AMMAN, 20 March 2003 — The day after US President George W. Bush issued a war ultimatum to Iraq, Munzer Salah went to the supermarket in neighboring Jordan to buy a carton of milk — and walked out with $250 of supplies. Despite government insistence that there is no need for panic and that supplies are readily available across the country, Jordanians have started to stockpile basic food necessities, kerosene and petrol.
“It was like a revolution all around me, people were stacking up food and supplies in their shopping cart. I was stung by this and I found myself imitating them,” Salah told AFP yesterday. Before he knew it his carton of milk was buried under sacks of rice, flour, sugar and potato chips, containers of cooking oil, sticks of butter, batteries for the radio and a multitude of other supplies.
As the cash register rang up a bill of 180 dinars ($250) for Salah, rumors that Jordan might impose martial law and curfews in the event of a war on its eastern neighbor began making the rounds in the country.
But the government, which held an exhaustive meeting Tuesday that ran well into the evening to map out a strategy to face a possible backlash from a war on Iraq, was quick to deny such possibilities. “There won’t be martial law or curfews. Life will go on as normal in Jordan,” Information Minister Muhammad Adwan told AFP. “There is no reason for anyone to panic, we have enough supplies and commodities in the event of a war,” he said.
According to official sources Jordan has 200,000 tons of emergency stocks of wheat to cover four months, as well as enough rice, sugar and cooking oil for a six-month period. Jordan has increased oil imports from Iraq, which provides it with all its supply, to build reserves in case of war and has doubled storage capacity at the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company from a level of some 300,000 tons to 600,000 tons.
Nevertheless motorists have begun to queue outside petrol stations to fill up their gas tanks as well as jerry cans with the precious “black gold” to store at home in case of shortages. A manager at Safeway, one of the leading supermarkets in Jordan, told AFP that the rush to buy began a week ago when news that a war was increasingly imminent began to emerge.
On a lighter note, the popular Al-Dustour newspaper summed up the situation in a cartoon published yesterday showing the “preparedness” of the Jordanian people. The drawing showed a basic list of six items which should be stored for the dark days ahead: a 40-liter tea kettle, a digital satellite receiver, several 50-kilogram bags of rice, extra-large family size bags of chip, a barrel of soda drinks and an over-size sack of peanuts.
On the other hand, Jordanian officials said yesterday a special camp will be set up in the no man’s land between Iraq and Jordan to process refugees fleeing Iraq in the event of a war. Refugees seeking to enter the country will be processed in this “assembly” camp before they are sent to two other temporary camps near the Jordan-Iraq border, the sources said.
The “assembly” camp will be run by the Jordanian authorities who will check the refugees’ identities for security reasons before referring them to the other compounds. Jordan agreed in mid-February to set up two temporary refugee camps near Ruweished, the last frontier town which lies 60 kilometers before the Karama border post with Iraq. They will be able to accommodate 10,000 refugees and will be managed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Jordanian Red Crescent.
One of the camps will be destined for Iraqi refugees and the other for “third country nationals”, who will stay there for a short transit period before being repatriated to their own countries in line with an agreement between Jordan and the Geneva-based International Migration Organization, the officials said. Jordan took in 1.3 million refugees out of 2.5 millions who fled Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.
