Kuwait Moving to Try Hundreds as Collaborators

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.

A circle of Palestinian women, accused of working for an Iraqi newspaper that had the editorial misjudgment to declare that Kuwait was a province of Iraq, alternately chatter and wail and collapse, sighing, on nearby benches. White-robed investigators rush in and out of doorways, stacks of files under their arms.

Lath Mohammed Moulla, Kuwait city’s version of a Los Angeles defense lawyer, stands tie-askew in the middle of the mess, shouting down one client and shaking three fingers and a thumb in the classic Arab “wait a minute” gesture to four more off his right shoulder. A fifth client zeroes in menacingly from the rear.

“What can I tell you, this man does not understand this is serious,” he shrugs to an onlooker. “I tell him he is accused of two murders! He says it will be all right.”

Moulla runs a hand through already-tousled hair, picks up his briefcase and scuttles into a nearby office. When he opens the leather bag, there are stacks of newly issued Kuwaiti dinars inside. He smiles apologetically.

“I do this only partly for myself,” he says. “Most lawyers won’t take these kinds of cases. But my job is to defend anybody. I don’t want Kuwait to be as a terrorist authority, not believing in the principles of law, justice and fraternity.”

More than two months after liberation, Kuwait is preparing to launch the first criminal trials of hundreds of Iraqis, Jordanians, Palestinians and others accused of collaborating with Iraqi forces during their seven-month occupation of the emirate.

The trials, to be held in the heavily damaged Palace of Justice, will provide Kuwait’s first opportunity to seek official punishment for crimes of torture, rape, murder and looting committed during the occupation--amid fears by some defense lawyers and human rights activists that justice could take a back seat to vengeance in a nation still overwhelmingly bitter and armed with the legal expediencies of martial law.

“A big question mark should be raised here. Are we going to protect human rights in Kuwait, or are we going to violate human rights? Are we going to be a civilized nation or not?” said Meshari Osaimi, head of the Kuwait Lawyers Assn., who complained that many lawyers are still unable to visit clients and all are prohibited from being present during interrogations.

Other lawyers have complained that Kuwaiti defendants are already being given preferential treatment by the courts.

Two of the six Palestinian women accused of collaboration because they worked as secretaries for the Iraqi newspaper published in Kuwait, for example, have been ordered detained without bail, while a Kuwaiti man accused of murdering a Sudanese and an Egyptian who allegedly caused him to be arrested by the Iraqis has been released without bail pending trial.

Najeeb Wegayab, a prominent Kuwaiti attorney, said he is representing an Iraqi woman who faces death by hanging for collaboration because she frequently entertained Iraqi officers at her home.

“There are a lot of cases that are just stupid cases, but the punishment is very serious,” Wegayab said. “But I think we have to wait until the first trial to see whether there’s going to be justice or not.”

Ministry of Justice officials say they have processed more than 300 of the estimated 650 detainees presently in custody and prepared more than 200 criminal cases for trial so far. More than 50 cases have been dismissed outright by the prosecution, some involving detainees who spent more than two months in custody, often without access to lawyers or family, for offenses as minor as having an expired national identity card.

U.S. officials have advised the Kuwaiti government on resurrecting its justice system. A majority of lawyers and judges had fled the country, and the 2-year-old Palace of Justice was heavily vandalized during the Iraqi occupation. The Americans say they believe that Kuwaiti justice officials have worked to clear the huge caseload of detainees brought in after liberation--most estimates ranged as high as 1,000 prisoners--as quickly as possible and that they appear determined to conduct fair trials.

“My impression is it’s going on in a professional way. It may not have some of the bells and whistles we might have, but it certainly is nothing like justice run wild,” said Lt. Col. Robert Feidler, a civil affairs officer and Washington government attorney who is advising the Kuwaiti government.

“Our first reaction was, ‘Uh oh, military judges,’ ” he admitted, “but most of these people have law degrees, and three of the five (military judges) they have so far have master’s degrees from the U.S. Many have been functioning military judges in the past.”

Under Kuwait’s 2-month-old martial law, defendants charged with the equivalent of misdemeanors, punishable by two years in jail or less, will be tried by a tribunal of two military officers and one civilian judge, who will preside. More serious crimes will be heard by a panel of three civilian judges and two officers. Most serious collaboration cases, defense lawyers said, will be punishable by death.

The range of suspected crimes covered by the trials, scheduled tentatively to commence within the next two weeks, range from torturing Kuwaitis to stealing office furniture from a government ministry.

