Anguish in Anatolia

Turkey's windswept eastern Anatolian region is a land as shaky as it is harsh. Situated in the world's earth quake belt, the area was devastated by a 1939 shock that claimed 23,000 lives, and another in 1943 that killed 4,000. Lesser jolts occur with regularity. "Since 1946," reports one villager, "I have had to rebuild my house 18 times." Earlier this year, tremors twice rattled the town of Varto, causing 16 deaths. Last week terror struck again.

At 2:25 one afternoon, soon after farmers had returned from lunch to their wheatfields, they heard a gathering roar that sounded like rolling stones. Then the earth began to pitch. "First it shook back and forth," recalled an old man. "Then it heaved up and down." In the village of Sehabettin, U.S. Peace Corpsman Ashley Campbell, 22, of Boston, was helping build a trench silo for fodder. "I scrambled out," he said. "Walls of houses were cracking and splitting. People in the fields were screaming, and some dropped on their knees to pray." Everywhere, yawning fissures zigzagged across dirt roads, whorls of disturbed dust swirled into an eerie pall--and flimsy mud-clay huts collapsed into rubble.

When it was over, Turkey had suffered its worst earthquake in 23 years. In three provinces near the Soviet Armenian frontier and Turkey's Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark came to rest during the Flood, scores of villages lay in ruins.

By week's end the toll stood at 2,477 dead and 1,494 injured. For the living came a flow of help from half a dozen nations. Even Turkey's old foe, Greece, sent blankets and food. The U.S. Air Force flew in a 36-bed field hospital with seven doctors and 125 technicians. After a trip to the disaster area, Turkish Premier Suleyman Demirel announced that the government was prepared to earmark $40 million to help the villagers rebuild. Hopefully, the work would be well under way before autumn's first snow two months hence.

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