Down But Not Out: A Kuwaiti Who Fights Back

By Kurt Holden

Call him Dr. M, because it's not his real initial. He literally recoils at the thought that someone in Iraq could identify him from this article. He's one of 100 members of his family outside Kuwait, but there are another 50 close relatives still there.

He was at the ruler of Kuwait's offices on personal business just a couple of days before the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion. He had worked there himself when he first came back from years of study in America and, seeing a former colleague, he asked if the government wasn't alarmed at the way the Iraqis were massing on their border with Kuwait even before negotiations had started.

"Saddam Hussain has assured the Emir he won't invade; he gave the Emir his word on it, " his friend explained knowingly. President Mubarak of Egypt had Saddam Hussain's word on it, too. So did King Hussein of Jordan. There was nothing to worry about. Neither the Kuwaiti army nor the border police were on alert.

Dr. M, a bachelor who lived with his extended family, went home considerably reassured. In recent years he'd seen a lot of brand new tanks and artillery being moved along back roads from Kuwaiti ports into Iraq to be used against Iran. Kuwaitis believe their government paid for more than $15 billion in Iraqi weapons. Saudis believe share was more than $60 billion. It would be unthinkable, Dr. M mused, that all that weaponry could be turned by one Arab country against the very Arab countries that had paid for it.

A Rude Awakening

No one in Dr. M's house knew anything about the invasion until they woke up the morning of Aug. 2 to find Iraqis directing traffic.

The next day Iraqi soldiers knocked on their door. They had already beaten up the guard at the outside gate, when he was slow to admit them. They entered the house and took away one of Dr. M's uncles. No one in the family has heard a word from or about him since.

His body didn't turn up in the morgue, so they hope he's in prison in Iraq. The prisons are so full, Dr. M has heard, that the Iraqis are using schools and even hotels. They don't put their Kuwaiti prisoners in the four-star Al Mansour Melia Hotel in Baghdad, however, where many American "guests" were detained under guard on the 10th floor.

"There is no one to speak for us, or to demand that Kuwaitis be treated in conformity with the Fourth Geneva Conventions," Dr. M says simply. "The Red Cross can't get into Kuwait. Amnesty International can't get there."

Dr. M says that in the first days after the invasion he personally saw a woman demonstrator killed and some men nearby killed or wounded when Iraqis fired on a demonstration peacefully protesting the occupation. He says the city was looted systematically almost from the beginning. He puts a twist on the story of ransacked hospital equipment. Patients were taken off life support equipment, he says, but much of it was thrown away rather than shipped to Iraq.

He says some Iraqi soldiers destroyed computers, thinking they were television sets that didn't work. They wouldn't touch beepers, thinking they might be bombs. Rape, as a systematic means of terrorizing the public, began after about a month.

In the first days, Dr. M believes, the Iraqis got about $3 billion in gold bullion out of Kuwaiti banks. They also looted the gold from the jewelry stores, which may have given the Iraqis close to another billion dollars in gold, Dr. M guesses.

After a month of occupation, Dr. M and some of his brothers, sisters, cousins, and their spouses and children saw their chance when the Iraqis and Iranians agreed to exchange prisoners remaining from their eight-year war. In a small convoy of half a dozen cars, Dr. M's family drove across the border to Basra, in southern Iraq, and then continued into Iran at a crossing where the prisoner exchange was proceeding under supervision of the International Red Cross.

When their trip took them through battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, their eyes watered and they started sneezing. In the first devastated town on the Iranian side of the border the children, and some of the adults, began vomiting. Dr. M thinks it was the residue of the poison gas used by both sides.

Scattering Across the Globe

He didn't have time to dwell on it. The family was safe in Iran but without money, so very soon family members were scattering across the globe.

Dr. M went from Iran back across to the Arab side of the Gulf at Dubai. A lot of Kuwaitis had preceded him into the United Arab Emirates, which, with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, was treating Kuwaiti refugees like princes, which some were.

Dr. M then went to the Sultanate of Oman, another Gulf Cooperation Council member state which produces some oil but which has a larger population and development needs to offset the oil royalties. Nevertheless, a member of the Omani government sought out Dr. M and other Kuwaitis the day after they arrived to provide "pocket money" from the Sultan. Dr. M was informed that free transportation was available at the hotel where the Kuwaiti refugees were staying at no charge and, the first time he used one of the cars, discovered it was from the Sultan's palace.

He subsequently visited Qatar and Bahrain, also GCC states, and found the same indescribable generosity. He didn't go to Saudi Arabia because he knew it already had the largest concentration of Kuwaiti refugees, said to number 250,000 by now. There the Saudi government provides hotel space until apartments and villas can be furnished and turned over for the use of each Kuwaiti family. The Kuwaiti government-in-exile, established in the Saudi summer capital of Taif, provides allowances for Kuwaitis who need help.

Many Kuwaitis who crossed into Saudi Arabia never went through the hotel transition stage at all, Dr. M says. As their cars left Kuwait and headed down the long roads to Dhahran or Riyadh, Saudis flagged them down to offer refreshments in private homes. They were invited to stay as long as they wanted, and many did until they could reunite with relatives scattered to the four corners of the earth.

The pre-invasion population of Kuwait, Dr. M says, was 1.8 million, of whom 700,000 were Kuwaitis and the others either long-term residents or short-term workers of various nationalities. There are about 200,000 Kuwaiti nationals still in Kuwait, and half a million outside. Of those who have escaped, half remain in Saudi Arabia, a lot have settled in Egypt, and others are in the other GCC countries and Syria.

Dr. M eventually flew to London, which has the largest concentration of Kuwaiti refugees in the West. There he offered his services to the rapidly growing Free Kuwait volunteer network.

