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AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL
Gulf crisis:
Lessons from 1991
By K Gajendra Singh
Dinner on January 15, 1991, at the Indian
embassy residence in Amman, the capital of Jordan,
turned out to be a much bigger affair than I had
bargained for. On January 1, I had casually asked US
Ambassador Roger Harrison if he would be free for dinner
on the 15th, the deadline given by the coalition led by
US President George H W Bush to Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, which he had invaded in
August 1990.
When Roger said yes, apart from
senior Jordanian officials, journalists and others, I
also invited ambassadors from the countries represented
in the Security Council, my human shield against the
coalition attack, as I jokingly remarked. Soon word went
round and everyone wanted to join in, and suddenly 70
guests were expected.
I had to dust off
ceremonial and personal crockery and cutlery, and set up
bridge tables and garden chairs to seat them all. I also
had to borrow my cook's TV so that guests could watch
King Hussein deliver a stirring speech on Jordanian TV
as many were already watching the latest news from
Israeli TV. CNN had not yet reached Amman. Guests were
sprawled on sofas and wandering through my study and
bedrooms. When King Hussein heard about this unusual get
together, he remarked that only an ambassador from India
could have thought of such a dinner. A great compliment
indeed.
Most embassies in Amman had already sent
their families home and were functioning on skeleton
staff. The cook at the Chinese embassy, though, was
considered essential, and understandably, as I have
never eaten such tasty Chinese food. There were regular
meetings among ambassadors. Tony, the British envoy,
would turn up on odd occasions for a spot of bridge to
take our minds off the mounting tension. No politics, we
had agreed. Once, he got me three down doubled (a rare
thing). Tony was delighted, "I do not care if Saddam
wins now," he teased. His armed bodyguard would watch TV
with my cook, sharing samosas. The Romanian
ambassador handed out gas masks designed for oil
drilling while the Chinese loaded me with various safety
devices to counter poisonous biological attacks. But I
used to show them the strong life line on my hand and
say that nothing untoward was indicated.
The
worst case nightmare for the coalition was that a few
germ-loaded Iraqi Scuds (which we could see over the
Amman sky cruising towards Israel) would kill a few
hundred Israelis, and even the presence of senior US
officials stationed in Israel to restrain them would not
have stopped the Israelis from joining in the fray and
directly marching to Iraq, the first stop being Amman.
In the event of that happening, the coalition, almost a
mini-UN force, with Pakistani, Egyptian and even Syrian
and other Muslim troops in it for the money and other
considerations, would have been impossible to hold
together.
In this contingency, Western diplomats
were to rush to the desert southeast of Amman, from
where helicopters would ferry them to war ships
positioned in the Gulf of Aqaba, cruising there to
enforce the embargo against Iraq. The embassy Indians,
though, were to remain in Amman as the ministry in New
Delhi could not accommodate the families in its hostels.
So our plan was to get into our cars and speed north, if
we could, for shelter with the Indian ambassador and his
colleagues in Damascus, the capital of Syria.
Having seen rich Indians from Kuwait reduced to
sharing or fighting for food or a bottle of water with
their workers in the infamous Shalan camp on the way
from Kuwait to Jordan via Iraq, the only thing worth
saving, I used to say, were my 10 favorite and priceless
long-playing records. Only Jordan had kept its borders
open with Iraq, so Amman was the only point for entry
and exit from Iraq.
Meanwhile, during the
evening of January 15, there was an atmosphere of great
gaiety and excitement, with adrenaline levels running
high after months of anxiety. Apart from sharing an
historic evening and exchanging the latest news,
everyone was dying to see my collection of LPs. Among
them were; Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Amir Ali Khan,
Beethoven, Strauss, Chopin and Mozart. But only Lata
Mangeshkar had two LPs in this set, and people were
asking who she was. I had to tell them she was one of
India's all-time great singers and she had sent me two
autographed records (Geeta and Ghazals) after a meeting
in 1974 in Paris, where I was then posted. My family and
I, aware that she sang only light music, and fearful
that thousands of people might be about to die, put on
the funereal Requiem. But animated and absorbed in
conversation, few heard it. But Roger did, and we both
became very sad.
