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Iraq | |||
Last envoys ready to leave Iraqi capital | |||
2003-03-15 | |||
Bags are packed. Spouses and cooks have been dispatched. Letters of apology to the chief of protocol have been printed. Among the dwindling diplomatic corps of Baghdad, only one important official duty remains before ambassadors and consuls form their convoys across the Iraqi desert to Jordan, and that is their calculation on the timing of this war.
Good question for the Somali delegation: where are you safer, Baghdad or Mogadishu? "Do you think if I stay I would be seen as a hero at home? I would be crucified. People will say: 'You are too dumb to be an ambassador. Were you seriously thinking you could stop the war by being there?" Good question. He paused to turn up the volume on the television set, tuned permanently to CNN. "The dilemma is to strike a balance between leaving too soon and leaving too late. The point will come when it will be impossible to leave."
But it did that when the Italians were there. A parallel exodus is under way at the United Nations, where the quotient of international staff in Baghdad and in the northern Kurdish enclave, has been drastically reduced. The numbers of weapons inspectors has also been in flux since early March, and this dropped to about 80. The UN says this was a natural outcome of short-term contracts ending, and not a lessening of faith in their mission. Officially, the Arab envoys are staying - bar the Bahrain ambassador who has left - and a trio of ambassadors led by the Algerian envoy stepped out for tea yesterday at a cafe frequented by Baghdad intellectuals. But the Libyan envoy, and the dean of the diplomatic corps, has not been seen since the mid-February Eid holiday.
They never told you where they'd 'see you around'. The realists admit there is little to keep the diplomats here. Except for the Chinese, the Russians and the French, commercial interests in Iraq are marginal. A few dozen Indian and Pakistani nationals remain - students of Arabic on Iraqi government scholarships or those with years of residence - and those who want to go will be evacuated over the weekend. The diplomatic corps is granted relatively little access to the inner power circles of Iraq. Aside from the ambassador from Vietnam - who first met Saddam Hussein as his translator during a visit to Hanoi before he rose to power - none has seen the Iraqi leader except on television. The closest they have come is the ritual group photo following military parades - and even these events occur only once every few years. "It has not been very stressful, let me tell you," said one ambassador. But the countdown to war has shaken them from their routines. As they gather around their TV sets, there is a sense they are about to become central to a drama that they do not yet fully comprehend. "Let's face it," one said, "We are the ones who know least about what is going to happen." Typical diplomats! | |||
Posted by:Steve White |
#1 The story I find more telling is that many of these countries are giving Iraqi "diplomats" the heave-ho. There was some reportage a while back on these Iraqis "casing" potential US targets in foreign capitals, e.g., we go in, they respond with a car bomb in, say, Sofia. I know the Swedes and the Hungarians have booted out Iraqis in the last 48 hours so, despite some countries publicly saying Saddam hasn't been provably linked to terror, privately their security services must know Saddam has such a plan. |
Posted by: JDB 2003-03-15 20:36:48 |