Working in the West

Three major organizations are represented in both Britain and the US, he said. One of these is the Committee for Free Kuwait, which is concentrating first on work with governments. Some of its members already are visiting members of Parliament in London and Congress in Washington, DC. Americans who watched on C-SPAN the televised government of Kuwait presentation at the UN Security Council saw some of the Kuwaiti volunteers at work, under the guidance of Hill and Knowlton, a US public relations firm. They included Kuwaiti doctors, nurses and other eyewitnesses to the Iraqi occupation, who told their tales of rape, physical and psychological torture, and of summary executions of Kuwaitis caught in acts of resistance.

The same people had met reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, DC the day before. They claimed, as does Dr. M, that teenage boys caught writing nationalist graffiti were tortured for a day or two and then told to telephone their families to say the Iraqi police were bringing them home.

When the Iraqi police arrive, Dr. M says, they let the battered boy stagger toward his horrified family and then, before he reaches them, he is killed by police bullets.

If that sounds too brutal to be true, reflect on the fact that there no longer seems to be in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait anything remotely resembling the open defiance of the Palestinian intifada in Israeli-occupied territories.

In London, Dr. M says, he learned that 7,000 Kuwaitis are believed to be dead. Of these, 4,000 were killed in the fighting with Iraqi soldiers, and 3,000 afterward in incidents such as those he described. Thirty thousand Kuwaitis, he says, are unaccounted for and presumably in jail.

Two other organizations now active are the Kuwait Peoples Committee, working to mobilize US and British public opinion, and the Kuwait Students Association. It has organized successful demonstrations in London and, in the US, looks for support to the 1,500 Kuwaitis still studying at US universities.

Dr. M was one of those students not so long ago himself. He spent a year at Kuwaiti government expense in the US studying English, and then went to a US university where he took a Ph.D. in economics. He worked for his government when he first returned home. Later, he went into business for himself.

A Quick and Unwanted Transition

He seems a little bewildered by his quick transition from citizen of one of the wealthiest countries on earth to refugee of uncertain occupation. Is he a lobbyist? A PR man? Maybe a little of both.

He is wearing a button proclaiming that Kuwait Will Be Free. When the writer asks if he can have it, or some stationery with the same message to illustrate this article, the answer is, "Yes, but please return it to my office after you finish. It's the only one I have. " The office address is that of Hill and Knowlton.

That's Dr. M's story. The next day he'll be telling it in Los Angeles. There doesn't have to be war, the writer suggests, as we walk together to the door. The US obviously has the power to force Iraq out of Kuwait, either by military action immediately or within a year or so by embargo.

"But every day they're killing us." Dr. M responds. "In a year there may be no one left alive in Kuwait."

If that is the case, the writer suggests, more likely it will be because the last of the Kuwaitis have fled to neighboring countries to wait out the occupation.

"The Kuwaitis are going to be refugees, Dr. M acknowledges sadly. Reminded of the truly tender loving care Kuwaitis are receiving in their fellow GCC countries, he speaks from the heart.

"Before, no one really cared about the GCC, " he exclaims. "It was meaningless to us. Now we've learned its value when we need it. That's why, after this war, it really will work."

Although GCC Secretary-General Abdullah Bishara is a Kuwaiti, in fact his country didn't pay much attention to the organization, suspecting it was a vehicle by which Saudi Arabia hoped to dominate the smaller Arab states of the Gulf, or by which poorer Arab states hoped to get their hands into the pockets of fabulously rich Kuwait. It was the way Kuwaitis had come to regard many of their fellow Arabs.

Since they struck it rich almost a generation before many of their oil-producing cousins, however, the Kuwaitis were among the first to give the Palestinian refugees a helping hand, more than 40 years ago. Kuwait provided the jobs and opportunities that made the Palestinian population there the largest in the Gulf, and the most prosperous Palestinian community in the world.

"The Kuwaitis are going to be refugees," Dr. M acknowledges sadly.

As the years passed, however, for every story of Kuwaiti kindness, the down-and-out could tell stories of the other kind. A person born of Palestinian parents in Kuwait had to score in the 90s on admission tests to enter the University of Kuwait. A person born in the same year and in the same hospital, but of Kuwaiti parents, could secure admission with a score in the 60s. A chasm was opening between Kuwaitis and the foreign nationals living in their state.

But now the Kuwaitis are down on their luck and working hard to tell their own story and get the political and military help they feel they need. Twenty years ago a Kuwaiti might have told an American: "Our cause is just and if you can't see that, it's your problem, not ours. " Now Kuwaitis, like Dr. M, are explaining that, although they never took anyone else's land or oil, the Iraqis have taken from them the fabulous city-state they and their parents built in only two generations out of a collection of tiny fishing and pearling ports on the edge of the desert.

When the Kuwaitis return, they know they will find their homeland profoundly changed-for the worse. They, themselves, however, may be profoundly changed—for the better.

Dr. M, a well-spoken and meticulously dressed young man, probably never had to ask a favor of anyone before this year, and might have been too proud to do so anyway.

Now he and his countrymen need a helping hand, and are getting it. In the future, they'll be less likely to ignore others in need.

Dr. M's forefathers in Kuwait built huge refineries, used the flare gas to distill water from the sea, imported generators to turn a thousand water pumps, and turned a desert peninsula into a giant oasis.

The refineries that supplied the generators and the pumps that turned everything green may be destroyed when Dr. M's contemporaries return to their looted homes. But someday his homeland will be as green as it would ever have been before the forced exodus of his people. Tears are water too.

Kurt Holden is a former film writer from California who divides his time between the United States and the Middle East.