Kuwait Ignores Accord, Deports Dozens of Iraqis : Persian Gulf: At least 36 civilians are forcibly repatriated. About 600 others face a similar fate.

In an apparent violation of an international agreement it signed in March, Kuwait forcibly repatriated at least 36 Iraqi civilians on Tuesday.

The internees, including 11 women and six children, were taken from an immigration detention center in Kuwait city where about 600 people are reportedly awaiting deportation. They were loaded onto two buses bound for the border town of Abdaly, where they were to be marched across the no-man’s-land into Safwan, Iraq.

“If I go to Baghdad, they will kill me,” said Jafal Musawi, 29, from the window of the bus. Musawi, a Shiite Muslim, said he was being forced to leave. He claimed that he was burned, his teeth were broken and he had lost hearing in one ear as a result of beatings in police custody.

“My body, oh my God,” he said, adding that no criminal charges had been brought against him.

Kuwait signed a memorandum of understanding in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in March, agreeing that neither prisoners of war nor civilian detainees would be repatriated against their will. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Britain and France also signed the agreement, which was prepared under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

A Western diplomat said he could not confirm that Kuwait had violated the international accord, since the Red Cross had been unable to speak with the internees to determine whether their departure was indeed voluntary. He said the Red Cross has raised the issue privately with the Kuwaiti government.

“As we don’t know who was in these buses, we don’t know if it’s a violation or not,” he said. “They (the Kuwaitis) say they asked the detainees, and all were willing to go back. Fair enough. But we would have liked to cross-check their willingness.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed that Kuwait has deported a number of Iraqi citizens but said he could not confirm that they were sent back against their will.

“We understand that the International Committee of the Red Cross is raising this issue with Kuwait, and . . . we will be doing the same,” Boucher said.

He said Washington opposes forced repatriations as a matter of principle, but he withheld criticism of Kuwait pending clarification.

The deportations, which have been rumored for weeks, are in keeping with Kuwait’s stated desire to reduce the number of foreigners in the emirate. Before the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion, Kuwait’s 800,000 citizens were a minority in an estimated population of 2.2 million.

However, the government has yet to announce a policy on who will be deported and under what circumstances.

Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the brutal Iraqi occupation have reportedly been deported, including three Jordanian passport holders who were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing by a martial-law tribunal May 19. The reports have not been confirmed, however, and Western officials said they had no idea how many non-Kuwaitis have been asked or forced to leave.

Two Red Cross representatives were seen at the immigration center Tuesday attempting to halt the repatriation, but they were ignored. They would not comment on the incident.

Police also confiscated a Los Angeles Times camera containing film of the detainees being loaded onto the buses, later politely returning the camera but not the film.

In a tableau of chaos and anguish, at least 150 other men, women and children milled around the detention center amid a huge stack of suitcases and parcels while weeping relatives spoke with other prisoners through a metal-mesh cage.

Eventually, the people were taken away but the luggage remained inexplicably behind. Some prisoners were taken to the buses in handcuffs, while one man was carried aboard in a chair.

One of the buses bound for Abdaly was reserved for women and children.

Amina Lajimi, 21, who said she was of Iraqi origin but was born in Kuwait, cradled an 11-month-old child in her arms. She seemed resigned to resettlement in a country she has never known.

“All my family is there,” she said. “There’s nothing for us here now. The news is terrible. All the Iraqis outside Iraq aren’t wanted, that’s what we hear. . . .

“We fear the gunfire, the oppression, that there will be no water,” she said.

Among the anxious relatives was Fatim Abuseibaa, a 27-year-old Palestinian who returned to Kuwait from Daly City, Calif., in October. She said her brother, Mufid, 26, is scheduled to be deported to Jordan on Thursday.

Mufid was arrested May 2, and was told about a month later that he was not under criminal suspicion, but his eardrum was shattered during police beatings, she said.

“They said there is no reason; he has come to Kuwait without a visa,” she said. “But my brother was born in Kuwait and has a visa and everything.”

Two other brothers are on trial for collaboration--a charge they deny--and both were tortured into making false confessions, she said. All want to rejoin a brother who has U.S. citizenship and is managing a car rental office in Daly City.

“We just want to leave,” she said.

Earlier Tuesday, border guards and Western officials at Abdaly said that another 46 Iraqis were repatriated Sunday night, apparently without being given the option of joining the 5,000 refugees who are living in a sandstorm-racked tent encampment 200 yards from the no man’s land on the Kuwaiti side of the border.

“They are crying, saying they don’t want to go,” said a Kuwaiti police lieutenant. “Maybe they say Iraqis (will) kill them. I tell them, ‘You don’t be scared of Iraq.’ ”

The lieutenant said he had been told to expect 100 to 200 more Iraqis to be sent across the border later in the day.

Two refugees reported seeing the buses drive past the refugee camp to the border after dark Sunday.

“They tried to come back, but they wouldn’t let them,” one said.

But the lieutenant said anyone who preferred to join the Iraqis, stateless Arabs and other non-Kuwaitis in the Abdaly refugee camp rather than cross the border into Iraq would be permitted to do so.

Asked why the Iraqis had been detained in Kuwait city, the officer said: “They were found at a checkpoint, they don’t have a visa, they are just coming here during the war.”

Meanwhile, the fate of the 5,000 refugees who have decided to remain in Abdaly remains unclear. The Red Crescent Society, the Muslim nations’ equivalent of the Red Cross, is providing food and water, but temperatures topped 120 degrees on Tuesday. Many of the 2,500 children have chronic diarrhea, and two women displayed emaciated newborn babies who were failing to gain weight.

“I wouldn’t say (Abdaly) is forgotten, but it’s not a priority if you think about the Kurdish problem or the Shiite problem,” the Western diplomat said. “And since when do humanitarian problems become priority No. 1, unless they meet political interests?”

In Washington, meanwhile, three leading human rights groups told Congress on Tuesday that arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances continue in Kuwait 3 1/2 months after U.S. and allied troops liberated the country, the Associated Press reported.

One group, Amnesty International, called on the Kuwaiti government to halt trials of alleged collaborators, saying the proceedings are “defective in all critical stages.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.