Palestinians Tell of Abuse From Resentful Kuwaitis

At least two Palestinians have been killed with gunshots to the head and five others have been hospitalized with injuries from apparent beatings and shootings, raising new concerns about reprisals against the Palestinian community here.

One of the hospitalized men, who is believed to have been tortured, is unable to talk coherently, and another is so fearful that he has refused to leave the hospital, according to physicians and representatives of Kuwait’s substantial Palestinian community.

All of the hospitalized Palestinians said they were beaten by Kuwaiti or Saudi soldiers after being arrested in their homes or at checkpoints throughout the city, in some cases for offenses as minor as failing to have their car registration.

Medical reports, combined with evidence that Palestinians are being detained for substantial periods and sometimes roughly harassed at military checkpoints throughout the city, have raised tensions among Kuwait’s remaining 180,000 Palestinians, some of whom are accused of collaborating with Iraqi forces during the seven-month-long occupation of Kuwait.

“We have a feeling that a danger is present after the liberation of Kuwait,” said one resident of Kuwait city’s Jabriyah district, one of three heavily Palestinian neighborhoods in the capital. “We are afraid. We are telling our families not to go out except for important reason.”

Said another: “Is the liberation of Kuwait a green light for their people to try to torture Palestinians, to make their life more difficult? We had difficulty during the Iraqis’ presence. Why should we suffer more?”

In New York on Wednesday, the Palestine Liberation Organization observer to the United Nations, Nasser Kidwa, wrote to the president of the Security Council charging that “violent and hostile actions” against Palestinians living in Kuwait continue at the hands of armed vigilantes and “some elements from the Kuwaiti army. . . .”

The confrontations raise questions about the future of Kuwait’s Palestinian community, estimated at nearly 400,000 before the Iraqi occupation, which historically has held important teaching, medical and technical positions that could not be filled by Kuwaitis.

Now, many Palestinians fear that the returning Kuwaiti government, angered at the PLO leadership’s support of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, will replace them with workers from Arab countries such as Egypt, which helped to liberate Kuwait from occupation.

Many Palestinian professionals who sent their families out of Kuwait during the occupation say they now believe it is unlikely that the Kuwaiti government will grant their families visas to return, and many therefore expect to be leaving Kuwait to join their spouses.

The Kuwaiti government has said it does not intend to discriminate against Palestinians in Kuwait who did not collaborate with Iraqi forces and has no plans to systematically replace Palestinians with Egyptians or other foreign workers.

Clearly alarmed at the reports of violence, it has ordered the army to renew instructions to its soldiers at checkpoints and insist on proper treatment of Palestinians.

“We must not lose in one week what we have gained, what we have fought for in seven months,” said a senior Kuwaiti official. “But if you suffered . . . it may be difficult to control.”

Kuwait’s Crown Prince Saad al Abdullah al Sabah responded Thursday to reports of police torturing Palestinians.

“I would like to . . . put on the record that I deny all such rumors and I would like you not to believe whatever is being rumored in such a direction,” he said.

The prince said that a small number of Palestinians have been detained, based on allegations that they “committed crimes against our people during the presence of Iraqi troops in our country.”

He said those detainees will be investigated and, if facts warrant, transferred to the courts for prosecution.

However, seven physicians at Mubarak Hospital said they have seen ample evidence of violence against their fellow Palestinians.

At least two Palestinians, shot to death execution-style, have been brought to the hospital since the liberation, they said. In addition, two PLO employees were shot, one in the buttocks, one in the leg, when they presented their PLO identification cards at a Saudi checkpoint, according to the doctor who treated them.

Two workers at the Hawalli district offices of Fatah, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s majority faction, were shot the day after Kuwait city was liberated, one in the stomach, one in the leg, another doctor said.

According to doctors at Mubarak Hospital, at least five Palestinians have been admitted in the past week with rope burns, cuts on the head and severe bruises.

