At Riyadh reunion, air’s thick with perfume and nostalgia; outside, the sand brings back smell of war
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is the last place you would expect to be in to speak at a college reunion. It’s also an unlikely place for you to expect to speak to a hall overflowing with not just nostalgic old boys, but also so many women.
In Saudi Arabia, you need special permission to have women attend a public function with men, even if they sit separately. But the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) alumni here are influential enough to swing it at least for the Sir Syed Memorial Day.
It’s a happy, family occasion. Children play in the hall, spray oodles of cola, even sprint up and down the dais—you have to understand, expats in Saudi Arabia are usually not allowed domestic help, so the women must carry their children should they choose to go out.
But there were so many of them here, even singing along as a chorus of younger ”old boys” sang their college’s official song, yeh mera chaman, yeh mera chaman, main apne chaman ka bulbul hoon.
The air is thick with perfume, and nostalgia. One instant source whispers that there are as many factions here as there are letters in Aligarh. But Aligarhians are an attentive, sentimental audience. They miss home, that’s obvious. They take pride in their Indianness, that is worn on their sherwani and achkan sleeves.
The loudest cheers come not when I tell some silly joke but when another speaker mentions the casualties suffered by (Indian) Muslim troops at Kargil, of how they surprised the enemy as they assaulted the hills to the war cry of Allah-o-Akbar.
”The Pakistanis thought their reinforcements had come, they realised too late it was the Indians, they just happened to be Muslim,” he said. The fellow Aligarhians applauded. But why the talk of war at a happy college reunion?
Saudi Arabia does not give tourist visas. You have to have a pretty serious reason to get here. The last time I was here, in 1991, was to cover a war. Now, my reason may be to speak at a college (not my college) reunion but somehow it’s timed with at least the whiff of a war.
There is something about sand that smells of war. It may be because many decisive battles of our history have taken place in deserts, from the crusades to Al Alamein to Sinai, and so on. Cavalry needs the desert to flow in its full majesty. It used to be horses and camels then, tanks and APCs now.
The last time I was hereabouts, the smell of cordite was for real. The 600-km drive from Dhahran to Kuwait, liberated just the day before (February 26), took you across a junkyard of Iraqi tanks and trucks as far as the horizon stretched, carbonised black by smoke rising from oil wells Saddam’s fleeing troops had set on fire.
The battlefield — if you could call it that — was so fresh, you could pick up an Iraqi rifle, helmet, even a workable tank, as a souvenir. The Americans had barely finished their pursuit of the routed Iraqis, they hadn’t yet had the time to clean up.
There were warnings of live shells and mines that nobody took seriously, at least not the journalists. Less than 50 yards from the road, lay bodies of a half dozen Iraqis, with three rifles half-buried in an overnight sandstorm and reporters routinely stopped for that picture to go with the letter from the editor/publisher to say his correspondent had been to the battlefield.
It was an odd battlefield though. There was no sign that anybody had even fired back at the Americans or, if he did, had hit anything. Sure enough, it later turned out that most American casualties came from friendly fire. The tank treads pointed only one way because one army was in retreat and the other in pusuit.
Another 50 kilometres up the road from Kuwait City was the great graveyard of Iraqi tanks where the Huey Cobra gunships had trapped a large, retreating cavalry division in a textbook killing ground, a depression between steep dunes on the sides making escape impossible.
An American pilot later told the CNN it was a ‘duck-shoot’. How the Iraqi commander got his tanks there, is a question he probably did not live to answer. But if you weren’t on that highway on that day, you would never know what a massacre of tanks is all about.
The final battle of Operation Desert Storm, or Saddam’s Umm Al Maariq (the mother of all battles) was not a battle at all. It was a rout, more in the nature of a colonial, punitive expedition. Nobody got the time to fight back. Nobody would have even had a chance.
YET another famous battle in yet another expanse of desert not so far away had not been so uneven. The challenge of covering that war in the strength of two (with a photographer), was in how to be on both sides of the battlelines and yet meet the same deadline.
Here, actually, there were more than two sides. There were Iraq and Saudi Arabia (where most of the US-led forces were stationed), and also slightly distant Israel where Saddam was raining his Scuds. It was, in fact, the only thing he did in that war that gave his supporters cause for cheer.
