Kuwaitis Prepare for the Day They Can Go Home, Pick Up the Pieces

The eyes of Othman Tulaig grew slightly wild as he described what the Iraqis had done to his country. And he said that no one will know for sure all that has happened until the Iraqis are finally driven out.

He said that once there were 17,000 students attending the university. Now there are none. Kuwait had been a learning center for the Middle East, where libraries were shown off with pride. Now the libraries are gone, carted away by the Iraqi invaders.

“They were put on big lorries and taken to Baghdad,” said Tulaig, a university chemistry professor now waiting here for the time he can return to his homeland when the goal of Operation Desert Storm is achieved. He talked bitterly about how word had reached him through friends that the laboratory where he once worked had been stripped bare.

“There is nothing (left),” he said.

Tulaig is not alone in his bitterness and longing to return home. Throughout the Persian Gulf region and beyond, hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis, from the royal family to average citizens, are waiting to go home and see what is left of their small state, once one of the richest pieces of real estate on the planet.

Right now, there is no sense among them of what will remain by the time the war with Iraq is over. This week’s torching of Kuwaiti oil fields by the Iraqis could signal another round of destruction on top of the general sacking carried out earlier.

“If (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein decides to pursue a scorched-earth policy, Kuwait might have to start from square one,” one knowledgeable Pentagon official said before the actual fighting began last week.

Still, the Kuwaitis in waiting are making plans, as they have been doing from the early days after the Iraqi tanks rolled in last Aug. 2.

That detailed look toward the future began in the Saudi mountain resort of Taif, where the Kuwaiti royal family lives in exile, and was later expanded to an office building in the heart of downtown Washington. The people mapping the reconstruction of Kuwait are putting together a program variously estimated to cost $40 billion to $50 billion. These estimates are expected to rise, now that the war seems headed toward fierce ground fighting.

Things that must be replaced or rebuilt range from street lights to desalination plants, from hundreds of thousands of school desks to the complete refitting of hospitals.

“Our first priority is medical preparation,” said Sulaiman Shaheen of the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry, who said that the Health Ministry and the Red Crescent Society (the Arab Red Cross) have already assembled teams of doctors to furnish emergency care in the early days of the return to Kuwait.

In Washington, Kuwaiti planners working with American engineers and other experts have been divided into 10 teams, each assigned to a certain segment of Kuwaiti society, from oil to public health to food.

Kuwait’s roads have been crushed under the weight of tanks, according to American hostages who eventually left Kuwait city in December. Abandoned homes have been looted down to the electrical wiring. Shaheen said other homes have been taken over and occupied by Iraqi families moved into Kuwait after the takeover.

While restoration costs will be enormous, the Kuwaitis have the funds to do it. Unlike some other oil-rich states, Iraq among them, the Kuwaitis did not invest their oil income in large factories at home. Instead, much of the country’s fortune has been invested in overseas projects. The nation also has an estimated $2.8 trillion on deposit in overseas bank accounts.

The planners have not yet resolved the issue of the return of foreign workers, who before the invasion performed jobs ranging from the most menial to running the country’s banks. The workers fled Kuwait by the tens of thousands and are unlikely to come back at the first blush of peace. As an example of how dependent the Kuwaitis were on foreign workers, only a tenth of the country’s mechanics and electricians were Kuwaitis.

Some experts think that will have to change, that the dependence on foreign workers was part of a condition that made Kuwait something of a rich, lethargic land and--therefore--an easier target for Saddam Hussein’s aggression. Patrick Clawson, a resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, says that Kuwaitis will have to assume a larger role in developing their own country, rather than leaving it to others.

Shaheen, of the Foreign Ministry, said that Kuwait is about to begin a new era, in which its citizens must examine why the country was invaded and the things they must do differently in the future.

For now, Shaheen also worries about the prospect of fierce ground fighting, envisioning the Iraqi troops retreating to residential sections of Kuwait city to make a last, desperate stand.

“We don’t know if there will be (such) a fight,” he said. “If there is, I am sure they will retreat to the civilian area. I don’t think he (Hussein) has any objection in his mind to keeping Kuwaitis as human shields.”