Kuwait’s Palestinians live in fear

Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service and Associated Press

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KUWAIT CITY — 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 doctors and representatives of Kuwait’s substantial Palestinian community.

The reports of violence came as American oil firefighters working near clouds of black smoke and roaring oil fires were assessing what it will take to restore Kuwait’s oil facilities sabotaged by Iraqi forces last month. Some say the bill could run as high as $20 billion over 10 years.

Kuwaiti oil officials estimated on Thursday that 189 million gallons a day — double what Britain uses in a day — have been lost from Kuwait’s largest oil field since Iraqi forces blasted 400 of the field’s 500 oil wells.

All 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.

“Is the liberation of Kuwait a green light for their people to try to torture Palestinians, to make their life more difficult?” said one resident of Kuwait city’s Jabriyah district.

In New York Wednesday, the PLO 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 worry 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.

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"Kuwait’s Palestinians live in fear," Daily Herald, 8 March 1991. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1991-047. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1991-047