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Iraqi exiles in Jordan: Hopes and
fears
By Paul Belden
AMMAN -
News of the first wave of bombing in Iraq hit a small,
nondescript, yet warm and comfortable hotel in eastern
Amman with something of a similar effect.
The
hotel is in al-Madeenah, a tough working-class
neighborhood in downtown Amman near the Roman
amphitheater. It is a neighborhood known for its high
percentage of Iraqi exiles, many of whom own the small
kebab shops that dot the surrounding streets or drive
the taxis that cluster in the city-center souk
nearby. As the first reports of fire and explosions
trickled out of Iraq by telephone, television news and
e-mail, many local exiles had gathered here to learn the
latest news.
One of the first targets of the
first bombs in Baghdad, it turned out, had been the
Dourra power plant in central Baghdad. This was a site
that carried a very specific emotional weight in this
hotel. This was the power plant where a much-loved
thirtysomething Pakistani woman named Uzma Bashir had
been sleeping every night since her arrival in Baghdad
the month before. Before arriving in Baghdad, she had
stayed for 10 days here, where the owner, a tall, lean
Jordanian man named Fayez, had befriended her. Tonight,
as the first rumors of war trickled in, he was wearing a
rumpled business suit despite the lateness of the hour,
and expressing his intense fear that she had been
killed.
It was a serious and well-placed
concern. Uzma was one of about 80 human shields who had
entered Iraq to place themselves in likely points of US
and British attack, in the hope - since proved to have
been misplaced - that they could by so doing avert the
war. As Fayez was speaking of his fears, somebody placed
on the bulletin board in the lobby a newspaper clipping
from a European paper - a photo essay of the last
moments on Earth of a woman named Rachel Corrie. Corrie
had also been a human shield, and she was run over by an
Israeli bulldozer and killed while trying to prevent the
destruction of a house in the Gaza Strip.
There
was a cold rain falling in Amman that night, yet it was
warm in Fayez' office, where one wall was dominated by a
map of the world without national borders except for the
pan-Arab nation highlighted in green. On another wall
hung a stylized inscription of the word "Allah" set in
shards of cut glass over a black felt background.
His staff served tiny cups of sweet shai
and Turkish coffee to the shifting collection of
activists and exiles from many nations who had gathered
to learn the latest news. Fayez was well equipped to
supply that demand: he had four computers set up where
guests surfed news sites and sent and received e-mail.
He had a television in his office that flipped back and
forth from CNN to al-Jazeera. He had several telephone
lines that rang continuously. At one point, he picked it
up and spoke in Arabic for a while, before hanging it up
with a sigh: "The government is closing the Iraqi
Embassy until further notice."
A German woman
wandered in and relayed the latest news from over the
border, which, she said, had been just open just the day
before, when she crossed into Jordan leaving Iraq. The
security officials on both sides, she said, had seemed
very tense. Everyone had been thoroughly searched - and
unlike before, guns had been drawn. Baghdad itself, she
said, had become a ghost town by noon the day before the
first bombs fell. At that time, every shop had been
closed, with tin shutters ringing down over every
storefront, and X-marks of duct tape covering every
vulnerable window.
A little later, Fayez was on
the phone again: "The border is now closed," he
reported.
As pictures flashed across the
television screens of the mass protests in capitals the
day before around the world - baton-wielding police
making mass arrests in Cairo; crowd scenes from Rome,
Berlin, San Francisco - his phone rang again bringing
rumors of mass arrests in Jordan. As of this writing,
they could be confirmed.
About 10pm, al-Jazeera
reported that a US helicopter had gone down in southern
Iraq. Twenty minutes later, CNN came out with a similar
statement, attributing the news to Iraqi television and
saying that the news could not be confirmed by the
Pentagon. Later that night the Pentagon came on CNN
denying the report. In the morning, it said a Chinook
had gone down for unknown reasons in Kuwait. An
investigation was pending.
Meanwhile, as CNN
concentrated on wide-angle video shots from the
Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad near the Tigris
River, al-Jazeera interviewed a taxi driver who had
witnessed some of the first bombs' effects. He had seen
several civilians wounded by shrapnel, he said. Within a
few hours, there were live shots from the hospital.
Finally, after an interminable wait, an e-mail
arrived. It was from Uzma, and she was safe. So was
everyone in her group of human shields. And they were
staying on, she said. But they were very scared.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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