Kuwait’s Enduring Wounds

Ismael seems an unlikely orphan of war.

He has the sweet, impish innocence of a 9-year-old. He’s the top student in his fourth-grade class. He adores soccer, handball, McDonald’s and Burger King, and he hopes someday to be a doctor--”because I want to care for people”--or maybe Tarzan or Batman or Superman.

Ismael wants for nothing: He gets new toys every month, $1.50 a day in pocket money from the Kuwaiti government, and more for trips to the mall or journeys abroad. He sleeps on a brass bed in a townhouse equipped with color television, video games and more than ample space for him and his seven roommates.

And Ismael believes, as his government caregivers at the Kuwait Orphanage have told him since he was very young, that his parents died in an accident nearly 10 years ago, as did the parents of his roommates.

This week, as Kuwait celebrates the 10th anniversary of its U.S.-led liberation from Iraqi occupation, these children are a powerful and wrenching symbol of their still wounded nation, a land forever changed and still suffering silently in denial.

They are, Kuwaiti psychologists say, the unwanted bequests of unspeakable acts, born to and then abandoned by Kuwaiti women who had been raped by Iraqis.

Even today, a decade after the horror, few people in this conservative, religious society speak of Ismael and about a dozen similar children who live with other orphans in their luxurious little corner of Kuwait City. The government declines to acknowledge their origins.

“The trauma is deep inside us. It does not simply vanish--even in 10 years,” said psychologist Jasem M. Hajia, who called the issue of the war orphans a taboo that “was simply dropped as soon as it arose.”

The enduring shock of the Iraqi invasion is widespread in this tiny emirate of 2.2 million people. The incidences of mental illness, violent crime, and drug and alcohol addiction are up. An estimated 300 Kuwaitis die each year from drug abuse--more than double the prewar rate.

Physically, Kuwait has been rebuilt as a gold-plated state even grander than before. And it remains one of the richest and most strategic nations, a land slightly smaller than New Jersey that is home to 9% of the world’s oil and flush with the trappings of extreme wealth.

New skyscrapers and sprawling palaces crowd a Kuwait City horizon lighted by a neon blizzard of American icons. Massive new marble-and-glass shopping malls are packed with Starbucks, Cartier, the Body Shop and Gucci. And every day, the nation puts on a dazzling display of Western ostentation and opulence.

Young, bored Kuwaitis on late-model racing bikes pop 80-mph wheelies along the broad Arabian Gulf Street corniche, jockeying with a river of Ferraris, Mercedes-Benzes, Corvettes and BMWs.

At this year’s Hala February festival--the closest thing Kuwait has to a carnival--the parade’s stars were not the royal palace float and its photos of the ruling family. Rather, the thousands of Kuwaitis lining the route with digital cameras and national flags wildly cheered the Harley-Davidson motorcade and the Kentucky Fried Chicken float, with its Colonel Sanders look-alike and people masquerading as French fries.

In the surrounding desert, Bedouins herd camels from the driver’s seats of new Mitsubishi Pajeros. In these winter months, the countryside is awash with the tents of mokhayam, a tradition of weekend family camping now practiced with satellite dishes, color TVs, computers, mobile phones, generators and maids.

But beneath Kuwait’s utopian veneer is a dynamic yet dysfunctional democracy, an irrational economy and a wounded soul, according to interviews with more than a dozen Kuwaiti doctors, educators, political scientists, economists and government workers.

“Some of us deny the trauma,” said Hajia, the psychologist. “Some of us say it is history. We want to forget it. We hide it behind our wealth, our new expressways, malls and clothes, behind the new greenery and the buildings.”

Added Dr. Ahmed Hamadi, a government physician who documented Kuwait’s enduring wounds while working at a center for war victims that was shut down late last year: “We believe the Kuwaiti population is still suffering. It’s not about the renovation of buildings. It is about the renovation of human beings.”

Thousands Have Stress Disorder, Study Finds

In all, Hamadi concluded in a national study submitted to the World Health Organization last month, 20% of the nation’s 825,000 Kuwaitis--a minority in a land where guest workers outnumber citizens--suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or other problems associated with the Iraqi occupation. “And the other 80% may be diagnosed at any time,” he said.

“One reason for this,” he added, “is the people who committed the trauma, the government and its leader who did this to us, they are still in power there.”

“There” is Iraq, which lies an hour’s drive north of this capital, beyond a 10-mile-wide U.N.-administered demilitarized zone and a 130-mile-long electric fence.

In the weeks leading up to the 10th anniversary, which has drawn such notables as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and former President George Bush here, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his sons have been rattling sabers.

Just last month, son Uday Hussein proposed a new national flag bearing a map of Iraq that includes Kuwait, which his nation claimed as its 19th province in justifying its August 1990 invasion.

Such rhetoric fuels fears that most Kuwaitis concede seem irrational, even to them.

“I and most others don’t imagine this kind of an invasion ever could happen again,” said Police Brig. Mustafa Zaabi, a 1984 sociology graduate from San Diego’s United States International University, who heads security for Kuwait City. “We have our God. God will help us. God and the Americans. But still, we all have these dark thoughts.”

At any given time, there are only 3,000 to 4,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Kuwait, mostly to train and provide maintenance. And Maj. Gen. John Vize, the Irish commander of the United Nations’ $53-million-a-year, 1,300-member military observer mission on the Iraq-Kuwait border, concedes: “We could never dream we could prevent a major incursion,” stressing that it is not his force’s job.

But hundreds of tons of U.S. military hardware are positioned in bases here. An American aircraft carrier battle group is constantly assigned offshore, and U.S. officials say a massive air-and-ground force could be mobilized within 96 hours to counter an invasion.

