The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Inside the city of Kuwait, we journalists were overwhelmed by stories of Kuwaiti loss and fierce revenge against the Palestinians, a phenomenon that the Americans simply ignored. Only a week after the liberation, parts of the city resembled the anarchy of wartime Beirut, with gunmen controlling streets and Palestinians kidnapped from their homes by armed Kuwaitis. Western ambassadors and relief organisations pleaded with the few Kuwaiti ministers to have arrived—the emir and his immediate family had not yet deigned to return—to restore law and order before they lost control of the capital.

  Yet even the Kuwaiti army seemed set on retaliating against the Palestinian community, some of whom had undoubtedly collaborated with the Iraqi occupiers. Up to 400 young Palestinians were said to have been kidnapped from their homes in the first three days of March. When Colin Smith of The Observer and I drove into the Kuwait City suburb of Hawali—home to tens of thousands of Palestinians—on the morning of 3 March, we found Kuwaiti soldiers driving twelve armoured vehicles through the streets, shooting in the air, ordering shops to close and beating Palestinian civilians who fell into their hands. Incredibly—or so it seemed to us—American Special Forces troops who were present did nothing to stop this brutality, instead shouting obscenities at journalists who asked why they did not intervene.

  When three armed Kuwaiti soldiers began to beat up a Palestinian boy on a bicycle in Hawali, Smith and I were forced to intervene, physically pulling the Kuwaitis off the young man and ordering them to lower their rifles. The fact that Smith and I were still wearing the camouflaged gas capes in which we had smuggled ourselves into Kuwait must have persuaded the Kuwaitis that we were allied personnel and they let the boy go. But when we shouted at U.S. Special Forces personnel to help us, they either stared at us or laughed. When I asked a U.S. Special Forces officer, a captain, why he would not come to our assistance, he replied: “You having a nice day? We don’t want your sort around here with your rumours. This is martial law, boy. You have a big mouth. Fuck off!” Smith and I took the number of the American vehicle—IS055A—and I later visited the reopened U.S. embassy to tell them what we had seen. By chance, the BBC had filmed the incident. After some minutes, a U.S. officer emerged along with Fred Cuny, one of the most courageous American aid officials of the postwar years. But the American officer seemed little interested in what we had to tell him. “Have you people seen any sign of Palestinian terrorists in these streets?” he wanted to know.

  So here we go again, I said to Smith later. Palestinians are terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. The Americans were more anxious about “terrorists” than law and order.145 The two men confirmed the registration number of the Special Forces Humvee and said they would “look into the matter.” The soldier admitted that “we’re having problems all over the city—we’ve had a colonel of ours threatened by armed men. Things are getting completely out of control. Has this BBC film been shown?” Cuny, a tall, balding, heroic man who was to acquire legendary fame for his selfless work with refugees in Kurdistan and Sarajevo—and in Chechnya, where he would ultimately lose his life—seemed at first more interested in preventing the BBC from airing the tape than in persuading U.S. forces to act with discipline. “I thought we’d stopped the tape getting on air,” he said, and seemed put out that he had failed.

  In itself, the incident was minuscule. Compared with the crimes committed by the Iraqis in recent weeks—not to mention the uprising now burning its way across Iraq—the youth’s painful experience was insignificant. But it was symbolic of a disturbing reaction among U.S. forces in the aftermath of the liberation. Weeks later, Cuny would tell me that he had filed a report on the incident and that the abusive Special Forces team had been sent back to the United States within days. But they had been disciplined not because they allowed a Palestinian youth to be beaten in front of their eyes. They were sent home because they “submitted an incomplete report.” The Special Forces officer had informed his superiors of a “confrontation” with journalists—but had chosen not to mention the reason for this “confrontation”: his refusal to help the Palestinian boy.

  Much worse was to follow. Death squads roamed the streets of Kuwait, one of them run by a son and nephew of a senior Kuwaiti prince. American government officials held a secret meeting with the prince later in March 1991, and, after listening to his indignant denials, handed him a list of names, dates and other details of the execution squads. Cuny was transferred to the fields of Kurdistan in northern Iraq to cope with the tide of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam’s vengeance, and it was he who disclosed to me in late April that an undercover team of U.S. Special Forces and specially trained military reservist officers—including a U.S. federal judge and an assistant district attorney for Philadelphia—had been tasked to track down the fate of hundreds of missing Palestinians in Kuwait. The State Department, according to Cuny, learned long before the liberation that Kuwaiti authorities had drawn up secret plans to deport the entire Palestinian community into Iraq in buses painted with the logo of the Red Crescent humanitarian relief organisation. Another plan that reached American ears was for Kuwaitis to execute large numbers of Palestinians “to try to stampede the community into a mass exodus”— a variation on the method used by Israel to depopulate western Palestine in 1948, although this was not an observation the Americans made.

  Cuny admitted that “things were not right at first in Kuwait. Our people on the ground didn’t understand what their role was. Some of our senior officers were not reporting things up the channel. We would find that our Special Forces officers based in Kuwait police stations would know people were being tortured there but couldn’t prove it. We would have American officers who would hear someone screaming but who couldn’t say the man was being tortured because he wasn’t witnessing it. So they wouldn’t report it to us.” All of this I duly reported in The Independent, although the inaction of Americans listening to screams of torture yet failing to report them because they couldn’t actually see the torture was a truly bizarre—almost Iraqi—explanation.

