Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102030132
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Der Spiegel
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Millions of Egyptians, Yemenis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Sri Lankans and Filipinos have fled the fighting or been expelled for political reasons.
The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel has examined the plight of some non-combatant victims.
Dirt-poor Yemen, for example, was forced suddenly to reabsorb a million workers (the equivalent of a sudden influx of 20 million refugees to the United States) because the Saudis, angered by Yemeni support for Iraq, stripped them of their possessions and threw them out.
The war's impact even is being felt in far-away Africa, as aid donors like Britain have had to scale back in order to finance their involvement in the war.
The auto mechanic Salih Ali Salim crouches with his wife and four children in a hut he has cobbled together from pieces of plywood and scraps of gunny sack.
It is one of thousands of such huts lining both sides of the road from Harad, near the Saudi border, to the port city of Hudeida in western Yemen. Only a few weeks ago, Salih still was living in luxury. He had his own car-repair shop in Saudi Arabia, and a house with "a refrigerator, color TV and a washing machine," he proudly recounts, as well as two autos of his own and some 80,000 riyals (about $20,000) in his bank account.
Then one night the police came. He was told to leave immediately, with his family but without his possessions. "Beat it" he was told. "Let your president feed you."
For 57 of his 60 years, Salih has lived abroad, finding work in other countries as ambitious Yemenis always have done.
As many as 2 million Yemenis have built houses, roads and factories for their richer neighbors. As laborers, craftsmen and businessmen, they were able to profit from the oil sheikhs' burgeoning wealth. For years, as foreigners but still Muslims, they remained the most reliable "guest workers" in the kingdom of oil, a class above the menial laborers from Asia.
Unlike other foreigners, Yemenis were not required to have domestic sponsors in order to work - not, that is, until last August, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. And the government of the newly reunified Yemen, eager to preserve its close ties to Iraq, refused to join the coalition allied against the Iraqi aggressor.
The attitude of their southern neighbor infuriated most Saudis. In September they revoked all the Yemenis' special rights and chased them from the country in circumstances that Amnesty International has described as a brutal violation of human rights. In all, nearly 1 million Yemenis were expelled.
Most of the uprooted Yemenis were forced to leave their possessions behind or to sell them for a fraction of their worth. Many others were robbed at the border. Customs officials took their food and even their water, and some of the elderly, the ill or the infant refugees died before reaching the Yemeni border post.
For bitterly poor Yemen, the forced return of a million people within a few months represents a catastrophe - one the world has ignored.
When the U.S. secretary of state, James Baker, visited Yemen in November and the San'a regime tried to tell him that this would be like a wave of 20 million refugees suddenly pouring into the United States, he had no comment.
So it is that Yemen has become one of the hardest-hit victims of the gulf crisis, even though it is not directly involved in the war. The Yemenis forced out of Saudi Arabia left behind assets and possessions valued at $10 billion. Billions more were lost through the interruption of remittances from abroad, the cancellation of economic aid, oil orders that went unplaced, a sudden plunge in tourism and in contracts for the oil refineries and the harbor at Aden.
Another neighbor, literally between the fronts of the gulf war, has received a bit of help but its situation offers little hope. And unlike Yemen, the very existence of this country is endangered: King Hussein's desert kingdom of Jordan.
Like Yemen, Jordan has been boycotted by Saudi Arabia because it has not declared its unconditional support for the anti-Iraq coalition. Its once burgeoning trade with Iraq has come to a virtual standstill, as has tourism. Some 120,000 guest workers have returned from occupied Kuwait, and nearly a million other foreigners forced out of the gulf zone, primarily Egyptians and Asians, have added to Jordan's already huge refugee population.
But the war in the gulf has threatened not just the neighboring lands; its effects could plunge many far-flung Third World nations deeper into poverty.
Poor and overpopulated nations like Bangladesh, and countries like India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines have more than 2.5 million guest workers in the gulf region. They have sent billions of dollars in earnings back to their homelands, providing the hard currency those countries need to buy important imports.
For long-suffering Bangladesh, the $800 million that its gulf emigrants sent home each year constituted the country's largest source of foreign currency. Pakistan received more than $2 billion a year from its workers in the gulf.
And even big India, whose entire foreign-currency reserves have dwindled to some $1.5 billion, can ill afford the loss of the $1.1 billion its workers sent home each year from the gulf.
Only the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal still is showing a profit from the gulf. Its Gurkhas, 2,000 of whom serve as bodyguards to the sheiks, send home $100,000 a year.
The invasion of Kuwait has driven some 500,000 Asian workers out of the gulf - and many of them left just as poor as they were when they arrived. They had entrusted their life's savings to Kuwaiti banks, and thus lost them overnight.
On the Kerala coast of southern India, in Bengali villages and in the Pakistani mountains, these returning workers now are swelling the armies of unemployed, adding fuel to the explosive social situation in these poverty-stricken lands.
On top of all this, the homeowners in the region, who up to now had profited from the gulf crisis because of the rising oil prices (particularly Saudi Arabia and the emirates), have lowered the wages they pay their foreign workers. For there is still an abundant supply - Egyptians driven out of Kuwait, for example, who have no future in their homeland.
But the war has not hurt only those countries with workers in the gulf region, it also has struck a blow against economically ailing countries like those of Africa, so utterly dependent on foreign aid.
When a war costs those countries fighting it a half-billion dollars a day, they have nothing left to spend on the hungry of the world. Britain, for example, has said that as a result of the gulf war, it could not increase its food assistance to Africa by a single penny this year.
In Africa, where 27 of the 42 least-developed countries are, a far worse famine threatens this year than even in the great drought year of 1984-85. The United Nations estimates that 20 million Africans could starve unless 3.2 million tons of grain are provided soon.
While the West has its eyes on the gulf and West Europeans are sending food packets to Leningrad, "a whole continent is going begging," wrote one bitter correspondent from Africa.
The amount of money Britain spent in the gulf even before the outbreak of war - some half-billion pounds - "would be enough to feed all the hungry Africans until the middle of the year," according to the British aid organization Oxfam.
by CNB