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Learning the eruption of military actions against Iraq by US and other countries, a group of Chinese workers who once worked in Iraq more than a decade ago, expressed their strong hope for peace in Iraq on Friday.
These workers and technicians were sent by the then Chongqing International Company to work in Iraq and returned to China just before the 1991 gulf war.
"I want to tell people all over the world that war is terrific, and we need peace, not war," said Yan Jie, a female who is one of the 187 workers and technicians who worked in a textile plant in Diwaniya in Iraq, in 1990.
"I'm still worried about my Iraqi friends," said Tang Lixian, another woman worker from the No. 5 Textile Factory. She said, an Iraqi auntie has five sons, two of whom died in the war between Iraq and Iran, and three engulfed in the gulf war. "How could she live on after lost all her sons?" Tang said.
With the help of the Chinese embassy in Iraq, these Chinese workers and technicians left Iraq on Sept. 11, 1990, four months before the gulf war erupted on Jan. 17, 1991.
Yan Jie recalled that on the morning that day, when all the Chinese workers and technicians were to leave, they found that their foreign colleagues including Iraqis, Egyptians, Sudanese and Jordanese, tears in eyes, standing in line to see them off.
"All these foreign colleagues had respected us very much and praised we Chinese woman workers as capable and skillful," said Zeng Fanwen, an engineer with the Chongqing Textile Research Institute.
"We saw many refugees on the way to Jordan, especially in Iraq's border area. Many of them laid on the scorching desert and we didn't know whether they were alive or dead," Tang Lixian recalled.
"We saw a father used a tin to hold the urine of his child and drank it. That area of desert is called 'desert of death', and we didn't know how many of the refugees had survived," said Yan Jie.
"We were sympathetic with the pitiful refugees and gave them some of the food and water melons we brought with ourselves," Yan added.
Despite of twists and turns on the way, they returned to the motherland safe and sound, Zeng Fanwen said, adding "We really felt the grandness of our motherland at that moment."
"We do hope that there will be no bitterness and there will be now war, forever," Zeng said.
(Xinhua News Agency March 21, 2003)
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