Grim Glimpses of Life in Occupied Kuwait Seeping Out

With communications blacked out, the anguish of occupied Kuwait seeps out only in small bits of diplomatic intelligence, refugee accounts and rare press reports. The assembled portrait is grim.

Iraq’s military machine, a force estimated at 120,000 in Kuwait, has the country in an iron grip. But wild ill-discipline among the ranks has terrorized the populace and washed Saddam Hussein’s vaunted army with a dark stain.

According to reports, and discounting rumor and hearsay, the occupation has been marked by unprovoked killings, rapes and wanton looting.

“This is not an invasion,” said a Kuwait oil-company worker who fled that country to Saudi Arabia. “This is a bank robbery.”

“These aren’t soldiers, they’re pirates,” he told a reporter in Abu Dhabi.

The supposedly well-trained Iraqi soldiers have rampaged through Kuwait’s glittering, air-conditioned shopping malls, smashing windows and carting off merchandise, according to refugees who escaped to Jordan over the last few days.

“There is no security at all,” a Lebanese named Walid Khodr Shaker told a Reuters news agency correspondent at the Jordanian border. “Many shops have been looted, especially jewelry shops and car showrooms. The place has fallen apart.”

In Manila, Philippines President Corazon Aquino has expressed alarm over reports that Philippine maids have been raped by the invaders. She gave no details, but Alice de Ocampo, a governess who fled through Saudi Arabia, told reporters on arrival in Manila that “many Filipinas are being raped there.”

Her account was supported by reports from two other refugees, a South Korean and a Kuwaiti. The Kuwaiti, speaking to reporters in Geneva, said three soldiers had demanded food at the house of one of his relatives. “After they ate,” he related, “they said, ‘Give us your maids.’ ”

The Kuwait oil-company workers said that the Iraqi soldiers are young and that many appear to be rural boys. To be dropped from a dirt-poor Iraqi village into the riches of modern Kuwait presents mind-boggling temptations.

Many refugees say their passage out was assured only because the soldiers could be bribed. One Philippine woman said she and her friends put bottled water, reported in short supply among the Iraqi troops, into their luggage. The soldiers took the water and waved them through the checkpoint on a road to Jordan.

Steve Betts, the American coach of the Kuwaiti national swimming team, was stopped at a checkpoint on the road to the Saudi border. He told a Cable News Network reported on arrival in Washington that a soldier had leveled his rifle. Betts reached down and presented a can of cola.

“His face lights up,” Betts recounted. “He goes for the Diet Pepsi, I go for the border.”

Accounts of killing continued to surface outside the occupied territory. In the first few days of the invasion, the number of Kuwaitis killed and wounded was put at 800, according to diplomatic estimates and reports from the self-exiled Kuwaiti government. Since then an undetermined number of anti-Iraqi protesters have reportedly been killed during demonstrations in Kuwait.

A Kuwaiti identifying himself as a resistance fighter, reached by telephone Friday at the Saudi border town of Khafji, reported that three Kuwaitis had been shot down during a protest in the capital’s Jabriya district.

The clandestine radio of the resistance, which had been off the air for four days, was back in operation and claimed that sabotage operations against the Iraqi occupiers were continuing. In a message monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp., the underground radio asked the Iraqis: “Look around you. Who are you fighting, terrorizing? Children, women, elderly and young people.”

The Kuwaiti oil worker, who said the sheikdom’s citizens were banned by law from owning rifles, claimed that the Iraqis were swapping their own for television sets and cars.

“Those boys don’t know the value of their weapons,” said another Kuwaiti in Abu Dhabi, a physician who cut short a vacation to West Germany to return to the gulf. “They’re not soldiers. What are they going to do, point their new TV sets at someone and fire?”

Kuwaitis in the Abu Dhabi Hotel have set up a rumor-control committee to sort out the reports coming out of their country. Lacking a direct line to Kuwait, they have only the accounts of the latest refugees, which are canvassed for news of various neighborhoods where the families of vacationers caught out of the country and business executives live.

Beyond the reports of violence and abuse, they are collecting eyewitness accounts on day-to-day life under the occupation. As of Friday, the refugees reported that food supplies are tightening but that most Kuwaiti families are fairly well stocked. According to the accounts, many Kuwaitis loaded up on canned and packaged goods in the first days of the invasion.