Jordan Buries War Dead, Disputes U.S. on Oil Cargo

This neutral Middle East nation began burying its war dead Saturday--three Jordanian truck drivers who were killed last week in an allied bombardment that has now escalated into an international war of words between the U.S. and Jordan.

As family and friends of the dead truckers carried flag-draped coffins to the grave, chanting, “The martyr is loved by God” and “Saddam, don’t worry, we are ready to kill for you,” Jordanian officials were flatly rejecting a U.S. charge on Friday that the truckers were violating U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq when they were killed in neighboring Iraq.

“There is nothing that requires a state in applying a legal obligation such as sanctions to commit economic suicide,” Aoun Khasawneh, a legal adviser to Jordan’s King Hussein, said Saturday.

“It is not that Jordan loves Iraqi oil. If there can be a commitment of guaranteed, continuous oil supplies at similar prices, we would stop.”

The statement came in response to charges leveled by U.S. State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler on Friday that Jordan was violating the international economic sanctions by using the highway between Baghdad and Jordan as its lifeline to crude oil.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s main source of oil, cut all supplies in September, apparently as punishment for Jordan’s refusal to back the Arab and Western coalition opposing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Although King Hussein similarly has refused to back Iraq in the conflict, Iraq clearly has been a vital neighbor for Jordan ever since the Saudi cut-off.

Since September, Baghdad has been sending 60,000 barrels of crude each day into Jordan on a fleet of Jordanian tanker trucks as in-kind repayment for a $900-million Iraqi debt incurred during its eight-year war with Iran.

And yet, the controversy over Jordan’s imports from Iraq began only after allied aircraft began bombing and strafing both military and civilian vehicles traveling on the highway in western Iraq last Tuesday, leaving behind more than a dozen burning trucks, buses and cars and at least five corpses--among them the three Jordanian drivers who were buried here Saturday and another driver who was interred Friday.

The drivers were killed early Tuesday morning, and their deaths provoked the Jordanian leadership into filing an angry, formal protest with the United States and three other U.N. Security Council members. Amman alleged in its complaint that the allied forces were deliberately targeting the Jordanian oil tankers, a charge backed by more than a dozen credible eyewitnesses interviewed independently by The Times at the Jordanian border the day after the allied strikes.

It was in direct response to questions about the Jordanian complaint that Tutwiler made her countercharge of sanctions violations by Jordan, angering the leadership here still further.

For largely impoverished Jordan, whose economy has been shattered by five months of crisis and more than two weeks of war on its doorstep, the issue is an explosive one. And, for the United States, it may well be emotional and compelling enough to push Jordan off its tightrope of neutrality and into the Iraqi camp, according to several Jordanian analysts.

The first driver’s funeral, which took place Friday in the northern Jordanian town of Rantha, drew more than 4,000 mourners who quickly became anti-American demonstrators.

And, as the mourning crowd of dozens quickly grew to hundreds during the Saturday morning funerals for the three remaining drivers on the outskirts of Amman, religious grief converted itself into political anger within minutes after the funeral march began.

“Hosni is a traitor! Hosni is a traitor!” the mourners chanted, in furious condemnation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his pro-West stand in the Gulf conflict.

Later, as they followed the hearse containing the flag-draped coffin of Mohammed Musa Emnezel, a tanker driver from the Amman suburb of Madaba, they chanted: “Saddam, don’t worry. Don’t worry, Saddam Hussein. We are the blood-drinkers who will stand beside you in battle.”

The crowd followed the hearse to a simple, concrete mosque in Emnezel’s impoverished neighborhood for the Islamic final prayers for the dead, and then to a nearby cemetery, where his fellow drivers laid a wreath of pink carnations and covered his grave with handfuls of dirt.