Vit Pohanka - power, chaos and the absurd: impressions of the war from Kuwait
Vit Pohanka is Czech Radio's chief foreign affairs correspondent. He recently returned to Prague after a month covering the war in Iraq from Kuwait City. Here Vit talks of some of the lasting impressions from his stay in the Gulf.
"I remember the first air-raid. People didn't know where to go. Then people learned where to go and started going to the shelters. But what you could see in the street when the siren sounded was that some people would go directly to the shelter and other people just wouldn't care at all. They would be having their cup of coffee, and they wouldn't feel threatened. Yet other people would hurry down to the shelter and would feel threatened. So it looked kind of absurd - that's the only word that comes to my mind.
Another aspect that comes to my mind very vividly is the impression of these huge military columns, American mainly, but sometimes British, heading into Iraq. What you could see was these huge, long, long columns of military vehicles just pouring into Iraq. Just the amount of these vehicles and the length of these columns that were just pouring in gave you the impression, maybe even fear, of something that simply cannot be stopped, and that's definitely going to stick in my mind for a long, long time.
And a third thing that comes to my mind when I think of that time is this experience that I had when I accompanied a humanitarian convoy of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent into southern Iraq. We went to a village called Safwan, which is right next to the border, and we didn't quite know what to expect, because we hadn't been there before. And the situation when we arrived was a complete mess. There was no proper organization concerning the delivery of the humanitarian aid, the Red Crescent people just started handing it out from their trucks and there was an enormous crowd of people around them, and I could see some of the Iraqi people carrying away five boxes of humanitarian aid, other people with one box, some people struggling to get any box at all, and somehow it just gave me this prevailing feeling that there's no justice in this world, and yet there was this kind of good will behind the humanitarian aid, even though it wouldn't help in large numbers. But this was my first experience with Iraq, and it was an experience of complete disorganization, complete mess, and that's what I think I will remember to the end of my life really."
