A Nightmare to Remember: Fleeing from Saddam

chillibreeze writer — Nayantara Mallya

August 2nd, 1990, Kuwait City.

At 5 a.m., I peered out of my window. 2 fighter planes zoomed past in the rosy pre-dawn sky. I was just a fifteen-year-old, looking forward to returning to school in a month. Little did I know that this was the beginning of my Return to India Experience!

A week earlier, I’d returned from India, having spent my summer vacation with relatives. My parents had been touring Europe; they brought me a World Cup mascot keychain from Italy. I’d followed the football matches keenly from India, collecting SportStar magazines featuring the German captain Lothar Matthaeus.

Saddam Hussein had been amassing troops on the Kuwait border for weeks. My parents’ American friends warned them not to return to Kuwait. They laughed it off.

We awoke to find the phones dead. Kuwait TV was off the air. When the phones came back on, international calls were jammed. For a month, the rest of our family would not know our fate. BBC, our only source of news, confirmed through the static that we were now in the 19th province of Iraq!

Life in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait
Was Saddam chasing us? We had already suffered during the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war— living in Baghdad through bombings, black-outs and bitter cold; finally escaping to India with nothing but our lives.

We had started over in Kuwait and had been settled there for eight years. Now, our lives were being torn apart again.

My panic-stricken parents searched behind sofa cushions for precious fils. Used to the convenience of ATMs, they now counted exactly 17 Kuwaiti Dinars in change. We were in deep trouble, but all that my teenage mind could focus on was that half my friends were in India for their vacation. I might never see them again.

Unlike my father, who worked for a national petroleum company, most Indians’ passports were with their employers. And now, everything had shut down. Twice weekly, provision stores sold inferior-quality Iraqi produce and rations. Banks opened briefly for people to withdraw limited cash.

At one bank, a trigger-happy soldier shot into the air to control the crowd. The bullet ricocheted and killed an Indian. My mother lost her ID card while shopping; she cried in despair.

The crrrack of sniper fire was a regular background noise; for years, I detested the sound of Diwali crackers. Fighter jets screamed through the sky 24/7, and spires of smoke curled up from the horizon.

Going out was risky. Iraqi soldiers, very young or very old, would stop and search the cars, taking any food or money they found. They wore shabby uniforms and were hungry and untrained. The prolonged Iraq-Iran war had depleted the army. Our mostly Indian neighbours organised a night-watch, for cars were being stolen.

One day, two sixteen-year-old soldiers searched our building for hiding Kuwaiti resistance fighters. My parents pushed me aside during the search. Luckily, they did not intend to rape or pillage. They were excited to hear we had lived in Iraq and chatted about Baghdad with my father.

All through August, I hoped my school would re-open on September 1st, even if there were Iraqi soldiers patrolling the corridors. I just wanted my carefree childhood back. But my parents knew we had to leave. They stocked canned and packaged food and squirelled away money. My father, an asthmatic, ran out of inhalers, but found a pharmacy secretly open, and an Egyptian doctor smuggled tablets in her shoes for him.

It hit me when my father sold our TV and VCR to our Palestinian neighbour. I cried in anguish. The Palestinian was furious to see my game of Chinese Chequers. He objected to the six-pointed star outline saying it was the Star of David, or as he put it, “The Star of Devil”; the Devil being the State of Israel.

Preparing to Leave
Meanwhile, the Indian embassy had established a base in the Indian school to issue travel papers to the 1,70,000 Indian expatriates. My mother, a schoolteacher, volunteered on the team making priority lists.

Pregnant women came first, then invalids, students in the 10th and 12th, senior citizens, families, and finally bachelors. Kuwait airport was closed to commercial airliners.

India’s foreign affairs Minister I.K. Gujral visited Kuwait. He returned to India with some “influential” Indians and a large diplomatic bag with our letters, carrying the glad news of our safety to our families.

Some people left by ship, but that soon stopped. The evacuation plan agreed to between the Iraqi and Indian governments, included convoys of the Kuwait public transport buses. These would travel though Iraq upto the Jordan border where Jordan’s Indian embassy officials would escort the Indians to vacant school buildings, and then on to Amman airport.12 mercy flights would operate on a daily basis, repatriating us at the expense of the Indian government.

Only One Suitcase
We were scheduled to leave on 16th September. We were allowed a bag each. What does one take in such circumstances? We chose photo negatives, certificates, bank records, gold jewellery. Most of the space was occupied by food, water, juice packs, bedsheets, sweaters and medicines.

I remember arguing with my mother about my SportStar magazines. I won that one! My aunt had delivered her baby girl a week after the invasion. When they travelled, they carried only baby food, diapers and clothes.

