KARAMA: The Jordanian-Iraqi border crossing Karama offers what many Iraqis have desperately longed for since the war and occupation of their country.
A simple sense of normalcy has returned to this place in the desert where United States soldiers largely leave the controls to the Iraqis and customs checks are almost the way they were before the war.
Travellers will not encounter any of the uniformed and well-fed former officials of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party drinking tea in the VIP area any more.
However, the old accustomed system of baksheesh and bribes is already well in place again and it is being operated almost as smoothly as during the era of Saddam.
“I can already tell from your face what a good man you are,” the driver of a long-distance cab shouts at one of the customs officials.
And the stocky forty-something officer whose brow is covered in sweat in the sweltering 42 degree heat answers quietly that the standard search of the car which requires at least 40 minutes of waiting time could easily be avoided — by paying a mere five US dollars.
The two young US soldiers who are watching the scene from 15 metres distance do not even notice how the dollar bill discreetly changes hand as the driver and the guard exchange the brotherly kiss customary among Iraqis.
The Jordanian driver who makes the trip from and to Amman and Baghdad three times a week even remembers the official from the old days.
“He has just been called back to work here, he was already here under Saddam,” he says.
Since the fall of the old regime the border checkpoint has become a little easier for the few foreigners who are crossing over to Iraq — most of them either journalists or members of aid organizations.
They no longer need to take the formerly obligatory AIDS test for which Saddam’s bureaucrats used to charge 50 dollars.
The former so-called “rolling pipeline” of thousands of trucks who had provided Saddam’s regime with oil from the then still supportive kingdom of Jordan also no longer exists.
Instead, articulated trucks and large lorries now cart everything from second-hand cars to food from Jordan into Iraq. The number of Jordanian and Iraqi travellers is also almost as high as before the war.
While there are no limitations on Iraqis leaving their country the Jordanians refuse entry to some who want to cross the border. The controls have been in place even before the fatal bomb attack on their embassy in Baghdad on August 7.
Sometimes, however, the Jordanian officials also turn a blind eye such as recently when the aged mother of an Iraqi resident in Jordan tried to enter the country.
As Iraq has not yet got a passport office, the counterfeiters in the Shia slums are frequented not only by criminals but occasionally also by average citizens. —dpa