The grand coalition attack on
Iraqi forces did not begin that night. It came the next
day, January 16, actually in the early hours of the
17th. Despite requests to all journalists to inform us
immediately, and a pact with other ambassadors to inform
each other, my son Tinoo from New York was the first to
telephone me at 00210 hrs (LST) on January 17, and tell
me that the attack on Iraq had commenced. Only just
woken up, I queried how the hell did he know. CNN, he
said. Soon journalists from the Jordan Times and others
followed with calls. No wonder that world presidents and
others confess that they learn about world events first
from CNN. It takes too long for secret messages to be
coded and decoded in the chancelleries.
August 2, 1990: The Gulf crisis
begins
It all began on August 2, 1990. A day
earlier, I had been in the Nabatean pink city of Petra,
in the south of Jordan, some 262 kilometers from Amman,
once the stronghold of the gifted Nabateans, an early
Arab people. The Victorian traveler and poet, Dean
Burgeon, gave Petra a description that holds to this
day, "Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime, a
rose red city half as old as time."
After a
morning visit to the sprawling ruins, just before going
for lunch at the hotel restaurant, as per habit, I
switched on the BBC news. The news of Iraqi troops
entering Kuwait shocked me out of my reveries of the
magnificent pink Hazane (treasury ) monument that
suddenly comes into view as one rides through a narrow
gorge. Truly a marvelous sight. Although Baghdad was
1,200 kilometers from Amman and Kuwait even farther,
after three decades in diplomacy I instinctively felt
that something was seriously amiss. The next morning I
returned to Amman, although I had planned to explore
Petra at leisure.
Yes, tension had been building
up between Kuwait and Iraq, but an invasion was not on
the cards; after all, inter-Arab tensions are not
exactly uncommon. The last round of negotiations between
Iraq and Kuwait in Jeddah over disputed territory had
collapsed on August 1, and Saddam Hussein was incensed,
feeling squeezed. Instead of being grateful, Kuwait,
with encouragement from the West, was insisting on the
repayment of "loans", and it was flooding the oil
market, thus lowering the price of a barrel of oil from
US$18 to $12 to $14, which hurt Iraq the most.
Saddam also felt that he had saved the Arab Gulf
states, many with large Shi'ite populations, from the
fury of the Shi'ite revolution in Iran, for which he had
been lauded by the Arab masses and governments, and
gifted billions of dollars and friendly loans. Western
nations, notably the United Kingdom, France and even the
US, granted him credit, dual use of technology,
chemicals and machinery and even aerial intelligence on
Iranian forces.
And of course there remains the
mystery and enigma of the full details of the last
meeting between the US ambassador to Iraq, April
Glaspie, and Saddam in Baghdad on July 25, when she told
Saddam that his dispute with Kuwait was a bilateral Arab
matter. Glaspie then disappeared from public view, and
was barred from giving interviews or writing a book. The
Western media did not pursue her as they do others, and
with a few exceptions the media have subsequently
functioned as a handmaiden of the Pentagon and Western
spokesmen.
In the first week of August, there
were hectic international political developments, with
King Hussein of Jordan playing an active and
constructive role in trying to defuse Iraqi aggression
with an Arab solution, with help from Saudi and Egyptian
leaders. There have been various versions of these
events, but it appears that the US finally prevailed on
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, so dependent on US
aid, and he fell into line.
On returning to
Delhi in 1984 after six years, having headed missions in
Dakar (Senegal) and Bucharest (Romania), I served as
chairman-managing director of the Indian Drugs and
Pharmaceuticals company, with 13,000 personnel in five
units, and established the Foreign Service Training
Institute in New Delhi. So my posting in July 1989 to
Amman, with only a first secretary and an attache, was
considered a light mission. So in Amman my bridge game
improved, but I was getting distrait - bored - as
the French would say. But this was only the lull before
the storm.
