The gulf war was supposed to reshape the Mideast–and on the way, to encourage regional democracy and even the redistribution of wealth. Some change may still be possible; last week Syria agreed to a formula for a Mideast peace conference, a concession that put pressure on Israel to agree to genuine negotiations on the Palestinian issue (page 33). But one year after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait ignited the gulf conflict, most of the same faces and the same tired policies remain. Saddam Hussein clings tenaciously to power, and last week his soldiers were once again moving to put down Kurdish rebels. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is as hard-line as ever, and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat is as dodgy. Kuwait’s reinstalled royal rulers are jousting with opponents, yielding political ground only grudgingly. Saudi Arabian King Fahd is languidly tinkering with one modest reform proposal at his summer retreat on the Red Sea. One of the results of the war, ironically, has been to strengthen King Hussein of Jordan, who had seemed the most likely to topple. A stream of reforms coming out of Amman are the most promising in the Arab world. For the most part, however, the conflict has left the Mideast with more refugees and less money, more cynicism and less hope.
The United Nations calls the aftermath “a bitter peace.” The conflict left as many as 200,000 people dead and displaced more than 5 million others across the region. The wealthy gulf states have made it clear they have no intention of picking up the tab for any sort of Mideast Marshall plan. Their own postwar economic problems, they insist, leave them little spare change to hand out to their poorer Arab brethren. “Whenever the Egyptians and Syrians look into our eyes they see dollar signs,” one Saudi finance official told me in Riyadh. He said his country had given as much as $60 billion in aid in the last decade. “Well, the party’s over.”
As the oil-rich Arabs plead poverty, millions have been left without a home. Naif Abdullah had to watch his aged mother die slowly of hepatitis at a Kuwait detention center. The 19-year-old university student belongs to a nomadic tribe called the Bidoun-many of whose members, Kuwaiti authorities believe, had cooperated with Iraq. Abdullah was taken in handcuffs to see his mother’s body one last time before being returned to Abdali Two Camp, a city of tattered tents on a desolate spot on the Kuwait-Iraq border. “No one cares about us. We are like animals,” he says, standing amid piles of garbage. “We will die here.”
Iraq, of course, is supposed to pay reparations for the damage it inflicted on its neighbors. But the war-and the sanctions that Washington has insisted remain in place have cost the Iraqis dearly in money and lives. Hannan Mehsin was born two months ago in a Baghdad slum. Since then the baby’s 18-year-old mother has fed her only raw cow’s milk and rice water; she can neither nurse the baby nor find formula. Hannan weighs less than seven pounds, and doctors say she has no hope of surviving. Thousands of other babies like Hannan could perish in the next few months.
Saddam, meanwhile, is busy hiding his nuclear program from U.N. inspectors and rebuilding a 500,000-strong Army equipped with as many as 3,000 tanks salvaged from the war. The Iraqi Army is still the largest in the region, and while it poses no immediate threat, its neighbors are understandably nervous. Even as she sits in her luxurious home near the Kuwait seafront, Mrs. Manal Bishara remembers Iraqi troops invading her home and pointing their rifles at her youngest daughter. Five-year-old Farah asked them innocently, “Are you going to kill me?” That left an indelible mark on her mother. “He will come again,” Mrs. Bishara insists anxiously. “And the next time he will kill all Kuwaiti families. He will not leave us alive.”
Kuwaitis have plenty to keep them busy while they wait. The oil fires set by the retreating Iraqis have turned the once pristine deserts of Kuwait into oceans of black glue. Even the camels and alley cats are tinged a ghostly gray by the muck. Some Kuwaitis wash their cars with gasoline to cut through the pollutants.
One third of the 600-odd oilfield fires have been extinguished, but it may take another two years to complete the task. Water, electricity and telephones have been reconnected, but Kuwait’s downtown remains a gutted ghost city, in ironic contrast to the crowded streets of Baghdad (NEWSWEEK, July 22), where energetic reconstruction work is underway. Kuwait’s pampered citizens seem partly to blame for the emirate’s sluggish rebirth. Nearly half of Kuwait’s 800,000 passport holders remain abroad either to escape the searing gulf summer or because, as one mother of four told me, “foreign servants are so hard to find these days and it is difficult coping with the children.” The Kuwaitis, says one senior foreign diplomat, “are sometimes like spoiled children themselves. Their plaything [Kuwait] has been broken and they want someone else to fix it for them.”
