Violence against the Palestinians raises concern

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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 physicians and representatives of Kuwait’s substantial Palestinian community.

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? We had difficulty during the Iraqis’ presence. Why should we suffer more?” said one resident of Kuwait city’s Jabriyah district, one of three heavily Palestinian neighborhoods in the capital.

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.

Many Palestinian professionals who sent their families out of Kuwait during the occupation say they now doubt 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 systematically to 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.

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"Violence against the Palestinians raises concern," Huntsville Times, 8 March 1991. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1991-048. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1991-048