The Kuwait Nobody Can Defend : The government must intervene and stop the human rights violations

Human rights conditions in Kuwait, nearly four months after its liberation from Iraqi oppression, remain grim and dispiriting. As three human rights groups told a congressional hearing this week, disappearances, arbitrary arrests and torture continue on a wide scale. These abuses, with non-Kuwaitis almost always the victims, are no longer the spontaneous reactions of a population getting even with those suspected of collaborating with the occupier. “The private violence of the first week has now largely given way to significantly more organized torture and sometimes killings,” says Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, who returned last week from a nine-day visit to Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti government’s role in all this is unclear. Certainly it bears responsibility for the military tribunals that are in the process of trying more than 200 alleged collaborators. The quality of justice in those trials--the almost complete absence of witnesses to alleged crimes, for example--has been widely criticized. The government is also responsible for the forced repatriation of Iraqis now going on, in violation of the international agreement that Kuwait signed in March.

But it’s also probable that vigilantism and rogue behavior by the police and army may be involved in a large number of cases where torture and murder, mainly of Palestinians, have taken place. The government, which has proven to be remarkably ineffective since its return from exile, may simply not be in control. What has to be recognized at the same time is that the campaign of fear being directed against Palestinians and other non-Kuwaiti Arabs supports the new official policy of sharply reducing the country’s foreign population. Were it otherwise, the government almost certainly would have moved energetically by now to halt the outrages that are occurring. In the absence of such action, countries that supported Kuwait’s liberation have a moral obligation to publicize and protest these injustices, vigorously, emphatically, constantly, until they are stopped.