To be fair, rebuilding a country is a daunting task for any government, and Kuwait is making some progress. The ruling al-Sabah family has brought a vicious postwar crime wave largely under control, and revenge-seeking vigilante groups are rare. Military courts have been closed down and martial law lifted. Kuwaitis who stayed during the invasion-the insiders-are slowly overcoming their aversion to the “outsiders” or “runaways” who spent the war outside the country.
The government makes no secret, however, of its wish to get rid of most of the 400,000 Palestinians who lived in Kuwait before the war. There have been frequent reports of human-rights abuses, including torture and forced expulsions of foreigners. It probably is prudent for the country to slash the number of foreign workers from prewar highs, when they outnumbered Kuwaitis two to one. In the “new Kuwait” the entire population is expected to total 1.2 million people, half the number of a year ago.
It’s just as well that the war “wasn’t fought about democracy in Kuwait,” as George Bush recently insisted, because there isn’t much democracy in the emirate. “The royals control everything from the central bank to the central slaughterhouse,” says opposition spokesman Abdullah Nibari, suggesting that national elections have been deliberately delayed until late 1992 to allow the al-Sabahs to rig the voting. Kuwait’s political evolution is painfully slow–except when compared with the pace of reform in surrounding states.
The House of Saud has hinted for years it might establish a consultative council of both elected and nominated elders to “advise” King Fahd and his Council of Ministers. The idea was revived during the war, unleashing an uncharacteristic bout of energetic political debate. Religious conservatives blitzed the country with clandestine audiocassettes and pamphlets. Moderates hit back with propaganda broadsides of their own, often via fax machines. Both sides sent petitions to the king, often demanding, ironically, similar reforms including greater political and individual freedom. Religious police called the Mutawain, incensed at the presence of so many “infidel” troops during the war, made their own political statement by stepping up their harassment of women showing too much bare ankle or arm.
The king is likely to establish a council within a year-but that is as far as change is likely to go. His kingdom is already beginning to shut its doors again to the outside world. And though the defense of Saudi Arabia and the 25 percent of the world oil reserves it contains was the key reason America intervened so decisively a year ago, Riyadh has been less affected by the war than any other regional player.
As summer engulfs the Arabian Peninsula, many Saudis have fled to their summer retreats in Europe. The political debate has gone flat, and even the Mutawain have retreated from the streets of the capital. The kingdom has reinstated the penalty of beheading for vicious crimes after a 10-month pause introduced out of respect for foreign sensibilities. Newspapers practice a strict self-censorship, and the 47 women who tried to strike a blow for greater liberty by driving their own cars through Riyadh in wartime remain under a benevolent type of house arrest.
“Nothing has really changed here,” one senior Western diplomat said. “Even the talk of things changing has started to fade. " A radical Saudi Arabian businessman in the oil city of Dhahran put it more bluntly: “The war didn’t go on long enough for it to deeply affect the Saudi psyche. There weren’t enough Saudis killed for people to feel it really happened.” Here, the war had greater power as a cultural event than a political one. Waiters automatically offer Tabasco sauce, which all soldiers seem to relish, at favored military hangouts. Many Saudis are indulging their newfound taste for country-and-Western music, developed after listening to Armed Forces Radio, and those with illegal satellite dishes now tune in to Israeli TV-despite public warnings that the Israeli secret service is trying to corrupt Saudi society over the airwaves.
At the Mutla Pass outside Kuwait City, where allied warplanes caught retreating Iraqis on the now infamous “Highway of Death,” hundreds of buses, trucks and armored personnel carriers lie rusting in the sun. The bodies of Iraqi soldiers have been removed and buried. Autos occasionally speed by; perhaps their drivers are embarrassed to stop and view the carnage. There are few visitors, but American troops have left their graffiti on the battlefield. Scrawled in white spray paint across one tank at AI-Mutla is the message, “Into the Valley of death rode the 26,000?” On a burned-out hulk inside Iraq is the legend “Bob’s Grill-Pittsburgh,” and one lovelorn soldier wrote “I love Stephanie Anderson” on the side of a truck, The relentless Arabian sands have already begun to bury many of these steel skeletons of war. The hopes for change, for peace, for a new Mideast-naive as they might have been seem to be heading for a similar fate.
