After Saddam disappears from walls, they have nowhere to go

There's not much choice — images of forgotten ruins in Iraq on a Syrian channel and a meeting of European Union leaders on Al Jazeera. ...

There’s not much choice — images of forgotten ruins in Iraq on a Syrian channel and a meeting of European Union leaders on Al Jazeera. In a room filled with tension and helplessness, the staff of the Iraqi embassy in New Delhi switch from one channel to the other. They settle on ancient ruins of Iraq.

A week after the fall of Baghdad, they have got out of the denial mode and have reconciled to the reality. Saddam Hussein is gone.

So has he from the walls of the embassy. The face of Saddam Hussain which used to beam from the wall of the reception has now been replaced by a picture of two smiling women picking fruits. They say his photographs have been dismantled from every room in the embassy and are stacked away in the storeroom.

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They are now citizens of no-man’s land. The diplomats say that they haven’t got any communication from the Indian government and their government is no more. ‘‘We haven’t recieved any communication from the Indian government… We represent our country here. We are living peacefully here,’’ said Omar, a third secretary at the embassy, speaking on behalf of Charge d’affairs Adday-ul Sakab.

The embasssy and its employees — eight diplomats and a few Iraqi and Indian staff — don’t have much to do. A few inquiries come in about visas. One came from a group of Indians in Mumbai who wanted to visit Iraq for religious purposes. The routine for the last couple of days has been the same for all of them. Meetings, television and more television. Their only link with home.

But no channel has the news that they want — news from relatives and families back home. Abd. H, a translator who was posted to India in January, hasn’t heard from his wife and three children since the war started. They live in Umariya in West Baghdad.

‘‘My family is there but I haven’t heard from them since the war started. We all have parents or relatives about whom we are very worried,’’ he said. He has been trying to contact his family through Indian journalists who have gone to Iraq but hasn’t succeeded so far.

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‘‘There is no way I can communicate with my family. Here we have nothing to do but sit and wait. We are all living with high tension. We don’t know about our future,’’ he said.