World View : Multinationals Stand Firm as Deadline Nears : Around the globe, millions of people have been affected by the countdown to Jan. 15.

In a north Manila suburb, Hi-Top Supermarket supervisor Mary Yap worries aloud about nervous crowds of shoppers who have nearly emptied the huge store’s shelves of canned goods, sugar and rice. “It’s panic buying,” she said. “Everyone is afraid of war.”

In Germany, officials have tightened security at airports and borders against terrorist attacks. In London, contingency war plans include using old army camps to intern British-based Iraqis deemed dangerous to the state. In Brussels, the Belgian finance minister warns that if shooting starts, “we will be in a wartime economy.”

In North Africa, angry Algerian tour operators complain they had to cancel pilgrimages to Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia. In Thailand, Bangkok’s usually busy Arab red-light district, Soi Nana, is tense and quiet. And in cash-strapped Cuba, Fidel Castro has imposed a 10% energy-saving plan and warned of power cuts if war breaks out.

Around the world, thousands of miles from the Persian Gulf, millions of people have been affected in countless ways as the tense months and weeks have ticked down to today’s United Nations-imposed deadline for Iraq to leave Kuwait or face all-out war by U.S.-led forces.

International air travel has been disrupted, financial markets are going haywire, governments are scrambling to formulate contingency plans, and families far from the front line pray for those serving in the 28-nation allied force facing Iraq, or among the more than 2 million Asians and other foreigners still working in the region. In ways large and small, the world now fears the worst and tries to anticipate the unimaginable.

“I am afraid,” said Brazilian Maire Maciel, whose husband jumped at the chance two months ago to earn the equivalent of $10,000 a month by going to Iraq to replace a departing colleague from the construction company Mendes. Now the construction engineer is trying to get an exit visa. “Anything could happen there,” his wife told reporters in Rio de Janeiro.

In England, which ranks second only to the United States among Western nations sending troops to the gulf, Prime Minister John Major took his own gas mask with him when he went to visit British troops in Saudi Arabia last week. At home, regional health officials have been warned to prepare up to 7,500 beds for possible casualties and to defer non-urgent admissions.

“We are preparing in the same way that we prepare for a train crash or plane disaster,” a British Department of Health spokesman said.

Unlike a train crash, however, a major conflagration in the Middle East, particularly one that affects the supply and price of oil, could have an economic, political and human impact around the world. Fear is palpable in far-off lands.

“It’s going to be chemical warfare, and the chemicals they explode are not just going to stay in the Mideast,” said a nervous young mother in Mexico City. “They will travel all around the world. It’s bad enough to have to bring up my daughter in such a polluted city. But now this!”

Moreover, numerous nations are bracing for bombings and other attacks in the wake of Iraqi President Sadaam Hussein’s repeated threat to unleash a worldwide terrorist campaign if war erupts.

Germany, home to hundreds of thousands of U.S. service personnel and citizens, expects to be a target. “Presumably, Iraqi terrorists have already been smuggled into the Federal Republic,” Willfried Penner, chairman of the Parliament’s intelligence committee, told the Cologne Express newspaper.

The impact is more personal for Ralph Lemke, a 30-year-old former East Berlin bartender who set up a lucrative used car business after the Berlin Wall fell. Now he has stored jerrycans full of gasoline in case fuel prices shoot up, and fears for his business.

“The only thing I’m afraid of is a war in the Middle East,” Lemke said. “Gasoline prices are going to shoot up and people are going to think twice before spending money on a new car.”

In Italy, which relies heavily on Middle East oil, a proposed wartime contingency plan would impose highway speed limits, reduce street lighting and limit heating fuel. Anti-terrorist police and paramilitary carabinieri already have been deployed in airports and railway stations, and around offices, embassies and official buildings.

A few countries stand to gain, at least in the short term. Oil-exporting nations--including Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia and China--have already profited from increased oil revenues.

Mexico, for example, has increased oil exports by 100,000 barrels a day and enjoyed a $3-billion windfall from higher oil prices. Partially as a result, per capita income rose by 0.5% last year after falling steadily since the early 1980s--a statistical improvement that unfortunately has not translated into greater buying power for the average Mexican.