Still, every belligerent word Saddam Hussein utters resonates, triggering trepidation and debate south of his border.

Much of that fear, psychologists and political analysts say, is because of the issue Kuwaitis call simply “our POWs”--607 Kuwaiti civilians who the government and citizens insist, despite Iraqi denials, are alive and being held hostage.

Kuwait’s leaders have made the prisoners of war a national obsession. The committee to free them is headed by the defense minister, a member of the royal family. Most major public events, including concerts and festivals, open with dedications to the missing.

The postwar U.N. resolutions and international economic sanctions against Iraq are linked to the issue. They cannot be lifted unless Hussein’s government, which released about 7,000 Kuwaitis immediately after liberation, frees or accounts for the remaining 607.

Like the new highways and high-rises, though, such efforts are of little solace to relatives such as Mona Malak.

Malak was 20 years old when Iraqi soldiers came for her husband, Yousef Malallah, and his brother, Yunis, on Sept. 3, 1990. The Iraqis burst into their home and promised to return the men in a few hours, Malak recalled.

“One month later, they brought my brother-in-law and shot him twice in the head in front of our house. In front of my eyes. In front of his mother’s eyes,” she said in a recent interview. “We were out of our minds. They slaughtered him like a sheep.

“In 1991, when the POWs were freed after the liberation, one of them told me he saw my husband in a prison in Iraq. But from 1991 until now, I have not heard a word about my husband. I have been to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. I’ve tried everything and looked everywhere. Nothing.

“So now we have finished 10 years since the liberation. My boy was 2 when they took my husband. Now he is 13. And every day, he wants to know: ‘When is my father coming home?’ ”

She acknowledged that she and her son, Yacoub, are well cared for by the government, as are all Kuwaitis.

“Financially, everything is OK,” Malak said. “We’re just talking about the emotional side, and they can’t help us with this. We have the money, but we don’t have the happiness.”

Yet it is that state paternalism that analysts here blame for Kuwait’s mutant economy, which U.S.-educated economist and women’s activist Rola Dashti calls “a free economy with a high welfare state.”

More than 90% of the Kuwaiti citizens in the work force are employed by the government, about half of them in do-nothing jobs that economist Jasem Sadoun calls “hidden unemployment.” Wages for those 220,000 Kuwaitis total $7.2 billion a year.

The net effect: Productivity levels are even lower than before the war, Sadoun said. And that, combined with the nation’s postwar demographics, bodes ill for the future.

Nearly half of all Kuwaitis are younger than 15. Despite the state’s steady oil income and the more than $50 billion it has saved in its Fund for Future Generations reserve, the government will not be able to employ the younger generation without a healthy private sector.

At the same time, Kuwaiti policies have done little to encourage private investment--foreign or domestic--in spite of pleas from economists and diplomats.

“The government is convinced that they cannot continue the way they have been doing business because they cannot absorb the 10,000 to 15,000 Kuwaitis entering the work force every year,” Sadoun said.

“The period after the invasion was a missed opportunity. We could have rebuilt our economy in a more rational way from scratch.”

Policies Deter Foreign Investors, Envoy Says

Especially critical of the government’s approach to foreign investment have been the U.S. and British ambassadors, who will take honored positions at ceremonies marking the liberation.

U.S. Ambassador James Larocco told a recent gathering at the Kuwait Economic Society that “excessive bureaucratic red tape” and sky-high corporate tax rates have discouraged American investment. “Unless the bureaucracy begins to change its habits, investors will not rush to Kuwait,” he said.

The bureaucracy is the government. And despite U.S. pressure for greater democracy, the government remains, in effect, the Sabah royal family--a Cabinet appointed by the emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, and his cousin, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, the crown prince. But analysts note that the four main family rulers are old and ailing. Women still cannot vote. In spite of widespread praise for the parliamentary elections that have been held during the past decade, economist Dashti calls Kuwait “a democracy with an autocracy.”

The elements of democracy that have taken root here are messy, with governments and parliaments dissolving or resigning with disturbing regularity; last month, the entire government quit.

Speaking for that government in an interview the night it resigned, Sheik Saud al Sabah, a royal family member who was serving as minister of both oil and information, blamed the decision on a belligerent parliament seeking to usurp executive and judicial powers.

“But things are fine,” he said. “The country is healthy. We’re in better shape than any country in the region.”

Yet he added that emotionally, Kuwaitis “are not healed.”

Dr. Ghenaim Fayez, a California-educated clinical psychologist who lectures at the Kuwait Orphanage, said that “the Gulf War changed the structure of our society fundamentally and dramatically.”

With the government’s largess, he said, many Kuwaiti parents have turned inward, grown more self-consumed, relied more on nannies to raise their children and generally lived for the moment.

The war orphans, he said, are extreme examples of a familial detachment and denial almost universal in Kuwait.

Even orphanage director Haufaa Nakas, who has cared for the abandoned war babies since their births, refused to blame Iraqi rapes for their creation.

Living in a society where such an act stigmatizes victims for life, she said only that “the babies we received from the hospitals suddenly increased after the occupation. It was something strange--maybe, we don’t know, because of the Iraqis.”

But the psychologists who have treated rape victims say they have no doubt that Ismael and his roommates are among Kuwait’s most painful and enduring legacies of the war--”just one drop,” said a POW relative, “in an ocean of our nation’s pain.”

When asked the cure, Fayez said: “There is no quick solution. We have to plan for years ahead to get our policymakers, educators and caregivers to bring [Kuwaitis] back to the values of before.”

“For total recovery,” concluded Hamadi, the government physician, “I fear it will take a full generation.”