Culture : Gulf War Lives On for Kuwait’s Children : Youngsters need help to cope with the psychological damage, researchers say. But families prefer to deal with it privately.

“To go to bed at night and wake up with no country . . . ,” Hassan Ebraheem mused, recalling the shock of Aug. 2, 1990, when the Iraqi blitzkrieg hit Kuwait. And he remembered the children.

“In case of war, children will be the first victims,” said Ebraheem, an authority on childhood education. “The impact is so sudden.”

Like the kids of Lebanon, Central America and other worldwide hot spots, the children of Kuwait have been wounded by war and occupation, deep cuts that bandages and medicines cannot heal.

When Kuwaiti schools opened in late September, seven months after the last Iraqi soldier had been driven from the country, teachers reported that some pupils broke into tears and outbursts of rage for no apparent reason, said Taghreed Qudsi, a specialist who works with Ebraheem at the Kuwait Society for the Advancement of Arab Children.

Her own children were traumatized by the invasion that overturned Kuwait’s largely privileged society, Qudsi told a reporter. “When the occupation happened,” she recalled, “the Iraqis immediately put their own programming on our television and radio. In a Kuwaiti home, the existence of it meant the absence of our world.”

James Garbarino, an American specialist on children amid violence, came to Kuwait two days after the Iraqis left to make a snap survey for the U.N. Children’s Fund. Interviewing 45 children aged 5 to 13, he found that 62% showed some instance of traumatic experience.

“Many had seen bodies hanging from lamp posts or dumped in their neighborhoods--often someone they knew,” Garbarino, president of the Erickson Institute in Chicago, wrote in his report. “ . . . Iraqis trying to subdue the Kuwait resistance often executed people and prohibited covering or removing their bodies for 12 hours. This led to vivid and horrible encounters for children.

“More than half the children described what appear to be psychological aftereffects: repetitive dreams related to traumatic events or generalized fear of Iraqis. A 10-year-old girl who saw the body of a neighbor dumped in their alley said she dreams repeatedly that he is sitting on her head asking, “Why won’t you cover me up?’ ”

Ebraheem said there has been no organized effort so far to deal with war trauma here, but he urged the government to step in to train staff and institutions to deal clinically with problems that Kuwaiti children had never been expected to experience. The ordeal requires using new approaches.

“Families in Kuwait shy away from anything to do with psychology or social workers,” Qudsi said, pointing to the traditional Arab preference to keep personal problems behind closed doors. “As a child, I went to my mother or my sister” with problems, she said.

Nor has there been an attempt to measure the problem since Garbarino’s initial, limited study. But in recalling the occupation, a number of Kuwaitis mention the reactions of their children. Fatima Nazar, who also works with Ebraheem, said her family was in the United States at the time, but her daughter was nonetheless affected, worrying what the Iraq soldiers might do. “Do you think they searched my room?” the girl asked her mother. “Do you think they’ll take my turtle?” She said that sense of violated privacy was intensely painful to the child.

Ebraheem, a former minister of education, said the invasion presented unique complexities because the Iraqis are Arabs and fellow Muslims and that the shock of violence had been compounded by a sense of betrayal. During the occupation, Qudsi noted, her children became acutely aware of the Iraqi accents on television programs.

In his postwar study, Garbarino reported, some children, aware that Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, feared that his soldiers would return. And nearly all the boys he interviewed said they want to be soldiers when they grew up, the American researcher said. He attributed the choice to a desire to protect their families.

Nazar recounted an episode where a woman and her daughter were confronted by an Iraqi officer who asked the child: “Who do you love, Saddam or Jabbar?”--the Iraqi leader or Kuwaiti Emir Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah? Sheik Jabbar, the girl answered. Such questioning left many Kuwaiti children nervous in the presence of any man in any uniform, researchers have found.

Kuwaiti mothers kept their children indoors as much as possible during the occupation to avoid such encounters, Nazar said, but the seclusion also was difficult on children.

And since the war ended, Qudsi and Nazar pointed out, children have been neglected as their parents focused on getting their households and businesses together. The two women have talked to a number of parents who report their children suffer the same reactions to war and violence as others throughout the world: aggressive behavior as a self-defense mechanism; fear and nightmares; stuttering, trembling and uncontrolled crying.

“Time is an enemy, not a friend, to the children of Kuwait,” Garbarino concluded. “We know that delay makes dealing with trauma increasingly difficult. Children need help now to process their experiences, to work through their fears, to exorcise the demons of war.”