. Now a rent-free existence and a narcotic shield against the memories of death and destruction have taken away any inclination to rebuild their lives. “It’s one of the major problems in Bam now,” an Iranian aid worker, who did not want to be named, said. “People in Bam are getting used to life in a prefab hut. Come back in five years’ time and unless the Government has done anything about it they will still be there.”

Aid pours into black hole

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