Iranian building codes

I was thinking about my previous post all day yesterday. I was worried that I sounded too much like I was keen to make a political point and not sufficiently concerned about the Iranian people. It's just that as I watched the news over the weekend I was getting angrier and angrier. I couldn't help thinking that this is what you get when the government doesn't care about its own people.

Frank's comments mirrored what I had been considering late yesterday. But, this morning I found out that Iran has had two devastating earthquakes in the past 25 years. In 1978, 25,000 people were killed in the Tabbas earthquake and in 1990, 40-50,000 were killed in the Gilan earthquake.

This morning, David Aaronovitch writing in The Guardian notes that the Iranian leaders "don't appear to give a toss".

So why, despite the loss of 40,000 lives in the Gilan earthquake of 1990, had nothing been done? The same question was being asked back in the queue outside the clinic. Fariba Hemati told the Guardian what she thought of official efforts, "Our government is only preoccupied with slogans: 'Death to America', 'Death to Israel', 'Death to this and that'. We have had three major earthquakes in the past three decades. Thousands of people have died but nothing has been done. Why?"

It seems that 'Death to the Iranians' is the government's unspoken slogan.