Several cases involve citizens who were frequently seen with Iraqi officers and were suspected of supplying them with information and supplies. “Simple collaboration is being considered a crime,” said one Kuwaiti government official.

The detainees include about 265 Iraqis, 120 Jordanians and Palestinians and a few Kuwaitis along with a variety of other Arab nationals, but U.S. officials say they believe there are no Iraqi soldiers among the defendants. Indeed, Kuwait turned over to Saudi Arabia for processing as prisoners of war the 50 military detainees it held, and both Kuwaiti and U.S. officials have appeared disinclined to pursue any war crimes cases under international law.

“All the Iraqi soldiers have escaped to Iraq,” Hamed Othman, Kuwait’s attorney general, said in a recent interview. “Because most of the Iraqi officers have withdrawn to Iraq, especially the high-ranking officers, there is in fact no way of making legal cases against those people.”

Other officials have said Kuwait is reluctant to mount antagonistic legal cases against Iraq at a time when Iraqi authorities are still believed to be holding thousands of Kuwaiti prisoners--and at a time when the region is seeking to smooth over the wounds of war.

“Is it an advantage to have an Iraq that is raked over the coals for the next five years or is it to the advantage of the region to have a healing atmosphere and get this part of the world back to normal and not have an Iraq that is dragged back to court every two years with another sensational trial over murder and torture in Kuwait?” asked one authority.

“The decision to go after war criminals is a political decision more than just a prosecution department decision,” added a Justice Ministry official.

Indeed, the upcoming trials will open to a bristling, emotionally charged political atmosphere inside a country that is attempting feverishly to widen the democratic process at the same time that it is seeking to quell a flood of national anger that resulted, according to human rights organizations, in widespread beatings and other abuses against Palestinian and Iraqi detainees.

U.S. officials say they are confident the government has ordered an end to mistreatment of detainees but say there continue to be occasional abuses.

U.S. officials say they have inspected the civilian prisons and found conditions acceptable but have been prevented from viewing the Kuwaiti army’s detention facility in the district of Farwaniyah, an area where a number of former detainees say they were tortured.

U.S. officers also say they have no way of knowing the fate of an unknown number of detainees, many of them presumably accused Iraqi counterintelligence officers who entered Kuwait after liberation, who are being held outside the normal criminal justice system by Iraqi state security.

“We were told to keep our hands off state security,” Smith said.

Defense lawyers who have agreed to take on the cases of accused collaborators say they are experiencing widespread reproach from their fellow Kuwaitis, many of whom want to know why another Kuwaiti would be defending an Iraqi.

“It’s a very, very bad situation,” said Wegayab. “I receive a lot of complaints. I tell them I’m defending one of the Iraqis, or one of the Palestinians, and they tell me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Especially in the beginning, when emotions were very high. I tell them this is my job. I have to do it. Justice is justice. There are no nationalities.”

Moulla said that Kuwaitis who were not in the country during the occupation, and the justice system itself, need to remember that the line between survival and collaboration can be thin.

“Here in Kuwait during the occupation, we did deal with the Iraqi people, because they lived with us. We had some needs. Even if there is military occupation, the relations cannot be cut because of that. Life continues,” he said.

“People needed money to live. And don’t forget the Iraqi authorities are savage. A lot of people were obliged to work for them.”

In the case of the Palestinian women accused of working for the Iraqi newspaper, he said, “If I condemn these girls who worked there, that means I have to condemn all the journalists in the world who met and talked with Saddam Hussein, or visited Iraqis, even.”

Some Kuwaiti legal officials predicted that it will be difficult to try torture and rape cases in a society in which privacy and honor are occasionally valued higher than retribution.

“It’s something in our traditions and customs that we don’t articulate some things. We will probably not get enough help from people who were raped or tortured,” said Naif Lafi, a Kuwaiti who is working with U.S. civil affairs officers to prepare for the upcoming trials. “It’s a very difficult thing to get a man to talk about how he was humiliated. Honor is a very important thing in Kuwait.”

A large number of Egyptian judges arrived in Kuwait this week, supplementing the estimated 30 to 50 judges who had arrived by early April. Officials estimate that they will need about 200 judges to return the justice system to normal.

“Kuwaiti justice is up and running,” said Othman, the attorney general. “Under these unusual circumstances, the system is working fine. We had to start from less than zero. It was very difficult, but under the circumstances, it’s working well.”