Human Rights Kuwait

The United States, reacting to Amnesty International's charges of widespread torture in Kuwait, said the human rights situation in the emirate has improved dramatically in recent weeks. A State Department statement issued late Thursday said, "The situation by most accounts in Kuwait is very much improved over what existed some weeks ago."

Iraqi forces maintained at least two dozen torture sites in Kuwait city as part of a massive effort to subjugate the Kuwaiti people after seizing the country in August, 1990, according to a U.S. government report released Friday. The report, compiled by the Defense Department and made available by the State Department, was submitted to the United Nations in accordance with an effort to document war crimes committed by Iraqis during their seven-month occupation of Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government is coming under increasing pressure to grant thousands of Arabs stranded in a squalid border camp permission to return to their homes in Kuwait. The refugees are part of a minority known as the bidoun, stateless Arabs who descended from nomadic desert tribes and lived in Kuwait but who were never recognized as citizens under the law.

In elegant, marble-tiled villas in this city built on oil and ease, the dinner talk is of reconstruction projects. The top priority, people say, is a new highway south to Saudi Arabia with six lanes--one way. It is only partly a joke. A striking number of Kuwait's brightest, best-educated citizens, deeply demoralized by the postwar political climate, say they plan to leave the country. Many who stay are hedging their bets, opening bank accounts in dollars and buying houses overseas.

Speaking softly in a voice that often broke, an American-born woman who fled Kuwait after the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion told members of Congress about the scene at a hospital there: "We took our cousin, who was in labor, to Sabah Maternity Hospital. Upon our arrival, we saw a Kuwaiti woman at the front door--in hysterics, because she was in labor and they (Iraqi troops) would not allow her to enter," said Deborah Hadi, pausing to fight back a sob.

The corridor at the Kuwait Ministry of Justice looks disconcertingly like Monday morning arraignment court in any lived-in American city that has grown too many criminals and not enough lawyers. Glum, mustached Iraqi defendants sit handcuffed in chairs along the wall, staring silently at the dirty tile. Three dozen other detainees mill around in the hallway, shouting to no one in particular and bolting anxiously toward whichever defense attorney happens out of the elevator.

Already facing brutal harassment in their northern Iraqi homeland, large numbers of Kurds in Kuwait have been prevented from returning to their jobs, and at least seven have been arrested and have subsequently disappeared, according to spokesmen for the small Kurdish community here.

The tears came when Lubna Nashashibi recalled the thunderous cannon that would signal the end of the day's fast during Ramadan in Kuwait. After sunset, family and friends would gather together, swapping stories over a hearty feast. Children were allowed to stay up past their bedtime, sipping a special concoction of peach-flavored juice. "My sister and I were watching television and we started crying thinking about the good old days and what it was like," Nashashibi, 31, said recently.

One day after a martial-law tribunal sentenced its first convicted wartime collaborator to death, the Kuwaiti government said Sunday that it will set up a panel to review all verdicts in the controversial trials. The announcement was reported without elaboration in a leading Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Fajr Al Jadid (New Dawn), which is operating under censorship and has cleaved closely to the government line.

More than a dozen Palestinians charged with cooperating with the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait went on trial Saturday as the emirate continued its prosecution of alleged wartime collaborators. A Turkish house painter charged with spying and theft and accused of wearing an Iraqi uniform in Kuwait city was acquitted by a five-judge martial-law tribunal. A Palestinian man caught with one bullet was sentenced to six months' probation.

Bowing to international pressure, Kuwait's crown prince said Wednesday that he has commuted the death sentences of all 29 people convicted of collaborating with the Iraqi occupation, the official news agency reported. Kuwaiti defense lawyers and human rights activists rejoiced at the news that the sentences have been reduced to life imprisonment.

Ignoring Western warnings that it may be violating the Geneva Conventions, Kuwait is quietly continuing to deport foreigners to Iraq, Western diplomats said Saturday. Since June 9, more than 400 unwanted residents have been bused to the no-man's-land on Kuwait's northern border and then marched into Safwan, Iraq, according to witnesses and diplomats. At least 200 have been deported within the past four days, they said.

The French and German governments and two human rights groups Wednesday joined U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar in urging Kuwait not to execute convicted wartime collaborators. But a senior Kuwaiti official dismissed growing international criticism of the martial-law trials as premature. The official said that the more than 200 verdicts, which include 21 death sentences, have yet to be reviewed by a special judicial panel, approved by the crown prince and sanctioned by the emir.

The Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States on Thursday defended his country against charges that it has allowed widespread abuse of non-Kuwaiti residents, calling such accusations "politically motivated." Sheik Saud al Nasir al Sabah, in an interview before an evening address to the World Affairs Council of Orange County, acknowledged that Kuwait has undergone severe postwar trauma that spawned violence against those suspected of collaborating with the Iraqi invaders.

In an apparent violation of an international agreement it signed in March, Kuwait forcibly repatriated at least 36 Iraqi civilians on Tuesday. The internees, including 11 women and six children, were taken from an immigration detention center in Kuwait city where about 600 people are reportedly awaiting deportation. They were loaded onto two buses bound for the border town of Abdaly, where they were to be marched across the no-man's-land into Safwan, Iraq.

One day after a martial-law tribunal sentenced its first convicted wartime collaborator to death, the Kuwaiti government said Sunday that it will set up a panel to review all verdicts in the controversial trials. The announcement was reported without elaboration in a leading Kuwaiti newspaper, Al Fajr Al Jadid (New Dawn), which is operating under censorship and has cleaved closely to the government line.

Torture and other atrocities committed by Kuwaitis against resident Palestinians have begun to decline in recent days, but many Palestinians continue to be held in jail for no apparent reason, Western diplomatic sources said Thursday. The sources said that while senior members of the ruling Sabah family appear genuinely opposed to the mistreatment of Palestinians, some younger members have had to be restrained from committing abuses.

Iraqi forces maintained at least two dozen torture sites in Kuwait city as part of a massive effort to subjugate the Kuwaiti people after seizing the country in August, 1990, according to a U.S. government report released Friday. The report, compiled by the Defense Department and made available by the State Department, was submitted to the United Nations in accordance with an effort to document war crimes committed by Iraqis during their seven-month occupation of Kuwait.

The coalition that liberated Kuwait now expects the emirate to champion justice and fairness and to end human rights abuses, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait said Saturday. "Clearly, those individuals who broke Kuwaiti laws and were parties to Iraqi criminal actions should be prosecuted fairly and fully under the law," said Ambassador Edward W. (Skip) Gnehm Jr. "But the innocent should not become new victims."

The young Palestinian limped out of the hospital last week so badly beaten that he had to lean on his father's arm to make it across the parking lot to the car. He talked softly, and when he lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness, the scabs of cigarette burns were still fresh on his palms. He pulled up his T-shirt to show a mass of bruises he said were inflicted during beatings at two police stations. "They wanted to ask about my friend, who works with me," he said.