  But the kidnapping of Palestinians was already going on,146 and, in the end, the Kuwaiti government got its way. Within months, it deported more than 200,000 Palestinians. Others would follow later. The only difference was that many of them travelled north to Iraq in Red Cross buses actually hired by the Red Cross—rather than in buses disguised with the insignia of the Red Crescent. The Kuwaiti resistance themselves acknowledged that 5 per cent of their comrades-in-arms against the Iraqis were Palestinians, but this did not save them.

  Yet the experience of those same Kuwaitis was sometimes so terrible that other crimes faded from our tired reports. By the time of the liberation, the resistance had already compiled a list of martyrs, who included women as well as men, some of whom—arrested in the very last hours of the Iraqi occupation—suffered terrible fates. Abu Sami, Abu Ahmed and Abu Saad were among them. “The Iraqis knew who they were,” a member of the Kuwaiti resistance in the suburb of Qurain told me. “They had been watching them for many days and they decided to get them at the end.” Two of their comrades in Qurain were women but their fate was the same. “They penetrated their heads with drills,” the resistance man, Tariq Ahmed, said. “We saw the bodies afterwards. They were murdered in this way.” Such appalling accounts might be dismissed as exaggeration were it not for some of the bodies that later turned up in Kuwaiti hospitals. At least three were found to have drill holes through their arms and legs, mechanically crucified.

  If nothing else, it should have given us a terrifying picture of the treatment that the Iraqi government would visit upon any Iraqi rebels who unwisely heeded the American call for insurrection further north and then fell into the hands of Saddam’s security men. Still, however, reporters in Kuwait—including myself—were obsessed by the extent of the Iraqi army’s defeat in Kuwait rather than by its fearful reincarnation inside Iraq. In the very early days of the liberation, I drove beyond the Kuwaiti frontier with Lara Marlowe of Time magazine. There was still littl
e sign of the terrible events taking place beyond the American lines, only the distant sound of shooting further north, and an American army officer who talked of men arriving at his checkpoint to beg for weapons and being told that they could have none.

  On the Iraqi highway north of Safwan, a young black tank crewman from the American 1st Armored Division offered me a cold Pepsi on top of his Abrams tank and we sat there together, staring north across the grey and dun-coloured wastes of southern Iraq. The tank was parked on a perfect clover-leaf motorway intersection whose smooth six-lane highway possessed a dangerously normal perspective, a transplanted bit of Europe or America amid the debris of war, an illusion heightened by the concrete picnic tables placed at regular intervals along the road. It was cold and damp and we could hear the roar of the oil fires whose clouds towered high into the desolate sky. “Just think of it,” the American tanker said after a while. “They call this the cradle of civilisation.”

  And of course, he was right. Just east of here lay the great ziggurat of Ur, the 4,000-year-old Sumerian city of Mesopotamia and biblical birthplace of Abraham; a sharp-eyed U.S. artillery officer had just stopped a tank crew firing live rounds into the monument when he spotted “historic ruins” on the corner of his map. North towards Baghdad lay Babylon and Nineveh and the great primal rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as the Shiite shrines of Najaf and Kerbala.

  From the north, three Iraqi soldiers in the red berets of Saddam’s Republican Guards walked gingerly towards Lara and myself. They had no weapons and moved with their arms away from their sides in the familiar “walking duck” attitude we all adopted when we wanted to demonstrate that we were harmless. Cigarettes? they asked. We gave them some Marlboros, watched by the American soldier on the tank. Then the tallest of the three men pointed to an Iraqi army truck abandoned in a field to the north of the highway. Would we give him permission to drive it away? Sure, we said, but we’ll just check with the Americans. Any problem with these guys taking their truck back? we asked. The soldier on the tank gave us a thumbs-up. “They’re beaten—they can take their crap,” he said. There were more cigarettes and the three Iraqis then walked purposefully to the Russian-built military lorry, started the engine and bumped off across the desert floor northwards. Only later did we ask ourselves why they came for the lorry. Amid all this destruction, why did they care about an abandoned truck? What would the Republican Guard want this stuff for now?

  Next day, I understood. Back at Safwan, the empty clover-leaf motorway interchange had transformed itself from Western-normal to Eastern-terrible; drifting down the highway towards us came the damned. Some were Iraqi soldiers, others frightened women; many were wounded. Around us flowed a mass of huddled, shuffling figures, many crying, others throwing themselves into the motorway ditches to sleep. Hundreds of Kuwaitis kidnapped in the last hours of the occupation but newly freed by the Basra insurgents were now on the road with terrible stories of hospitals crammed with the dead and dying. One of them was a pharmacist and former Kuwaiti MP called Ahmed Baktiar. He had been taken to Basra hospital to help the wounded men and women littered across the floors, he said. “A young man just died in front of me. The tanks were coming and they were firing straight into the houses on each street, reducing the houses to ashes. There are lots of people dying of a strange sickness. Some think it’s because they have to drink the water lying in the streets which is contaminated. Others say it’s because the water in Basra now contains oil from the smoke over the city.”147

  And all the while, the tide of sick and starving and frightened people shuffled past us. Some came in hand-pushed carts, old men and babies with filthy blankets thrown over them, and I thought of the medieval carts that went from house to house when the Great Plague struck Europe, collecting the dead. Some of the people in these carts were dead. There were two television crews pointing their lenses at close range into the faces of the refugees, and I noticed how, for once, the faces did not react to the cameras. It was as if every face was also dead.

