It is 4.30 a.m. when the phone sounds what is not a wake-up call in these war weary days. It is from none other than my wife in distant India where the sun rises 2 1/2 hours before it does here. She can’t be blamed for her choice of the unsocial hour for the call — she has just seen images of the American invasion of Iraq on the TV. The burning of Baghdad, the thick clouds of smoke billowing from what is the cradle of a great civilization... and the picture was too frightening. She had to call to make sure I had survived the blitz. Added to it was the non-stop footage of haggard looking passengers with tired children in tow disembarking from passenger planes into media limelight to talk about how they managed to flee the bombs just in time. And one of the passengers interviewed was from Jeddah!
Mine was not the only wife to phone at an awkward hour. Though Saudi Telecom doesn’t have clear statistics about the number of calls that came through from the Sub-continent in the last three days, it certainly was in the thousands. Most expatriates who have their folks living in distant lands had to prove vocally that they were still alive.
For them, a war in Iraq is a war in the Gulf and anyone living anywhere in the region could get hit. No one was beyond the reach of deadly missiles which could pierce through the best of bunkers. Obviously, they were taking a cue from Saddam Hussein’s 1990-91 “mother of all wars” that sent many a Gulf resident scurrying for cover.
If the phone kept ringing through the day, it showed that one had more relatives than one thought or ever bothered to count. Everyone was suddenly concerned about one’s safety and everyone had to be repeatedly reassured that one was still in one piece.
Are we in the thick of war after all? Though we don’t feel its heat? We are and we are not. A few Western expatriates here have been targeted by gunmen in the run-up to the hostilities. No one knows if it was a wake-up call to the otherwise easy-going Western community. But the message went down and many fearful Westerners packed their families up and sent them home. Many stayed back, unfazed by talk of doomsday scenarios, in an open expression of solidarity with the local people.
Since the war proper got under way, things have been quiet on all fronts, especially along the Kingdom’s border with Iraq. The theater of war is so far removed from us in Jeddah that we even feel psychologically distant from its ravages.
We seem to be so insulated that we refuse to be sensitive to the impact of a war on our doorstep. War is not all hits and misses of missiles. Do we think of the innocent people who are at the receiving end of those missiles? Are we concerned about the people who have no choice but to fight the war?
It is time we sat up and thought as humans used to. Wishing the war away as the war itself is distant is unbecoming of us as human beings. We need to find our voice and make it heard.