One doctor said he treated a Palestinian man who had been shot in the knee, reportedly at a checkpoint after he was unable to produce a registration for his car.

In all, as many as 300 Palestinians may have been detained in a series of sweeps of the Palestinian neighborhoods over the past few days aimed at rounding up known collaborators.

“I think there is an anti-Palestinian, anti-Yemeni, anti-Jordanian feeling, especially among those who stayed back” and did not leave Kuwait during the occupation, said the senior Kuwaiti government official, who asked not to be identified.

“Even prior to the invasion there was an anti-Palestinian feeling, traditionally because the Palestinians were better educated, better motivated, did all the jobs, never hesitated to help, and somehow it bottled up over the years,” he said. “When some of them collaborated with the Iraqis, especially in cases where torture or looting or rape occurred, somehow the resentment reached a crescendo.

“But Kuwaitis do realize that you can’t just throw these people out in the streets, you can’t just say to hell with them, because the Kuwaitis have been supporting the Palestinian cause from the beginning. That is not a political issue, it is a human issue. I think the government will tread very carefully.”

Nonetheless, many Kuwaitis have expressed bitter resentment against Palestinians who aided the Iraqis. They have given detailed accounts of Palestinians helping to guide Iraqi secret police to Kuwaiti resistance fighters and helping to identify locations of valuable goods to be looted.

Kuwaitis are also in many cases resentful that while most Kuwaitis refused to work during the occupation, most Palestinians continued working. They are infuriated at television images of Palestinians in Jordan demonstrating in favor of Saddam Hussein, and at the anti-Kuwaiti attitude expressed by some Palestinians in Kuwait during the occupation.

Now, signs of anti-Palestinian sentiment have sprung up throughout the city. At the Fatah office in Hawalli, which was burned Feb. 26, a large sign reads: “We Don’t Want Palestinians in Our Gulf.”

“I think they should all be thrown out. You have a box of apples, and three or four bad apples, why touch any of them? Throw the whole box out,” said a young civil engineer, Abdul Mazidi.

A leader of the Kuwaiti resistance said in a recent interview that many Kuwaitis will not be happy until all Palestinians, whether they collaborated or not, are ordered to leave the country.

“We have our first demand to kick all the Palestinians out of the country,” he said. “Our second demand is to let the Kuwaiti people have their chance in their (the Palestinians’) jobs. Because when they let a Palestinian be a secretary, that means it is another job less for a Kuwaiti.”

But diplomats and government officials here say it is unlikely that Kuwait would be able to replace all of its Palestinian workers with Kuwaitis, or even other Arab workers.

“Can Kuwait survive without the expertise of the non-Kuwaitis? The answer is no,” said a second government official.

“I think they’re going to find there are so many Palestinians who do the jobs they want and have close enough ties, through family and friends, to this country that in the end there’s going to be a substantial Palestinian population in the country,” said a Western diplomat.

Many Palestinians here say they have lived in Kuwait for years, in some cases for decades, and strongly disagreed with the PLO leadership’s support of the Iraqi invasion.

Most of the Palestinians who collaborated were members of Iraq’s Palestinian Baath organization and fled back to Iraq with Iraqi soldiers, several Palestinians said in recent interviews. Others admit that some Kuwaiti Palestinians aided the Iraqis, but they say it is wrong to punish the entire community for the misdeeds of a few.

Indeed, many Palestinians aided the Kuwaiti resistance, and at least two were executed by the Iraqis as a result, according to several Kuwaitis interviewed.

“If you could have come to my office after the liberation, you could see we were all crying because of what happened, crying because of happiness--Kuwaitis, Palestinians--crying, hugging each other,” said Ghazi Mahmoud, who has lived in Kuwait for 30 years.

“You can consider Kuwait as our home,” said a middle-aged Palestinian television technician who has lived in Kuwait most of his life. “I didn’t see Palestine, but I live and grow up in Kuwait, and I consider it my home country. Now, they said they want to make a new Kuwait. But a new Kuwait for whom?”