Halfway around the globe, oil-exporting Indonesia, as the world’s largest Muslim nation, might find a gulf war a political and economic boon, according to Robert Broadfoot, head of an economic risk consultant firm in Hong Kong.

“Indonesia will be the big beneficiary,” Broadfoot said. “It’ll make more money from oil. And in the long term, it’s a moderate Muslim nation. It will shine as a beacon of stability. That’ll attract business.”

Although Japan imports 70% of its oil from the Middle East, appreciation of the yen has cushioned recent higher oil prices. Indeed, many Japanese appear unconcerned by the looming war. When a Times reporter asked several Tokyo residents what Jan. 15 means, they replied “ Seijin-no-hi “ or “adults day,” a national holiday in which young women don flowery kimonos and visit local Shinto shrines.

“The majority of people in Japan are either unaware of the date and what’s happening with the U.N. resolution, or they are accepting it as inevitable and something over which they have no power,” said Paul Koroluk, a Tokyo-based American teacher who is organizing an anti-war protest outside the U.S. Embassy today. “Almost every American knows of somebody who’s in the gulf right now. But the Japanese are cut off.”

Not far away, South Korea’s acting prime minister, Ro Jai Bong, clearly disagrees. Last week, he ordered his Cabinet to prepare economic and security contingency plans, including possible oil rationing, in case of war.

“We should prepare countermeasures covering national security, oil reserves and protection of our citizens in Iraq,” he announced, according to the government news agency. “The war clock in the gulf is ticking down.”

And Thailand’s fast-growing economic bubble could well burst. The stock exchange last week announced new rules it will enforce in case of war to prop up the market, which has lost 48% of its value since the crisis began. The measures include a price floor to limit daily declines in stock prices to 5%, and the doubling of a fund to buy shares when prices start tumbling.

The five-month Persian Gulf crisis already has dramatically affected five poor Asian countries--the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka--which had millions of overseas workers in the area. The loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in remittances, combined with reduced exports and sharply higher oil prices at home, have caused economic hardship and political upheaval in all five.

“Economies that are the most sensitive, the most fragile, those are the ones you have to worry about,” said Malcolm Dowling, assistant chief economist for the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. Even without war, he added, the crisis has “had a significant impact” on Asia’s poorest countries.

At the height of Bangladesh’s political unrest last month, for example, government radio interrupted broadcasts of the fall of the decade-old dictatorship of President Hussain Mohammed Ershad with what it termed “a very important announcement.”

“Reports that American and British troops in Saudi Arabia are using the 2,000 Bangladeshi soldiers stationed there as cooks, waiters and janitors were categorically denied today in Dhaka,” the announcer declared in an official statement that appeared the next day on the front pages of every newspaper in the impoverished South Asian nation.

In an overwhelmingly Islamic nation where Saddam Hussein is widely revered as a hero, the official denial was meant to defuse rumors and avert violent protests at the U.S. and British embassies. But riot troops have been put on standby in Dhaka, and most Western embassies have warned their citizens to be extra cautious.

Similarly, in nearby Pakistan, where a violent mob attacked and gutted the U.S. Embassy during an anti-American demonstration touched off by events in the Middle East in 1979, U.S. officials are increasingly nervous about how the orthodox Islamic country will react if war erupts.

The State Department last week urged Americans to “defer all non-essential travel” to Pakistan due to “unsettled conditions” resulting from the gulf crisis. And embassy officials offered to help any American, including non-essential diplomatic personnel and their families, to leave.

Pakistan sent 5,000 troops to Saudi Arabia last fall, but the civilian and military leadership insist that the infantry brigade is deployed to defend the shrines of Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, rather than to support U.S. aims.

Increasingly, however, influential Pakistanis have condemned the U.S. role and have praised Hussein for his attempts to link the occupation of Kuwait with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“The thirst for Saddam’s blood is but a logical sequence to . . . the ongoing brutal and inhuman repression in occupied Palestine,” thundered The Muslim, Pakistan’s largest-selling English-language newspaper.

