Expected Tide of Refugees Is a Mere Trickle

The portable toilets stretch to the bleak horizon. Empty tents snap in the wind. A lone Jordanian soldier in a crisp blue uniform stands guard, looking like a lawman in some Wild West ghost town.

“There is no one here,” he said as he battened down the flapping doors of a small bathroom with a piece of wire. “Maybe tomorrow I will get to go home.”

The sprawling camp, the largest of its kind in the region, was set up in this desert frontier near the Iraqi border to hold the anticipated tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war.

But no one came.

“Obviously, you don’t wait for a fire to buy a firetruck,” said Peter Kessler, spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which built the camp. “We prepared a scenario and that scenario was for 600,000 to 1 million refugees. We purchased supplies for 350,000 people at a cost of $30 million.”

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a million Iraqis fled to Iran and more than 500,000 headed for the icy mountains straddling the border between Iraq and Turkey, a U.N. spokesman said. An additional 15,000 Iraqis left for Jordan.

So far this time, just six Iraqis have sought refuge in Jordan. About 200 others have arrived at camps in Syria and Iran since the war began.

The U.N. and Jordanian relief agencies also built a camp for non-Iraqis they assumed would be leaving the war zone.

Jordanian officials said that during the 1991 Gulf War, some 1.4 million non-Iraqis came through their country as they tried to escape the fighting.

The second camp, a mile or so from the U.N.’s empty Iraqi compound, can handle up to 25,000 people. As of this week, it held just 222 mostly Somali, Sudanese, Yemeni and Mauritanian nationals. An additional 800 or so Iranian Kurds are trying to get into Jordan.

Though the fighting in Iraq is winding down, Kessler doesn’t think the crisis is over. Should ethnic or sectarian violence flare between Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, or if a fundamentalist theocracy were to come to power, many Iraqis could decide to flee.

“In the early stages of any conflict, very few people leave,” Kessler said.

“This was the case in the last war. In this war, the Baath Party told people to stay home; the Americans told them to stay inside,” he said. “There were curfews. The lack of fuel also contributed because the government had strictly rationed fuel. And people know that if they do leave, they may lose what they left behind.”

Meanwhile, aid workers have been left scratching their heads.

“We prepared for much worse,” said Amer Suifan, assistant disaster manager for the Jordanian Red Crescent Society, which runs the camp for third-country nationals. “But now the movement is the other way. The Iraqis are going home instead of fleeing.”

Suifan was drinking cardamom-flavored coffee in a tent rattled by blowing wind and sand. A thin fluorescent light flickered above him and a portrait of Jordan’s King Abdullah II gently swayed back and forth.

“I thought we could have a million refugees,” said Suifan, who had the air of a good-hearted man with nothing much to do.

A Jordanian by birth, he now sells real estate in Skokie, Ill., and returned to lend a hand.

“I’m not sure why they didn’t come. Maybe they didn’t want to end up like the Palestinians and never be able to go home again,” Suifan said.

Mohammed Hadid, president of the Jordan Red Crescent, said he wasn’t surprised that the Iraqis never materialized.

“In 1991, there was a lot of money. People came in expensive cars. The situation is different now,” he said.

“In 2003, the Iraqis have nothing. Sixty percent were living on government rations, so they were not in a state to go and live as a refugee. It was not an option, so they stayed at home to see what would happen.

“I never expected many Iraqis,” Hadid said. The Arab world knows what living as a refugee is like. The Palestinian saga was a warning to them.”

Jordan, with its Palestinian refugee camps operating since the creation of Israel in 1948, is well aware of the danger. Palestinians are more than 60% of the population in this region.

Labib Kamhawi, a political analyst and former president of the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Amman, called the camps a “futile exercise” designed more for public consumption than refugees.

“There was no reason for the Iraqis to come out,” he said. “Between Baghdad and Ruweished is about 600 kilometers [375 miles] of flat desert. There is not even a curve in the road to wake you up. No intelligent person should have assumed we would have an influx of refugees in Jordan. There are no people up there to run away. Those who had the means to leave the country left long ago.”

Kamhawi said he suspects the area was used by U.S. Special Operations troops to attack missile sites in western Iraq that might have been aimed at Israel. The camps, he proposed, could have been cover. “Maybe Ruweished was part of a larger scenario,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “There were a lot of roads and infrastructure built to be used just for refugees.”

Kessler dismissed that idea as “bunk,” saying that the media as well as U.N. personnel had been in the camp for weeks and never saw any American troops.

“There are a lot of rumors about the presence of British or American forces in Jordan, but it’s completely untrue that there were Special Forces hiding under the tent pegs,” he said. “The camp is exactly where refugees and third-country nationals were in 1991, so they could make it there again.”

Suifan, the aid worker, chuckled at the idea that his camp for third-country nationals was a covert staging ground for American troops. “I have seen nothing like that,” he said.

Many of the people in the camp are shabbily dressed in old coats without buttons and shoes without laces. Children cavort and small gas stoves fill the tents with fumes as water boils. The majority are Somalis and Sudanese who fled their war-torn nations for the tyrannical but stable Iraq under Saddam Hussein. They had worked as drivers, laborers and maids. Some were medical students.

“It was too dangerous to stay because people were killing each other and there was no order,” said 45-year-old Saleh Ziah from Khartoum, who shares a tent with his wife and three children. “In Iraq, many people ran up to us and said, ‘Is this your city? If not, get out or we will kill you.’ ”

His wife, Eklas, wearing a smudged headscarf and a long blue dress, made a fire. All their belongings were bundled into a single suitcase. The blue tarp floor was furnished with just four thin mattresses.

Eklas apologized for the chipped Mickey Mouse mugs from which she served coffee.

“It’s not what I like, but this is my life,” she said with a weak smile, “a refugee life.”

Across the compound, Suifan talked to a few staffers sheltering from the wind. He said that as long as there are people in his camp, no matter how few, he would keep it open.

“I live in this tent, so I can feel what they feel,” he said. “And I will not close this camp until the last one leaves.”