From India's point of view, the
serious issue was the safety of its foreign workers -
about 180,000 in Kuwait and 10,000 in Iraq. By early
August they had started to trickle into Amman as
refugees. The earliest batches were mostly Indian Hajis
- pilgrims to Mecca - a thousand odd, who had been
stranded as Air India flights to Iraq and back had been
cancelled after August 2. After Mecca, many Hajis,
specially Shi'ites, go on a pilgrimage to the holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala in neighboring Iraq.
But soon the numbers of refugees from Kuwait
reaching the Amman embassy started growing. In the
beginning, whatever the time of the day or night, the
small Indian staff of half a dozen would rush to make
tea or buy food to make the tired Indian arrivals feel
at home. In the evening, the embassy would telephone
that two or three more buses had arrived from Baghdad -
100 or 150 Indians. This meant arranging places to stay,
and providing food until air transport to India could be
arranged. Soon the staff were exhausted, but their
dedication and that of others who were deputed to help
the embassy later, barring a few black sheep, never
flagged.
There were more frequent meetings
between ambassadors. I would see Crown Prince Hassan and
other important persons to assess the political
situation and its likely impact on the influx of
refugees. In between, I made a few trips to the
Jordan-Iraq border, where there was little in terms of
facilities and infrastructure. But we had still not
envisaged the deluge that was to hit us.
Soon,
Amman became vital as it was the only point of access to
Baghdad by air, road or telephone. Apart from short
telephone contacts allowed between me and the Indian
ambassador in Baghdad (the Indian ambassador to Kuwait
had shifted to Basra), Iraq and Kuwait were effectively
cut off from the world. So, with other countries closing
their borders, apart from the refugee flood, Amman
became the staging point for international politicians
and others visiting Iraq. Soon, too, Amman was crawling
with international media.
Because of more than
half of Jordan's population being of Palestinian origin
and Yasser Arafat's full reciprocal support to Saddam,
and Amman's close relations with Iraq, there were
regular demonstrations in Amman in support of Saddam and
Iraq. Jordan TV gave the Iraqi viewpoint, which was
drowned elsewhere by anti-Saddam rhetoric spread by the
Western media. For us, the Western viewpoint was
available from Israeli TV, across the Jordan Valley 40
kilometers away. It was necessary to keep a watch on
political developments to help assess their impact on
the influx of refugees.
Jordan had only a small
Indian community, mostly workers earning barely $75 to
$100 per month, hoping to migrate to better-paying Gulf
states. We hired some of them to help us out. Only a few
families were well off, but I regret to say that we were
let down. In the first week of refugee arrivals, before
we had assessed the situation, we requested one family
completing a big project to put a van at our disposal.
This was refused. We requested another Indian who had an
empty warehouse to let us use it to temporarily house
the refugees. He also refused. In countries like Saudi
Arabia or Iran or Turkey, where only a few thousand
refugees in all went in the first few days, there was
full support from the well-organized and large Indian
communities. Soon, we started hiring whatever
accommodation we could find in hotels and flats, and
making arrangements for food.
Nearly a million
refugees, a majority from Egypt, mostly working in Iraq,
and Yemenis and others transited through Jordan, a
country of less than 4 million. It was the equivalent of
200 million refugees wading through India and using its
infrastructure. There was pressure on accommodation,
food and transport and decisions had to be taken on the
spot. Apart from morning and evening policy sessions
with my colleagues, I would invite them by turn for a
meal to maintain espirit de corps and I tried to make
their living conditions as smooth as possible. They were
working 14 to 18 hours every day, many even when ill and
down with fever. The main stress was on patience against
all provocation from the refugees, who, while they had
been silent while in Kuwait or Iraq, started shouting
and abusing once they saw Indian embassy personnel. As
the majority of the refugees were from Kerala in India,
four officers who had come to assist us had to pretend
that they did not understand the abuses showered on them
in Malyali. Some of our personnel were even assaulted
and embassy cars stoned by tired and jittery Indian
refugees. On many occasions the Jordan police had to
step in.