India has been flooded in recent weeks with calls for oil conservation. Several state governments have erected huge billboards at gas stations appealing: “Conserve Petrol. Preserve the Nation’s Wealth.”

Half a million Indians still work in the gulf, mostly in Saudi Arabia. Indian officials estimate another 3.5 million families back home depend on their income. The workers are also a prime source of foreign exchange in a country whose hard currency reserves already are so low the government is considering selling its gold for the first time in history.

Despite that, pro-Iraqi sentiment remains strong. “No matter what happens, Saddam Hussein is a big hero, even here in Calcutta,” said an airport bartender who identified himself only as Ranjan.

And in Brazil, Rauel Rosa, a provincial salesclerk and member of the country’s Communist Party, wrote to the Iraqi Embassy in Brasilia volunteering for battle duty against “American imperialism.”

But probably no country outside the front-line gulf states and Israel has prepared more for war than the Philippines.

In recent weeks, President Corazon Aquino and her top aides have announced a bewildering series of wartime contingency plans. She started with a request to the Philippine Congress to grant her sweeping emergency powers, including authority to take over essential businesses and regulate prices.

“We have to prepare the country and people for any eventuality,” explained Aquino’s executive secretary, Oscar Orbos.

Just about every eventuality has now been covered. The agriculture secretary urged Manila residents to plant vegetable gardens to prevent shortages, the transport secretary offered to remove bus seats to add capacity, the justice secretary threatened to use wiretaps to enforce anti-hoarding laws, and the defense secretary warned of looting, food riots and coordinated terrorist attacks by leftist and rightist rebels.

Other proposals include canceling school two days a week, limiting bank and nightclub hours and banning strikes and demonstrations. Gas rationing plans have been drawn up, and special police squads were announced to track down food hoarders and profiteers.

Daily headlines about such government initiatives triggered panic buying of foodstuffs, lengthy gas station lines, and such a heavy draw-down of bank reserves that the governor of the Central Bank repeatedly denied a run was in progress and a major bank was forced to issue a denial that it had closed its doors.

“If there’s panic in the air, it’s all because of a government that wants to make the gulf crisis the scapegoat of its shortcomings and utter incompetence and nincompoopery,” complained Emil P. Jurado, a columnist for the Manila Standard.

Even Filipinos caught up in the frenzy can’t explain why gulf war fever has suddenly gripped the land.

“If there is no war, I’m in big trouble,” laughed Rubio Abongan, a 34-year-old Manila driver who spent a week’s salary buying tinned sardines and other canned goods. “My family hates sardines.”

January countdown:

Jan 1: No price too high to oust Hussein, Bush tells British interviewer David Frost.

Jan 2: NATO agrees to deploy 40 warplanes in Turkey to help war effort.

Jan 3: Congress cancels January recess, plans debate on war.

Jan 4: Baghdad agrees to meeting in Geneva between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz.

Jan 5.: Bush meets with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar at Camp David. Rules out secret diplomacy in nationwide radio address.

Jan 6: Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd urges Iraq to withdraw, then negotiate its Kuwaiti claims.

Jan 7: Baker and British leaders reject extension of Jan. 15 U.N. deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait.

Jan 8: President Bush formally asks Congress to permit him to go to war with Iraq.

Jan 9: Baker-Aziz talks end in failure. Perez de Cuellar plans last-ditch peace seeking trip to Baghdad.

Jan 10: Congress opens debate on war resolution.

Jan 11: Baker tells American combat pilots in Saudi Arabia “we pass the brink” at midnight.

Jan. 12: Congress gives Bush green light for war.

Jan. 13: Perez de Cuellar meets in Baghdad with Hussein; no progress made in resolving crisis.

Jan. 14: Iraq’s rubber-stamp National Assembly votes to go to war rather than accept U.N. deadline to pull out of Kuwait.

Jan 15:

Contributing to this report were Times correspondents and researchers Juanita Darling in Mexico City, Mark Fineman in New Delhi, Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels, Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro, Tyler Marshall in Berlin, Fleur Melville in London, Karl Schoenberger in Tokyo, Janet Stobart in Rome and Charles Wallace in Bangkok.