Liberated Kuwait
Ever since the emir was returned to his throne,
repression, rape, and reprisals have become
staples of life in Kuwait
By Dennis Bernstein and Larry Everest
DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS, and pundits alike have
described the "liberation of Kuwait" as an apex in U.S. foreign
policy since the end of World War II. With great fanfare and
pronouncements of new openness and democracy for the oil-rich
kingdom, the emir returned to his palace, rebuilt complete with
gold toilet seats courtesy of the U.S. Army.
But those promises of freedom lasted only as long as television
news teams stayed in Kuwait City. Reports from human rights
monitors detail an ongoing Kuwaiti campaign to punish and expel
the 350,000 Palestinians living in Kuwait before the war. Today,
all but 60,000 Palestinians have been driven out by a combination
of summary executions, torture, detention, forced expulsions, and
a variety of other pressures. And according to human rights
workers, Kuwait is trying to squeeze those last few out quickly.
Meanwhile, Middle East Watch reports that the tens of thousands
of foreign workers in Kuwait, many of whom were meant to
replace the Palestinians, have suffered massive physical and
sexual abuse, rape, indentured servitude, and virtual domestic
slavery.
Women's Rights Project investigators in Kuwait reported that
since Kuwait's liberation in March 1992, more than 2,000 maids î
mainly from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh î
sought refuge in embassies from the terror.
"This report began as an investigation into the much-publicized
outbreak of domestic violence against Asian women last spring,"
Andrew Whitley, executive director of Middle East Watch, told the
Bay Guardian. Like Women's Rights Project, Middle East Watch
is a division of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which
co-authored the report. "When we went to Kuwait we discovered
that the problem was much larger," Whitley said. "It affected many
of the tens of thousands of women domestics."
The report, titled "Punishing the Victim: Rape and Mistreatment of
Asian Maids," found that Kuwait's government has only
investigated or prosecuted "a handful" of thousands of reported
abuses of maids and rather than investigate or prosecute alleged
abusers, Kuwaiti authorities often detain maids seeking to report
crimes to the police or simply return them to their employers.
"Worse," the report states, "there have also been credible reports
of abuse of women domestic servants in police custody that
likewise go unpunished."
Domestic workers are sometimes victims of "confidence tricks"
Whitley said, lured to Kuwait by promises of work as doctors or
nurses and then forced into domestic jobs. The report found that
the Kuwaiti government has "explicitly excluded" the treatment of
domestic servants from criminal and civil laws. "Almost without
exception the women interviewed spoke of debt bondage,
passport deprivation, and near total confinement in their
employers' homes."
Besides making it impossible for them to leave the country,
Kuwaiti law forbids foreigners to travel even inside Kuwait without
a passport î meaning that many of these women are effectively
prisoners of their employer.
"We were unable to find a single case in which an employer was
prosecuted," said Dorothy Q. Thomas of the Women's Rights
Project, who visited Kuwait and helped to prepare the report. "In
case after case it was the victim who was punished."
Initially, the ruling Sabah family "foreclosed all options" for the
maids to redress their grievances, or even to settle employment
disputes and change jobs, the report found. The government "flatly
denied exit visas" to the maids. Eventually, attempting to wash its
hands of the situation, Kuwait deported some 800 maids.
U.S. government officials have "done virtually nothing," Thomas
said. "The United States is very well informed about the nature of
these problems," she said. "They were aware that Asian women
maids in large numbers were fleeing abusive employers, and, as
early as 1987, State Department Human Rights reports have
been reporting on the abuses we mentioned in our report."
CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS
More than 50 percent of Kuwait's prewar population was
Palestinian. Many had lived their whole lives in Kuwait, holding
positions from banking and business to laborers. Many were
members of the professional classes that helped build Kuwait into
a relatively modern society.
Roughly half of Kuwait's Palestinians, some 180,000, left during
Iraq's occupation. But the real horror began with liberation.
The Kuwaitis launched a brutal campaign of punishment and
expulsion against the Palestinians for the PLO's opposition to the
Gulf War, ostensibly for their "collaboration" with the Iraqi
invaders, despite the fact that many Palestinians had fought and
died with the Kuwaiti resistance.
In April 1991, Amnesty International reported that "scores of
victims had been killed and hundreds more had been arbitrarily
arrested, many brutally tortured by Kuwaiti armed forces and
members of the resistance." The report found that "teams of
torturers often appeared to work in relays, maintaining the torture
for hours."
Amnesty International has documented that 40 Palestinians were
summarily executed, and another 120 disappeared. Five
thousand were detained, most of whom were beaten and/or
tortured. Another 7,000 Palestinians were formally expelled.
Kuwaiti officials have admitted that some excesses happened,
but claimed these occurred without their knowledge and were
committed by citizens who had endured great hardships by Iraqi
invaders and their alleged collaborators.
But the implicit Kuwaiti government approval for these atrocities is
underscored by the fact that no one has been brought to justice for
crimes committed against Palestinians. Aziz Abu-Hamad, a
senior researcher at Middle East Watch, said the Kuwaiti
government has not made any serious effort to locate the 120
vanished Palestinians. Mass graves have been discovered, but
Kuwaiti authorities have made no attempt to exhume these graves
and identify the bodies.
An agency was created, called State Security Intelligence Police,
Abu-Hamad said, which made a practice of telling Palestinians
that if they didn't leave, "we'll come after you."
And the government has made it all but financially impossible for
Palestinians to remain in Kuwait. All foreigners who worked for the
Kuwaiti government were fired immediately after the Iraqi
invasion. After the war, most foreign workers were rehired, but no
Palestinians. Private employers followed suit. The oil and banking
industries were forbidden to rehire Palestinians.
Besides throwing all Palestinians out of work, the Kuwaiti rulers
are refusing to give them back wages, severance pay (one
month's salary for each year of service under Kuwaiti law), or
pension funds they are owed until they have their passport
stamped with an exit visa (which gives them one week to leave).
By June 1992, another 110,000 Palestinians had left Kuwait, and
a deadline of Sept. 30 will soon be announced for the remaining
60,000 Palestinians, Abu-Hamad said.
Last year, when the treatment of Palestinians and foreign
domestics were brought to the attention of U.S. officials, President
Bush defended the Kuwaitis, comparing their feelings to those of
the French after World War II and suggesting it would be asking
too much of them to behave differently. When addressing the
Republican convention in August, Ronald Reagan said Bush "left
Kuwait free of foreign tyranny." He he did not mention the tyranny
within. *
Dennis Bernstein is associate editor of Pacific News
Service and co-host of KPFA's Flashpoints. Larry Everest is
a Bay Area freelance writer.