In the Arab/Palestinian street, particularly in neighbouring Jordan, each missile attack conjured up images of the end of Israel. Mobs danced in the streets of Amman, chanting Ya Saddam, ya habib, udrub, udrub Tel Aviv (O Saddam, my dear, wreck and destroy Tel Aviv). We were sure we were dying of poison gas when first Scuds fell in Tel Aviv, in the fairly fashionable neighourhood of Ramat Gan. An apartment building took a direct hit and was pummelled to the ground. But there were no dead.
If there is one thing the Israelis know, it is to save lives—at least their own. Since Saddam had threatened poison gas attacks, every individual had already been issued not only gas masks but even pre-loaded syringes of antidote and instruction booklets.
The visiting foreign press too were handed their masks and the rest along with their credentials at the office run by a very chirpy Linda Rivkind, who greeted us both, in Hindi and Bengali. She was a Jewish immigrant from Kolkata, married to one of Israel’s foremost trauma surgeons. We had never been to Israel before; she had never seen an Indian journalist there.
We had also never spent a night in a basement muffled by gas-masks. We Jews know how to handle poison gas, Israelis would say only half-jokingly, Hitler trained us a half century ago. They had set up special hospitals, with conveyor belts of stretchers, rows of showers and schoolkids dressed in PVC — so victims of any chemical attack could be scrubbed, washed and shoved into the wards without delay.
Saddam stuck to conventional warheads. Probably he was scared of using the more lethal ones for fear of retaliation. More likely he didn’t have any, that his weapons of mass destruction existed only in his lieutenants’ tall talk and the western media folklore.
THE ‘fighting’ was ending sooner than anybody had imagined. But getting from Tel Aviv to Kuwait in times of war wasn’t such an uncomplicated challenge. The journey necessitated a 475-km drive to Cairo past the Sinai desert and onwards by air to Dubai and Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, then the staging post for Kuwait.
The highway across the Sinai stretched some 200 kilometres and you could speed as much as you wished. But there were many distractions on the way.
It was here that the most bitter tank battles of the Yom Kippur war were fought in 1973. Its reminders were all there: wrecks of tanks and guns, the odd rusty helmet, rocket casings, shell casings. You got closer to a dune you discovered the silhouette on the top was actually a tank that got stopped by a rocket just as it was climbing on for a perfect vantage position.
There were wrecks, stretching almost up to the Suez, that bore both markings, Egyptian and Israeli. This was no one-sided rout. This was the most keenly contested battle in modern West Asian history.
The Egyptians, to date, claim they won it and with some justification. The Israelis say their recovery from early setbacks is more evidence of their invincibility. This war made Ariel Sharon into a hero and his mad (but spectacular) dash at the head of Israel’s last tank reserves across the Suez is the latest chapter added to the textbooks of tank warfare.
Why either side, even after the peace accord (the Sinai was with the Israelis till the accord and then returned to Egypt), had not cared to clear out the junk is difficult to say. It could be that the junk trade or the kabaadi bazaar in those parts is not as well-developed as here. Or it could be that somebody thought of leaving some of the wreckage there to remind future generations of what war could mean, without solving anything.
INTERESTING, isn’t it, that while the war with no clear decision (Sinai) led to the Camp David accords and solved a problem, or at least a large part of it forever; the other, with a knockout decision (Desert Storm, Kuwait) is now setting the stage for a repeat in just over a decade?
The war was an idea that the Saudis not only willingly accepted in 1991, they bankrolled it, not complaining even when the Americans billed them for replacement prices even for decades-old equipment and munitions. Today, the equation has is more complex.
The last war was about liberating Kuwait and preventing further Iraqi expansion in the Gulf. Tomorrow’s war (if it happens) will be about ridding the world of Saddam, and why? Because he is such a tyrant, a despot, is producing weapons of mass destruction, has crushed all democratic forces, massacred his minorities and is harbouring fundamentalist forces that threaten the entire world with terrorism.
The reason this is being greeted in the Gulf now with apprehension rather than enthusiasm is simply that while nobody doubts Saddam is guilty of much of this, it is also well known that he is not the only one. It was far simpler to support a war for territory and liberation, it is tricky backing one for ideas, ideology and a political philosophy.
Too many rulers and regimes in the Islamic and Arab world routinely trample democracy, curb minority rights, are despotic and corrupt. Some even have or are working on weapons of mass destruction. If the UN and the world at large were to today endorse a US invasion of Iraq on these charges, who knows whose turn it will be next?
Further, the last war ended with Kuwait’s liberation. This one won’t end with Saddam’s departure. Who knows, I might just be back soon enough, as the desert air hangs heavy with the talk of yet another war.