Jordan Bracing for a Crush of Refugees : Exodus: Planners expect war to trigger massive flight. Money to deal with the surge is a major problem.

An icy wind blew through the director’s tent as Thaher Hadid spoke of the prospect of a human disaster looming just beyond his desert outpost, a mass of 1,548 mostly vacant canvas tents known as Azraq I evacuation camp.

Here, he explained during the weekend, more than 1 million Asians, Egyptians, Sudanese and other Third World workers fleeing Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion took refuge after Aug. 2, stretching the compassion of Hadid’s nation and the rest of the world last fall. Only about 2,000 of those refugees remain here now, he said, most of them Vietnamese construction workers who will be leaving soon.

But, as war fears deepen in Saudi Arabia, 25 miles south of here, and in Iraq, 110 miles to the east, Hadid knows he is on the front line of a wave of refugees of almost unimaginable proportions.

“Sure, I’m scared,” said the 40-year-old Jordanian who wishes he were back in Anaheim, Calif., where he lived for 12 years and managed a nightclub and restaurant in nearby Garden Grove until his family and nation beckoned him home.

“Before, we could handle it because everyone helped us. We got money from overseas. But in the last month and a half, we didn’t get anything--only promises. I think it’s going to happen (again), but this time . . . people will die from cold and hunger. . . .”

“This time,” added his cousin, Ali Hadid, who runs the adjacent Azraq II camp, “it will be hell.”

The Hadids, Jordanian Red Crescent volunteers who have run the Azraq camps for four months, were not alone in their assessment.

As they spoke to a visiting reporter, the regional directors of a dozen international disaster-relief agencies and representatives from more than a dozen governments met in Jordan’s capital of Amman, an hour’s drive away, putting together a plan to cope with the human impact of war in the Persian Gulf.

A copy of the 11-page plan, a summary of weeks of research, debate and estimates by relief officials in Geneva, was obtained by The Times.

“It is estimated that over 1 million third-country nationals are still working in Iraq,” the document says. “In addition, hundreds of thousands of nationals of countries within the region could also seek temporary shelter and protection in neighboring countries in the event of hostilities.

“Depending on the severity and duration of any possible conflict, we could soon be witnessing a dramatic exodus exceeding even that of August-September, 1990, when over a million foreign nationals crossed into neighboring countries, mainly Jordan.”

The plan concluded that a minimum of $38 million is needed immediately to prepare for a deluge of refugees and that an additional $150 million would be needed within days after the first bombs and missiles fall.

But there’s a monumental problem: There is no money.

“It’s one thing to sit and talk, but the important aspect of all of this is where the funds will come from,” said Mohammed Yahya Maroofi, head of the International Organization for Migration’s mission in Amman. The mission arranged an air bridge that, as of Jan. 8, had repatriated 137,055 of the Asian refugees who had fled from Kuwait and Iraq.

“The contingency plan is there, and this is the second or third revision of it. But everyone stops at the ‘buck.’ Where is the money going to come from?”

At a similar disaster planning meeting in Geneva on Friday, the only specific financial pledge reported was a $3-million contribution offered by the United States, which noted that the pledge is in addition to the billions it has already spent preparing for war.

Funds for the future disaster plan are critical from a political as well as a logistic perspective.

Jordan’s government, which shouldered the brunt of last year’s refugee crisis, closed its border with Iraq last week. The move was designed, in part, to halt a possible deluge of refugees afraid that war is imminent. But it was also a message to the world that Jordan feels that it was overburdened during the last mass evacuation.

When he announced the closing of the frontier, Salameh Hammad, chairman of Jordan’s Evacuees Welfare Committee, declared that only $12 million of the $56 million Jordan spent to care for the refugees last year was reimbursed by an international community which he said had promised to foot the whole bill.

“The evacuees’ (Jordan refuses to call them refugees) problem is a problem for the whole international community and not Jordan alone. . . ,” Hammad said at the time.

U.N. officials here reckon that, in fact, Jordan has received a total of $15 million in reimbursements, and they say that an additional $3 million is on its way from Canada, Italy and Finland. But they add that it is unlikely Jordan will get any more money for last year’s effort.

“We had great problems to certify these figures,” Hans Einhaus, head of the U.N. Disaster Relief Office in Amman, said in an interview. “Although we did, in the end, verify them, and Jordan does deserve the money, donor countries remain doubtful. There was some waste (in the evacuation operation). We found enormous amounts of food that were just left to rot in tents, for example.

“It was due to mismanagement. This time, we have to manage it better. We have all learned.”

To illustrate, Einhaus detailed the preparations already under way in Jordan alone.

Stockpiled in Jordanian warehouses are 2,020 tons of flour, 3,534 tons of rice, 274 tons of cooking oil, 101 tons of cheese, 40 tons of fish and 71 tons of sugar. These provisions are enough, he said, to feed 100,000 refugees for three months. In addition, 5,000 tents, enough to accommodate tens of thousands of refugees, are waiting at Islamabad Airport in Pakistan to be flown here. Four giant tents that could shelter 3,000 people are en route from Pisa, Italy.

At the same time, however, Einhaus displayed a “readiness” chart listing the seven Jordanian camps either existing or planned that together could receive up to 112,000 war refugees at a time.

But work is not yet done on the accommodations for more than half that number, and Einhaus admitted concern that the camps will not be finished before Tuesday’s deadline for Iraq to pull out of Kuwait.

The Jordanian army volunteered Saturday to join in the construction effort, and Einhaus said he hopes the government will decide to reopen its border when it is convinced the outside world is prepared to house, feed and finance the next wave of refugees, which is likely to begin before any actual fighting occurs.

But the disaster planners also know that “in a war situation . . . it’s possible that human beings will start moving in all conceivable directions to save their necks,” said International Migration chief Maroofi, himself an Afghan refugee from the 1979 Soviet invasion of his nation.

Thus, the U.N.’s plan unveiled here Saturday calls for distribution of the $38 million in initial costs among Jordan, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Most officials here see that as overly generous to Syria and Turkey, both difficult exit points, and insufficient for Jordan and Iran, the most accessible of Iraq’s four neighbors.

This kind of planning and the criticism it attracts were seen by many as premature. First and foremost, concluded such officials as Einhaus, “we need the money.”