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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 PALESTINIANSMore 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.
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