UNITED NATIONS, 12 April 2003 — As envoys for a shattered government, Iraqi diplomats around the world kept right on working in limbo, confused, angry or resigned about the future and worried about families at home. Ambassadors in Vietnam and Venezuela were defiant. In Brazil, Iraqi diplomats set documents on fire. In Paris, an envoy at the Iraqi interests section at the Moroccan Embassy said he was “very very busy.”
But mostly it was an “Alice in Wonderland” existence, with the diplomats watching television like everyone else to get word of the war, Reuters correspondents around the world reported. “I’m living day by day,” said Bakr Al-Qaysi, an attache at Iraq’s Embassy in Athens. Cut off from Baghdad for at least two weeks, Iraq’s UN Ambassador in New York, Mohammed Al-Douri, was the first Iraqi official to concede publicly that “everything is over” as he turned up for meetings with Secretary-General Kofi Annan and talked to a variety of ambassadors.
Al-Douri kept up a busy schedule when the war began, granting interviews, blasting the United States and Britain in the UN Security Council. But in the last week, he prepared to make his way home, worried about his family and clearly showing the stress, his friends say. “There is no government that I represent. I am representing my country right now,” Al-Douri told Reuters.
Despite Iraqis tearing down President Saddam Hussein’s pictures in Baghdad, his portrait still graced the walls in many embassies. In Jakarta, it stayed in a display case in front of the Iraq’s Embassy, on the same street as the private residence of Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
Amid scenes of US troops sweeping into the heart of Baghdad, Iraq’s Ambassador in Venezuela, Taha Al-Abassi predicted continued resistance. “The war does not end, resistance will continue ... I think it will be a long marathon war,” he told Reuters in Caracas.
Al-Abassi, who during the US-British advance had defended Saddam’s government in defiant news conferences, said he hoped to return home. “I do nothing wrong, I have my family there.”
In Vietnam, Ambassador Salah Al-Mukhtar took up his post only three weeks ago and immediately warned that if he ran into US, British or Australian envoys, he would slap their faces. On Thursday, he said, “I will never shake hands with assassins — definitely. This is our homeland destroyed by British and Americans.”
He told Reuters that if he returned to his homeland it would be as a “freedom fighter” and “fight back against America and other colonialist forces.”
In Brasilia, Iraqi diplomats were seen burning documents in the heavily-guarded embassy grounds. “What they burn is their business,” a Brazilian Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Adday O. Al-Sakab, acting ambassador in India, said, “We are still functioning as usual. We have no instructions from Baghdad or from the Indian government. The staff have got salaries and everything is ordinary.”
Shortly before the war, the US asked about 60 countries to expel senior diplomats, close the embassies and freeze assets until a new government could be formed. Romania which expelled five diplomats, said no decision had been taken about those remaining. But the Philippines was hesitating about accepting credentials from a newly-arrived Iraqi ambassador-designate.