The Indian government did not
appreciate the gravity of the situation and gave us too
little too late. In a fast-changing situation, when I
requested Delhi to depute more staff, they quoted back
the previous week's telegram. They even sent a junior
officer to study the situation, who, on arrival,
appeared more interested in visiting Petra. We had to
carry out the evacuation as per normal rules designed
for a few or 50 or even 100-odd stranded Indians abroad.
We had to follow them, even though three to four
thousand Indians per day were flying out on 10 to 15 Air
India and International Movement Organization (IMO)
flights. This included making them sign indemnity bonds
and providing individual tickets. Despite my pleas,
these superfluous formalities were not done away with.
It meant queuing up for registration, air tickets and
the return of forms etc, by tired and hungry refugees,
even when there were up to 8,000 of them in Amman.
Once the evacuation was over, the government of
India did decide to waive the indemnity ie repayment of
the cost of the ticket. In 106 charity flights organized
for Indians by the IOM, the only formality was the
registration of the passengers in the flight manifest
with passport details, etc. Without time-consuming and
unnecessary formalities, the refugees would have been
saved much stress and strain and my colleagues (15 to 25
at the peak ), who had to be at the embassy, hotels,
apartment blocks, airports, border points and even in no
man's land, could have devoted more time to looking
after the comforts of the evacuees.
External
Affairs Minister Inder Kumar Gujral, during his transit
stay in Amman in early August 1990 on the way to his
famous hug with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the
"Millionaire's flight" in an Indian Air Force aircraft
from Kuwait, as the media described it, appeared
curiously reluctant to meet King Hussein and Crown
Prince Hassan. They received him with great warmth and
brought him up to date on the situation, of which he
appeared to have little grasp. Later, a non-professional
Indian diplomat was sent to Amman by Gujral, who wanted
to be included with King Hussein and King Hassan of
Morocco, then planning to take a peace mission to
Saddam. The Hashemite palace was most embarrassed.
Gujral made extravagant promises to Indians in Kuwait,
such as flying them out from Basra and Baghdad, with
planes waiting for them. In my office, Gujral told
waiting Indian refugees that they would get air tickets
for their home towns on arrival in Bombay. All they got
were the lowest class train tickets. He was making
extravagant promises as if he were fighting a
parliamentary election.
To overcome the staff
shortage problem at the embassy on a permanent basis,
Gujral, in consultation with the Foreign Secretary
Muchkund Dubey, selected an officer. But that officer
never reached Amman to assist "people like us". Gujral
kept shouting at everyone in Amman until he left for
Baghdad, much to the disgust of the officers and staff
who had just started trickling in from India to assist
us in our monumental task, which even we had not
envisaged. Gujral appeared to be edgy, short-tempered
and rude. But much worse was to follow. Except for Civil
Aviation Minister Arif Mohammed Khan, who flew in with
the first Air India plane on August 12, who was a
gentleman of the old school.
It speaks volumes
for the Indian government's perspective and contingency
planning under I K Gujral and the foreign secretary that
it held the only conference of Indian ambassadors in the
region to discuss the refugee problem and international
political developments just a few days before the
deadline for Iraq's withdrawal on January 15.
Now the US, with support from the UK, is
threatening a war and regime change in Iraq. If it takes
place, it will be a terribly messy affair, overflowing
if not involving neighboring Turkey and the Arab states,
including Saudi Arabia, which is also under scrutiny and
attack by the hawks in the US administration. Unlike
1990-91, when they were enthusiastic allies, these
states are now reluctant to support the US' unilateral
action. The gulf region has nearly 5 million Indian
workers. The question is, has the Indian government
learned from its mistakes, and is it prepared this time
around?
K Gajendra Singh, Indian
ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey
from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served
terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal.
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