  Two U.S. embassy officials were standing beside a station wagon along with a senior American officer. “We can’t have them just all coming down here,” one of the embassy men said to Staff Sergeant Nolde of the 1st Armored Division. “They can’t cross the border. We have no facilities to handle this. They’ve got to go back.” I noticed Cuny standing beside the embassy men, listening in silence. “Look, you’ve got to stop them moving down this road,” the embassy man was saying. “It’s tragic, I know that, but we simply don’t have the facilities for them.” Cuny asked if extra first-aid tents couldn’t be erected for the refugees, and the embassy man sighed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Liberation, a clean victory—and now this mess. And on television. You could see his problem. “You’ve got to stop them, Sergeant,” the embassy man repeated. The officer joined in. “Iraqi agents could infiltrate back into Kuwait among the refugees.”

  But suddenly, there on this cold, damp, hellish road, all the bright sunlight of what was best about America—all the hope and compassion and humanity that Americans like to believe they possess—suddenly shone among us. For the young, tired 1st Armored staff sergeant turned angrily on the man from the U.S. embassy. “I’m sorry, sir. But if you’re going to give me an order to stop these people, I can’t do that. They are coming here begging, old women crying, sick children, boys begging for food. We’re already giving them most of our rations. But I have to tell you, sir, that if you give me an order to stop them, I just won’t do that.” You could see the embassy men wince. First it was these pesky folk cluttering up the highway, then the television cameras, and now a soldier who wouldn’t obey orders. But Sergeant Nolde just turned his back on the diplomat and walked over to a queue of refugee cars. “Tell these people to park at the side of the road over there,” he yelled at the soldiers on his checkpoint. “Tell them to be patient but we’ll try to look after them. Don’t send them back.”

  Around Nolde, two famished Iraqi families, the women in filthy black chadors, the children barefooted, the men’s faces dazed, were sitting in the dirt, tearing open the American military ration packs with their nails, scoffing the cold lumps of stew, pouring the contents of the sauce packets into their mouths. Across the cold sand, Nolde’s soldiers had already helped to house an Iraqi woman and five children. Their story was simple and terrible. Their father had been executed for refusing to join the Republican Guard, their mother raped afterwards. The children were taken by their aunt southwards towards the American lines and there they all were now, squatting in an abandoned electricity shed. The Americans were feeding them, and had found four puppy dogs and a small, gentle-faced donkey which they had given to the grimy children.

  Now a line of battered cars was driving steadily towards Nolde’s position, packed with fearful civilians. Many had not eaten for days. The men were unshaven, the women in tears, the children had urinated in the car in the long journey across a devastated Iraq. Whole families were crying for civilian relatives killed in the allied air assault. Their convoy stank. A little girl was held out of the window of an old black Mercedes by a screaming woman. The child’s body was jerking grotesquely, the convulsions about to kill her.

  This was not quite what the generals in Riyadh had been thinking about when they announced their days of “battlefield preparation” and “communications interdiction.” Nolde ordered one of his men to run down the line of cars. “Where is the car with the sick child?” the soldier kept shouting in English, until someone translated his question into Arabic. There was a wail from the Mercedes. “Get a medic down here, fast,” the soldier ordered. Two more Americans arrived, a big, black soldier who took the little girl into his arms and touched her brow. “Oh, Jesus, she’s having a fit,” he said. “Tell the field hospital we’re coming down with her.”

  The stricken child, together with her distraught mother, was taken from the car. Nolde arrived to order the vehicle out of the column. “Tell the rest of the family we need to search their vehicl
e then they can go and wait by the Red Cross truck,” he said. Nolde and his twelve soldiers of the 1st Armored handed out more of their own rations. There would be no medals for performing these duties.

  And with good reason. For a conflict of interest was becoming apparent. That is why the American officer and the U.S. diplomats had arrived to inspect Nolde’s position. The newly returned and “legitimate” government of Kuwait—on whose behalf the Americans had gone to war—had no desire to see these refugees given sanctuary in Kuwait. The officer even muttered into Nolde’s ear the following revealing sentence: “We had an Iraqi soldier give himself up near here the other day and a Kuwaiti soldier just took him to one side, shot him in the head and pushed his body into a ditch. If you let these people through Safwan, they could face the same danger.” Nolde looked at the officer in contempt. He must have known very well what was going on. He was being ordered to send these people back to their deaths—not because of “lack of facilities” or “Iraqi infiltration” but because the Kuwaitis didn’t want them cluttering up their newly liberated treasure-house emirate. And Nolde refused.