Saudi Customs Officials Damaging Trucks at Border, Jordanians Charge

Jordanian truck drivers claimed Wednesday that Saudi Arabian customs officials were damaging their trucks as Persian Gulf politics continued to sour relations between the two countries.

The dispute, too new to do any serious damage to either side, nevertheless underlines the Arab divisions over the gulf crisis and the proliferating problems they are causing. Officials in Amman and Riyadh dodged comment on the controversy, but the evidence was clear at their frontier.

According to Jordanian truck drivers at the Umari border crossing, Saudi customs men were damaging their vehicles for no reason.

“They were spiking holes through the (aluminum) skins of our trailers without even opening the doors to see what we were carrying,” a Jordanian driver told a photographer on the scene.

The cross-border trucking dispute involved traffic going both ways. According to officials in Amman, it began with Saudi harassment of Jordanian trucks returning from the gulf, and local Jordanian officials responded by stopping their own vehicles as well as trucks from Syria and Lebanon, both Saudi supporters in the gulf crisis.

Jordanian officials in Amman said the drivers, carrying fresh fruit and vegetables to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, had been harassed by the Saudis for the last two days. The dispute follows Saudi decisions to cut off oil supplies to Jordan and oust Jordanian diplomats from Riyadh.

“It’s nickels and dimes,” a Western diplomat said in Amman on Tuesday night--but it illustrated the hard Saudi attitude against any country that tilts toward Iraq.

The Jordanian government has endorsed United Nations resolutions demanding an Iraqi withdrawal and economic sanctions, but popular sentiment in Jordan remains strongly pro-Iraqi. The dispute started last week, coming to a head over the weekend when Jordanian border officials said alleged Saudi harassment of their trucks led to the decision to block the border traffic, including Syrian and Lebanese trucks.

The vast majority of fresh vegetables and fruits reaching Saudi Arabia and the gulf states comes through Jordan. One report said the border tie-up has doubled the price of imported fruit in the United Arab Emirates.