Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150229
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: AMMAN, JORDAN LENGTH: Long
Protests swept across several countries, including Yemen, the Sudan, Libya and Tunisia, which along with Jordan declared a period of national mourning.
But on this matter, as on the war itself, the Arab world revealed its deep divisions. Countries like Egypt and Syria, which belong to the anti-Iraq coalition, blame President Saddam Hussein for the civilian deaths, accusing him of leading his own people to slaughter by refusing to withdraw his troops from Kuwait.
No group was more outraged by the American action than Palestinians. In the occupied West Bank, they began what was scheduled to be a three-day commercial strike, while thousands of other Palestinians marched through the narrow alleys of refugee districts in Lebanon.
Palestinian leaders based in Tunis and Damascus said the bombing in Baghdad on Wednesday was an "abominable crime." Some of them charged that it was part of an American war of extermination being waged against Iraq's people to avoid confronting the Iraqi army in a ground war.
Their accusations reverberated across the angry streets of Jordan, where half the people are Palestinians and sentiment for Saddam as an Arab champion runs strong.
"Is this how they are going to liberate Kuwait?" said Walid Tarabsha, a chemical engineer who was reading Thursday morning's black headlines at a newsstand in downtown Amman. "Does this now give me the right, too, to go out and kill every civilian I see?"
That was not the view, however, from Arab nations intent on removing Saddam from Kuwait and from power, even though they also expressed pain over the deaths of civilians.
In a commentary, the state-controlled Damascus radio said in the Syrian capital: "The heart of every Arab bleeds when the pictures of death and destruction are shown, except for one heart that remains unmoved. It is the heart of the ruler in Baghdad, who could put an end to this if only feelings of pain could touch his heart."
Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, also attacked Saddam personally, saying, "It is inconceivable for a ruler to make propaganda hay from the corpses of his citizens."
The deaths in Baghdad were totally ignored by some Saudi Arabian newspapers and scantly covered by others. In gulf oil states like Dubai and Qatar, newspapers spoke scornfully of Saddam, accusing him of having remorselessly committed war crimes on a huge scale over the years.
On Amman's sun-bleached streets and in the sullen lanes of the Beqaa Palestinian district 15 miles outside the city, no one could be found who believed the U.S. version of events: that a reinforced concrete building bombed in a residential neighborhood of Baghdad was a military command and control bunker and not the civilian bomb shelter the Iraqis said it was.
There was virtually universal agreement in the district that American bombers were deliberately going after civilians and that the targets included Jordanians trying to flee the war.
On Wednesday, refugees crossing into Jordan from Iraq reported that 30 Jordanian civilians on the road from Baghdad, including four children, had been burned to death on Saturday when their bus came under an allied air attack.
"The Americans knew these were civilian targets," said Mahmoud Daoud, a 34-year-old civil engineer. "American has failed in its military campaign. It has not stopped the Iraqi military. So now it is hitting civilian targets."
The Jordanian government, denouncing the bombing in Baghdad as a "horrible massacre," declared three days of national mourning and ordered that flags fly at half-staff on official buildings. Across the capital, people also draped black flags from lampposts.
King Hussein, who last week abandoned his previously professed neutrality in the war to side with Iraq, demanded that the United Nations Security Council order an immediate cease-fire and send an investigating team to Baghdad.
United Nations resolutions authorizing force to remove Iraq from Kuwait were being used, the king said, to "wage a war of systematic destruction against Iraq" that constituted a "flagrant and callous violation of humanitarian law."
On Wednesday night, police officers turned away about 1,000 Jordanians who had tried to march on the U.S. Embassy in Amman. But apparently in an attempt to defuse rising tensions, the government imposed no such restraints Thursday.
Hundreds of protesters stood outside the embassy's main entrance, where at one point they hurled stones and clumps of dirt scooped up from plant beds.
Some of them then marched to the nearby Egyptian Embassy, where they broke several windows. In another part of the city, demonstrators also broke windows at a building that houses United Nations organizations.
None of these protests led to injuries. But on Wednesday night, a German student in his early 20s was stabbed in the chest by a Jordanian man who was described by the authorities as emotionally overwrought after watching televised images of the Baghdad disaster. The police said he had attacked the first foreigner he saw, thinking he was an American.
The victim was said by the German Embassy to be in fair condition at a military hospital.
by CNB