Missing Kuwaitis a crucial factor

Fatima Saleh still makes her son's favourite chicken-and-rice dinner and puts it out for him on the table. But Khalid has not been there to eat it in 12 years.

Soldiers in the Iraqi force occupying Kuwait surrounded the Saleh house on October 21, 1990. It was 7am, and when they stormed in, Saleh recalled recently, they demanded her 16-year-old son Khalid by name.

A month later, the Iraqis returned. This time, they arrested the rest of the family: Saleh, her husband and their three other children.

For the next 4 1/2 months, the family endured life in a string of Iraqi prisons. They saw Khalid again only once - on their first day of imprisonment. His nose was broken, Saleh recalled, and he told her, "They are going to execute me."

Saleh still cannot help lingering over her family's trauma - and Kuwait's. "I always dream of my son, that he is calling me to save him," she said. "What Saddam Hussain did cannot be forgotten."

Khalid is one of 605 Kuwaitis who the government says never returned home after the 1991Gulf War, an unfinished saga from the last war that looms again in the lead-up to what could be the next one.

Most were dragged off on accusations that they resisted the Iraqi occupation, although Khalid's family says he spent most of his time in front of a computer screen.

The Kuwaitis call them prisoners of war, and the UN Security Council resolution passed on November 8 made a full accounting of their fates a condition for Saddam to avoid another war.

The missing Kuwaitis are one emotional reason Kuwait has offered itself as a platform for an American attack on Iraq. A dozen years may have passed, but many Kuwaitis say that only in hearing stories like Saleh's is it possible to understand their country's position on the prospective war.

"Those who object to American policy vis-a-vis Iraq, they don't live next to Saddam," said Abdulla Bishara, a leading politician. "They haven't experienced his terror."

Whether matter-of-factly or in tones of amazement and horror, Kuwaitis are quick to relate their tales of suffering during the Iraqi occupation, from August 2, 1990, until Iraqi forces were driven out seven months later. Some stories are baroque narratives of cruelty - toddlers in jail, torture, families ripped apart.

In this country of 2.2 million - only about 800,000 of whom are citizens - the suffering of a dozen years ago is often connected to a straightforward calculation about the possibility of another war: We can never be secure until Saddam is gone, goes this line of reasoning.

Even then, many Kuwaitis worry, Iraq may still harbour designs on its tiny neighbour made wealthy by oil. A historical Iraqi claim to Kuwait's 6,880 square miles was revived during the 1990 occupation, they recall.

Not surprisingly, those whose relatives are on the list of the missing tend to be more hawkish than others. But with so many Kuwaitis connected in some way, that adds up to a lot of hawks.

Five years later, Kuwait received its first - and so far only - communication from the Iraqi government on the subject of POWs. It was a letter, handed to them through the Red Cross, with a list of 126 Kuwaiti "criminals" still being held in Iraqi jails. The other missing Kuwaitis, it said, "were probably killed by allied bombs."