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Convers(at)ions on the road to
Jordan
By Paul Belden
AMMAN -
The drive from Baghdad to Jordan takes about 12 hours,
and for Omar, at least, the most dangerous part of the
journey came after we'd crossed the border.
Omar
is Iraqi, and even though he is used to this trip,
making it twice a week, he still visibly tensed up as he
presented his passport at the last Iraqi checkpoint and
rolled into Jordan. It didn't take long to see why.
The first item on the agenda at Jordanian
customs was to open his big four-wheel-drive truck like
a can of tomatoes. Top to bottom, front to back, they
tore it apart - took out everything in the truck, opened
every bag, rummaged through every pocket, checked under
the hood, peered under the seats, even crawled
underneath with flashlights to examine the chassis. A
lot of smuggling goes on across this border.
Then, to add insult to injury, just before they
let us through, they confiscated his mobile phone. He'd
get it back when he re-crossed the border, they said.
You could tell it pissed him off.
Once past the
border, Omar still didn't relax. Given the tense
political situation, it seems that the Jordanian
government has set up a good number of floating police
checkpoints along the border roads, and Omar sweated
every one. Driving across the great western Iraqi
desert, he hadn't been careful at all of his speed,
generally cruising along at about 150-160 kilometers per
hour.
But now, late at night and inside Jordan,
he kept it down to 110. Whenever he thought he saw any
type of unusual light on the highway ahead - a tanker
truck stopped by the side of the road, a gas station -
he slowed it down to 90, just in case. "If this was
daytime, the police would stop me for sure," he said.
This part of Jordan is full of Iraqi exiles and refugees
and smugglers of every stripe, and the regular truck
drivers are known by sight.
A few kilometers
past the border, a small two-lane blacktop road - what
they would call in Texas a farm-to-market road -
branched off from the main highway to the north. He took
this road, and just a few hundred meters farther along
we came to a great blaze of lights and Arabic neon in
the desert: an all-night truck stop and general store.
Here, finally, Omar lightened up. He pulled over
on to the gravel, and looked over at me - almost for the
first time. "You hungry?" he asked. "They have meat
here."
Well, no, I wasn't, not really. I just
wanted to get to Amman and find a hotel somewhere. But
Omar was already out the door and crossing the road -
all right, meat it is. By the time I wandered in behind
him, he was trying out a bunch of mobile phones from a
display rack and laughing with a gaggle of men of all
ages gathered around the counter. He'd found his
homeboys.
After a meal and several cups of sweet
Turkish coffee, we were on our way, a shiny new mobile -
a temporary measure - hanging from Omar's belt. Although
he still kept to the back roads, braking for every
possible checkpoint and keeping one eye on the
rear-view, he finally started to relax. So I took the
opportunity to ask the question that I'd known better to
ask inside Iraq. Minders or no minders, you just don't
go around saying things like: "So, tell me. Saddam
Hussein. Good president? Bad president? What do you
think?"
He didn't reply for a while, and I had
just about given up on getting any kind of interview -
if he didn't want to talk politics, I certainly wasn't
going to press him - when he said, "Not ... exactly."
And then he started to tell me about himself.
His name was Omar, he said. He considered
himself a lucky man. He was married, he had two children
- both girls - and he owned his own business in Baghdad.
(He told me what kind, but I think I'll keep that to
myself.) The taxi driving was just something he did for
extra cash - he made the Baghdad-to-Amman trip twice a
week, on average, and sometimes he also traveled to
Damascus.
Still, things could have been better.
Not only for himself, but for his country too. "My whole
life," he said. "Nothing but war. Iran - Saddam started.
Kuwait - Saddam started. And now, we have again war. He
is not good president."
He had served in the
regular army during the first Gulf War in 1991, and he
had survived only because he had been stationed in
Baghdad. If he had been down south, the odds are that he
wouldn't be here today.
So what about George W
Bush, then? I asked. Good president? Bad president? What
do you think?
As before, there was a long pause.
Talking politics didn't seem to come naturally to him.
Then he said, "This war, America starts, okay? Bush I
think is crazy. Understand - the American people, I
like, but government and people, they are not the same.
It is the same in Iraq. I am Iraqi. The Iraqi people, I
love. My country, I love. But government and country -
they are not the same."
I asked him what he
intended on doing once the war started, and he said he
was going to stay home, keep his head down and try to
ride it out. He had no intention of leaving Iraq. I
asked him what he thought about democracy for Iraq, and
he thought I was asking about Damascus. He gave me a
look as if to say, what kind of damn fool are you
anyway?
I don't know whether Omar's still making
his twice-weekly trips. Since I last saw him, reports
from journalists crossing the border say that the Iraqi
government has started setting up gun emplacements along
the highway.
But it would be interesting, after
the storm, to try to go back and find him and see what,
if anything, about his life has changed. The most
important thing I'd want to know, I think, is whether he
still feels that the only safe place to speak his mind
about those who would govern his country is over the
border, on the highway, in the dark.
(©2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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