Tales of Torture in Kuwait : Refugees Tell of Atrocities by Iraqi Secret Police Force

For years, the Bibi Saleh Center in downtown Kuwait city has been a haven for wealthy foreigners and Kuwaiti playboys and their girlfriends, a symbol of the oil-rich emirate’s penchant for the pleasures of life.

But in the two months since Iraq seized Kuwait, the four-towered condominium complex has become a cornerstone of Kuwait’s brutal subjugation, according to reliable sources fleeing the country.

Now, these sources say, the Bibi Saleh Center is the site of the torture chamber of Iraq’s secret police, or Mukhabarat--one of two tactical interrogation facilities widely known to be run by the feared agency.

According to dozens of senior diplomats, businessmen and workers who have left Kuwait in recent weeks, the Iraqi occupiers have set out on a course of systematic execution, torture, disappearances and looting on a grand scale--”the transplantation of an entire nation,” one diplomat called it.

Eyewitnesses said that at one Kuwait city hospital, the mutilated bodies of about 230 victims have been delivered from the complex since Iraq invaded Aug. 2.

In a report issued earlier this week, Amnesty International, the London-based group that monitors human rights worldwide, condemned what it called summary executions and torture by Iraqi authorities in a campaign to crush the Kuwaiti resistance movement.

Iraqi authorities in Baghdad flatly dismissed the Amnesty International charges as blatant propaganda initiated by Saudi Arabia and the West. They insisted that life in occupied Kuwait is “completely normal.”

But the Amnesty International report only scratched the surface, according to what eyewitnesses and reliable sources told The Times.

On at least one occasion, two weeks after the invasion, the Iraqi authorities themselves put several of their victims on display for the benefit of foreign diplomats.

At 11 a.m. on Aug. 16, as members of the diplomatic corps arrived at what had been the Iraqi Embassy in Kuwait to hear President Saddam Hussein’s order to shut their missions, plainclothes Iraqi police paraded at least five bleeding, blindfolded victims past them in what some diplomats said they viewed as a tacit threat.

In the weeks since, according to sources from Kuwait’s medical community, a number of Kuwaiti public figures have disappeared, among them Abdul Rahman Smaith, head of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society, and the assistant director of the cancer center in Kuwait city. The mutilated corpses of both men were found a few days after the disappearances.

The 230 bodies that have been received at Al-Rizi Hospital from the Bibi Saleh Center all bore evidence of torture--”missing fingers and noses, lacerated ears and scorched eyeballs,” as one source put it.

All of the victims were Kuwaitis, both men and women, most of them activists believed to have collaborated with the Kuwaiti resistance. The resistance, sources say, has now been effectively neutralized.

The torture and executions are but a small part of Iraq’s overall submission and “requisition” campaign in Kuwait, which has now been stripped so bare that the entire medical system has ground to a halt and such huge items as newspaper printing presses, power-plant generators, brick-factory machinery, traffic lights, telephone poles and even computer complexes have been dismantled and transported to Iraq.

The large-scale operation to transplant virtually all of Kuwait’s vast resources, which the Iraqis justify by citing their official annexation of the emirate, is being conducted at the highest levels of the Iraqi government, with Cabinet ministers from Baghdad personally directing it from guest suites at Kuwait’s Hilton Hotel, directly opposite the U.S. Embassy.

Referring specifically to the accounts of torture and abuse, one diplomat in Baghdad who has debriefed several witnesses said, “Over a period of weeks, we’ve had a large number of anecdotal cases of arson, house destruction, summary execution and casual torture by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.”

He added: “But these are the first confident references to the establishment by the Iraqi secret police of an interrogation and torture facility, which, in our heart of hearts, we were hoping was not there. And obviously it has been working for some time.”