Help Falls Behind Pace of Exodus : Refugees: Jordan appeals for more international aid. Relief workers describe ‘surreal situation’ as thousands languish in desert camps.

Before dawn Tuesday, a cargo plane from the United States brought 500 tents to Jordan. Along with another 500 brought in from a U.N. warehouse in Italy, they were trucked to a stretch of desert near Jordan’s frontier with Iraq.

By this afternoon, the 1,000 tents should be bursting with refugees from Kuwait and Iraq. But by then, another 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 new refugees will have streamed into Jordan from Iraq with nothing to eat or drink and nowhere to sleep.

The international relief effort is beginning to have an impact on the refugee crisis that engulfs Jordan and threatens to spread to Turkey and Iran. But it falls far short of the need.

As Jordan appealed Tuesday for more help, the staggering proportions of the crisis were just dawning on the hard-pressed aid workers and the governments involved.

“We are all a bit overwhelmed by the massive influx,” said Klaus Wiersing, disaster relief coordinator for the United Nations here.

In the month since Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, more than half a million people have fled from Kuwait and Iraq. Two or three times that many more may be just behind.

“It’s a surreal situation,” said Xavier Emmannelli, whose private French relief group, Doctors Without Borders, set up a desert camp for 4,000 refugees that was immediately overwhelmed by 15,000. “People who expected sanctuary find themselves prisoners in the desert. They are trapped in a dead-end of absurdity.”

As relief supplies trickled into Jordan from a variety of private and international agencies, Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan appealed Tuesday for more in order to cope with “a human tragedy of the widest dimension (that) has received but scant attention.”

By the Jordanian government’s count, about 420,000 refugees have entered Jordan, a poor, Maine-sized desert kingdom of about 3 million people. Most of the refugees--largely Egyptians, Yemenis and Sudanese--have been moved out of Jordan by means of a $60-million sea and air operation underwritten by the Saudi government.

Of the 100,000 or more still trapped in Jordan for want of a way out, most are from Asia’s poorest countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines. Some governments are struggling to find ways to bring home the workers, whose remittances from the oil-rich gulf will be sorely missed at home. Other governments, such as Bangladesh, have little hope of helping.

“As the downtrodden of the Earth, the plight of these people . . . has evoked only the faintest of responses from the world community, and from a world press more interested in war scenarios than in humanitarian relief,” Prince Hassan said at a news conference. “We should not forget that the situation, critical as it is, may be only the tip of the iceberg.”

Hassan said the number of foreign nationals in Kuwait and Iraq when Iraq invaded was estimated at 2 million, “a large number of whom may find themselves stranded in Jordan.” Coping with them, he said, “will be simply beyond the capacity of a small country like Jordan.”

Hassan said he will ask U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to name a coordinator for the relief effort.

Jordanian officials and international functionaries quarreled over who was responsible for the relief effort’s slow start and how the red tape is to be surmounted as the effort gains momentum.

When the first Asian refugees arrived Aug. 7, Jordan provided prompt assistance, using emergency funds to buy bread from bakeries and cheese and yogurt from wholesalers. But the relief effort soon staggered as the refugees overwhelmed Jordan’s resources.

Jordanian officials note that the U.N. relief did not begin until Aug. 27. U.N. officials point out that no formal request for help was received from Jordan until Aug. 22.

On Tuesday, the U.N. World Food Program in Rome announced that it will provide an extra 3,500 tons of food for the refugees in Jordan, Reuters news service reported. Officials said that amount can feed 120,000 people for 90 days.

At present, more than 60,000 refugees are trying to survive in a kind of no-man’s-land between the Jordanian border post of Ruweished and the Iraqi border. Most have no shelter. None have enough food and water.

They are reverse refugees--not people fleeing their homes but people trying to get back to their homeland, away from the risk of war. Confined to the camps with former Bangladeshi street sweepers and Philippine waitresses are engineers from Pakistan and rich Indian merchants.

“Never before have I seen refugees arriving at a camp in Mercedes-Benzes,” the Frenchman Emmannelli said.

Most of the refugees are townspeople, unaccustomed to the rigors of outdoor living. Many arrived wanting nothing so much as a bath.

“They are out of space, out of time,” Emmannelli said. He warned of catastrophe if assistance is not stepped up quickly.

In the critical short term, that assistance means tents, blankets, food, water, medicine and sanitation equipment. The International Red Cross will soon open a new camp for 30,000 refugees in the town of Azraq, about 60 miles east of Amman. The American tents were bound for a new camp between the two already established.

Along with the tents and blankets that arrived Tuesday, there were 120 tons of U.N. food. The United States alone will provide, at a cost of about $13 million, 2,000 tons of rice and 5,000 tons of vegetable oil.

The ultimate goal is to get the refugees home. With contributions from Japan, Sweden, Italy and Norway, the United Nations has chartered an Antonov 24 plane from the Soviet airline Aeroflot to fly 4,800 Bangladeshis home over the next 10 days. A Royal Jordanian jet carried 200 Sri Lankans home, and a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747, carrying aid supplies, arrived Tuesday from London to carry Egyptian and British citizens home.

“What we do is not so easily done, but once it starts, it will bring a lot of help,” said Robert Souria, emergency division chief of the U.N. Disaster Relief Organization in Geneva.

The relief effort is complicated by the fact that planners are being asked, in a sense, to shoot blind at a moving target. It is hard to know how much money will be needed, how many tents, when no one knows how many refugees there will be or where they will go.

Jordan is limiting the daily arrivals, but there are reports of tens of thousands of people lined up on the Iraqi side of the border. Turkey has asked for U.N. help to care for the refugees that it is accepting, and so has Iran, which Monday authorized the entry of up to 100,000 people from Iraq.

“It seems the situation is also becoming difficult in Iran,” Souria said, and there were reports of at least three deaths in Turkey’s under-equipped refugee camps.