Efforts Fail to Ease Plight of Refugees in Jordan Desert : Relief: International coordination lacking as Amman government seeks to grapple with an overwhelming crisis.

Aid is lagging to ten of thousands of Asian refugees from Kuwait marooned in perilous desert camps here while out-of-sync international relief agencies and the hard-pressed Jordanian government grapple with one another and a crisis whose magnitude has overwhelmed them.

Organizational structures and relief supply lines are emerging after a belated start, but most of the refugees still lack basic necessities, relief specialists and Jordanian officials complained in interviews.

“There is a lot of dust, lack of water and facilities and lack of hope. These are hard days for these people,” said French Minister for Humanitarian Action Bernard Kouchner, pledging French planes to carry refugees home.

More help is on the way from rich nations--President Bush authorized another $10 million in U.S. aid Saturday--but hunger and misery still rule the desert camps.

“First of all the aid is late; second of all it is slow, and third of all it is not enough,” said Dr. Ahmed abu Ghouri of the Jordanian Red Crescent, the local Red Cross equivalent that is staffing some of the worst camps.

Food and blankets languish in warehouses while hungry refugees sleep on the desert floor. Inexperience and bureaucratic tangles complicate the operation of established camps and slow the construction of new ones. There are long, cold nights ahead.

“Winter is coming. With the cruel winds of desert sand storms we soon shall have refugee tents scattered all over the Persian Gulf,” predicted a senior Jordanian official.

“We can’t say we are confident that the worst is over, because we have no information of how many are still waiting to come in,” said Klaus Wiersing, field head of the U.N. Disaster Relief Organization, UNDRO, which is coordinating assistance from at least half a dozen U.N. agencies. The worst-case scenario is that the refugees are joined by another 300,000 non-Arabs still in Kuwait, Wiersing said.

New refugees, as many as 10,000 a day, are continuing to arrive from Kuwait via Iraq faster than a complicated and costly international airlift can repatriate them. The intergovernmental International Organization for Migration plans to repatriate 19,000 refugees on 72 flights over the next two weeks.

At that rate, even if the refugee flow were to stop overnight, it would take five months and $46.7 million to fly home those Asians already here, the Jordanian government estimates. The IOM is urging industrial countries to donate planes and ships “now.”

“We are urgently appealing for more planes and more funds to charter aircraft,” said UNDRO’s Sergio Piazzi.

Some transit centers are operating smoothly: A camp for 15,000 at a trade fair site near Amman run by the Red Crescent and other Jordanian charities, and a desert camp for 15,000 operated by the private French aid group Doctors Without Boundaries, get full marks.

There is particular alarm, though, for about 30,000 Asians trapped in the makeshift Shaalan 2 in a desert wasteland 185 miles from Amman where shelter, food, and water are all short in what appears to visitors to be a virtual administrative vacuum. About 18,000 refugees have been moved from Shaalan 2 to other camps in recent days, and although supplies have improved, every night there are uncounted new arrivals. Khaleh Abuhalineh, a Red Crescent doctor at the camp, describes the situation as “still critical . . . a disaster from a medical point of view.”

Already, the flight of Asian workers from Kuwait into Jordan that began Aug. 7 has exceeded all expectations. The government estimates that around 600,000 people had arrived from Iraq in a month. That is nearly 20% of the total population of Jordan, where yearly per capita income is about $2,000. Imagine, as a matter of comparable scale, that 50 million people fleeing war, many of them poor, streamed into the United States in one month expecting care and passage to homelands thousands of miles away.

Saudi Arabia has underwritten the repatriation of most Arabs, particularly Egyptians, but around 120,000 Asians remain trapped in Jordan waiting for a ride out. Pakistan is sending ships and India and the Philippines some flights for their nationals, but Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, whose citizens were the majority of blue-collar workers in oil-rich Kuwait--and of the refugees--have no resources with which to underwrite repatriation.

In addition to the Asians, at a time of profound economic crisis Jordan must also cope with the return of 75,000 Jordanians and Palestinians who not only had jobs in Kuwait, but also sent money home to their families. There are no jobs for them here.

“This is a nightmare for us. For the first few weeks we worked alone, but we cannot cope with the numbers,” said a senior Jordanian official close to the ruling royal family. “We are a Third World country without great planning, infrastructure or experience with international agencies.” Jordan estimates it has already spent $46 million of its own funds in refugee care.

An interministerial Jordanian government task force is in overall charge of the relief effort. It is short on experience, if not resolve.

In all, there were 16 U.N. experts in Jordan this weekend, and five of them had come to teach a crash course in emergency management to 30 Jordanian officials.

“We are not operational here in the sense that we have trucks and make our own distributions. The U.N. is here to assist the government, not to substitute for it. We have no staff in the camps,” said UNDRO’s Wiersing.

Lacking any central coordination, more than a dozen non-governmental agencies that have come to help, such as the International Red Cross, the French doctors group, and the Middle East Council of Churches, run their own shows: securing supplies and transporting them to camps they administer as best they can..

It is left to the sorely tried Jordanian government, by contrast, to transport U.N. supplies to its camps.

“We need countries and the agencies to do more. We are overwhelmed,” said the senior Jordanian official who believes that it will take centralized executive control under expert international authority to beat the crisis. In the meantime, the bulk of the refugees will stay in the desert camps.

“We don’t want them to infiltrate into Amman and try to remain in Jordan as workers. Health and security concerns are also more easily addressed if they are kept away from the population centers,” the official said.

Administration of a cumbersome relief effort that did not begin in earnest until late August has been stalked by red tape every step of the way.

“We are seeing a lack of coordination between the direction of the relief effort and the field level. The lack of experience is combined with too many inputs from too many different places,” said Mercedes Sayagues, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program. At Shaalan 2, for example, inexperience means that lines of refugees waiting for food sometimes stretch for more than half a mile. That could be simply remedied by expanding the number of outlets where food is provided.

Bureaucratic snarls run in all directions. High-protein Dutch military field rations were turned back from one camp by a Jordanian official who mistakenly thought their shelf life had expired.

One West European government, responding to urgent appeals from its ambassador here, promptly dispatched funds--not to Jordan where he might have used them immediately, but to U.N. headquarters in New York, whence, the ambassador says tartly, some minor remnant of them may emerge in a year or two.

About 20,000 West German blankets wound up in a warehouse instead of the desert. One new International Red Cross camp for 35,000, whose opening was reported imminent for a week, was moved after construction began because Jordanian officials thought it was too close to the Amman water supply, and then delayed again by headquarters officials in Geneva who demanded a more sophisticated sanitation system than engineers on the scene thought necessary. It’s still not open.

World Food officials scored a coup by arranging that a chartered Soviet jet that carried 450 Bangladeshi refugees to Dhaka return with 50 tons of rice instead of coming back empty as originally planned.

Still, there were the sort of glitches that have marked the entire relief effort. First, it took 12 hours to get permission for the huge AN-124 transport to overfly Saudi Arabia, where air controllers these days speak in American military English. Then, when the plane returned, the rice went to a warehouse here instead of to refugee camps directly because there were no facilities there to cook it. Some of the rice finally got to the refugees Saturday, not to the hungry and stoveless desert, but to a camp near Amman where refugees are relatively well fed anyway.