Feeling unreal, we closed our apartment. A friend drove us to board the convoy bus. 36 people with 36 bags set off, white flags flying, on the 36 hour journey to Amman, with passenger lists, Iraqi authorities’ permission notes, bribes for the drivers in USD, KD and even Iraqi Dinars.

Expatriates to Refugees
Shortly, we left behind the tiny country of Kuwait, and crossed the Iraq border. Trucks passed us, carrying household goods bought for a song by poor Iraqis from the fleeing expatriates.

The heat was stifling, and we drank regularly to prevent dehydration, but also conserved it judiciously. With soldiers and looters everywhere, we did not even stop for a toilet break.

Passing through Baghdad, we saw larger-than-life cut-outs, statues, and murals of Saddam overwhelming the ancient city’s splendour. We traversed bleak deserts that baked in the day and chilled us to the bone as dusk fell. Cruel black boulders defined the road edges as we neared the Jordan border.

The buses dumped us near a long queue for Jordanian customs and returned to Kuwait. With night an hour away, we found ourselves in no-man’s land. No Indian embassy officials to greet us. Eventually, Jordanian buses agreed to take us to the airport, for a fee.

Before long, Jordanian soldiers halted the buses. Forced off, we huddled under a black moonless sky and turned to see the lights of a refugee camp, nicknamed Shaitan. This was one of the nightmarish camps shown by CNN, where refugees caught food thrown from trucks like beggars.

Our group refused to enter, even under threat of being shot dead. We sat on the cold sand, and I reclined under the sheer magnificence of star constellations twinkling across the heavens.

Saved by the International Red Cross
Indian embassy staff arrived with buses after midnight. Instead of school buildings, we disembarked outside another camp. The embassy took our passports and travel papers.

International Red Cross volunteers showed us into the brand-new and therefore very clean camp. Rows of canvas tents stretched across the desert, each accommodating about thirty people. Blankets were provided as we settled in, still in shock.

Bachelors from earlier convoys, who had been accomodated within Amman city, had absconded, preferring to become illegal immigrants in Jordan, to returning home. And so, here we were. Refugees in a camp.

Cold but healthy food was provided twice daily, khuboos (like Indian naan), tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese tins and apples. A medical tent served as a clinic and provided milk for babies. At one edge of the camp, twenty deep trenches served as makeshift open toilets. Women and children queued up, as men trekked to the hills. Some even bathed, but as the camp filled up, the stench dissuaded them. One afternoon, my mother washed my hair behind the tent, how lovely it felt!

We spent three days there. For me it was an adventure, as we roamed around finding friends. Kids dashed about playing football. Cigarettes and newspapers magically appeared. Some cooked hot food over lanterns and candles, but after a couple of fires, the Red Cross confiscated them. Our shoes were our pillows; it was also another way of preventing them from being robbed! The lucky few who managed to leave carried phone numbers of others’ families, conveying the message, “We’re coming!”

On September 21st, we clambered onto yet another bus with our passports, en route to the airport. We left behind our food, as our journey was almost over…..or so we thought.

Mercy Flights and a Hot Meal
Again, we were dumped quite a distance from our destination. The 12 flights promised by the Indian government were actually only 3. With refugees of every nationality thronging the building, Amman airport was utter madness.

Outside in the queue, we spent 20 hours without food, water, shelter or toilet facilities. A television crew filming us evoked my mother’s wrath; she enquired why they did not help us instead. They interviewed her! And had sandwiches delivered to us.

An Air India flight roared over our heads with its landing gear down, prompting our group to stampede into the airport, to wait two more hours. We were served hot food in the terminal, the first in six days. I remember wolfing down the spicy, piping hot pulao with peas, mushroom and corn.

On the flight, I watched Qayamat se Qayamat Tak while gobbling more scrumptious pulao. Flying over the Gulf, I bid adieu to Kuwait, with a lump in my throat. We’d had a good life there.

At Bombay Airport, we were given Rs. 100 from the Indian government, with a passport stamp reminding us to repay it. We called my uncle to pick us up and had a tearful re-union with my grandparents.

A journey that normally took 2.5 hours had taken six terrifying days. People enquired jokingly where we would settle next, for surely Saddam would hunt us down there too!

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—About our writer:

Nayantara says, "I'm an idealist, whose soul food is the written word, the library my temple and my retail therapy happens in bookstores! A "repeat NRI", I seem to be settled in Bangalore. I've taught biotechnology and CPR; my passion is writing, editing and speaking to the media for my adoption support group; for "timepass" I play my music keyboard, bake and embroider for my children."