Kuwait Times

Published Date: November 24, 2009

JEDDAH: Braving the swine flu pandemic and tensions between the Saudi hosts and Shiite Iran, more than 2.5 million Muslim faithful are descending on the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah this week for the hajj. Under heightened monitoring by some 20,000 medical staff and more than 100,000 security personnel, the world's largest annual pilgrimage kicks off tomorrow in western Saudi Arabia.

Four deaths from the A(H1N1) virus announced on Saturday - the first among pilgrims -served as a warning to the faithful who have mostly eschewed surgical masks and other preventive measures. But the number was less than had been feared by the Saudi authorities. Pilgrims from from all over the world have poured into Saudi Arabia, by plane, bus and boat since October, for what for many is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Among the other concerns, Saudi officials are hoping also that repeated deadly stampedes - the last in 2006 left 364 dead - are a thing of the past. Builders just completed a massive five-storey pedestrian walkway for the most crowded stage of the hajj - the stoning of the devil at the Jamarat in Mina valley - designed to avoid the panics of the past. The 950-m-long, 80-m-wide bridge cost $1.2 billion.

Swine flu has been a major concern since it reached pandemic level earlier this year. By Saturday, only 20 pilgrims had been diagnosed with the disease. Twelve had been treated and discharged, four died and four remained in hospital. Health ministry spokesman Dr Khaled Marghlani said the four dead - three 75-year-olds and a teenage Nigerian girl - all had health problems ranging from chest infection to cancer that made them highly vulnerable. "They all had pre-existing conditions," Marghlani told AFP.

After a May conference of international health experts, Saudis decided not to ban pilgrims from higher-risk groups - the elderly, children and the already ill. With the hajj a duty for all able Muslims, Riyadh instead urged governments around the world to restrict the pilgrimage to healthy adults between 18 and 65. Doctors monitoring airport arrivals said there seemed to be fewer children and elderly this year, but not a sharp reduction.

As a precaution, Saudi Arabia has provided additional doctors and hospital beds, and stockpiled 1.5 million units of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to treat flu victims. "We have six health clinics in the Grand Mosque itself, working 24 hours," Dr Abdullah Al-Rabeeah said. But Rabeeah said he hopes as many as 20 percent of pilgrims will have been vaccinated against H1N1 before arriving. "We had the vaccination, but we are still worried a little bit," said Swaliha Khan just after arriving with her husband in J
eddah on Saturday from Ahmadabad, India.

The run-up to the pilgrimage saw a war of words between the staunchly Sunni Saudi authorities and Shiite Iran, the fiercest in years. Last month, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad charged that Saudi Arabia might mistreat the 65,000 pilgrims from Iran, the vast majority of whom are Shiite. Leading Saudi officials and clerics rejected the Iranian accusation and warned Tehran not to abuse the hajj for political purposes. Disturbances involving Iranian pilgrims kill
ed more than 400 people in 1987.

General Mansur Al-Turki, the interior ministry official in charge of hajj security, said he does not expect trouble, but warned that protests "are prohibited in the hajj and we will not let them take place". "We will not allow any actions that might disturb any other pilgrims, or affect their safety," he told AFP. Turki's focus is also on the possibility that Al-Qaeda could try to use the hajj as an opportunity to launch an attack on the kingdom.

Already this year, Saudi authorities have thwarted several attempted attacks by Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which is based in neighbouring Yemen. In late August one AQAP militant, pretending to turn himself in to the country's security czar, Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, exploded a small bomb in the prince's Jeddah palace. Only the would-be assassin was killed, but the attempt shocked the government.

This year's pilgrimage marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most stunning attacks in Saudi history, the Nov 20, 1979 seizure of the grand mosque in Makkah by a band of Muslim extremists. It took two weeks for the Saudi army assisted by French special forces to invade the holy sanctuary and eject the group in close combat that cost hundreds of lives. "We are taking all the countermeasures to make sure nothing like that could happen again," said Turki.

Dr Mahmoud Al-Srouji peers at a laptop computer screen showing technicolor images of a group of Indian pilgrims filing by, just off a flight from Mumbai in Jeddah airport's massive hajj terminal. "They don't know that we are already checking them," he said, referring to the small thermal camera scanning each person for a high body temperature. "It rings if the temperature is over 38 degrees (Celsius)," he said. "It is so sensitive, if you light up a cigarette way over there, it will sound," he said.

Srouji is just one cog in a massive operation to make the hajj work - several hundred thousand security officials, health workers, guides, translators, religious advisors and baggage handlers vying to do the impossible and make sure few get sick, lost, robbed or left behind on their once-in-a-lifetime trip to the holy land where Islam began.

At Jeddah airport, Javeed Ahmed of Mumbai is on his 14th trip leading dozens of Indians on the hajj. He said the Saudi management has improved year by year, and newly rebuilt hajj terminal arrival facilities have vastly alleviated past hassles. "This is much better than before," when tens of thousands of people would be pushing and shoving in passport and luggage queues.

It is chaos, but altogether pretty efficient, says French consul Christian Nakhle, who has to care for as many as 30,000 pilgrims coming from France. "We all work 24 hours a day, seven days a week for several weeks," he said. Jeddah is the main port of entry for pilgrims heading to the nearby holy places. At the airport's hajj terminal - an airy structure looking from a distance like a desert bedouin encampment - a passenger jet lands every few minutes, disembarking pilgrims from around the world into a hu
ge hall decorated with welcome banners and Panasonic advertisements.

It is a huge mixing bowl of ethnicities and germs. But Srouji said that of the 5,000 people a day who pass by his camera alone - there are 11 other such stations - so far he has picked up only one person with a feverish temperature. As well as the flu, the doctors police for vaccinations, and have already pushed on arriving pilgrims 300,000 oral polio vaccines, and 100,000 meningitis prophylactic-antibiotic combinations. "We have to watch them take it," says the terminal's medical director Dr Mohammed Al-H
arathy.

Caring for so many is not just a government effort. Hundreds of travel agents and foreign missions are all working round the clock to deal with myriad problems, says Nakhle. The French consulate has brought in extra staff to deal with the inevitable medical emergencies and lost passports and other travel problems. Last year, for instance, an aircraft showed up two days late to pick up its load of returning, hotel-less pilgrims.

This year, he has three French-speaking doctors on call fulltime, three dedicated motorcycle drivers to get documents and other supplies through impenetrable Makkah traffic, and roll-up mattresses for staff inside Makkah who follow the French hajj groups around full time, but sometimes cannot get back to their hotels. The motorcycles are crucial, he said. A year ago, a French pilgrim appeared to be having a heart attack. They had to load the man on the back of a motorcycle to get him through the traffic to
where a car could take him to hospital. Eventually, the consulate had to organise a flight for the man and a doctor to accompany him back to France for treatment. In addition to sleepless days and nights, taking care of the French pilgrims "involves a lot of money," Nakhle said.