Word: kuwait
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...wholesale deportation is deplorable, it is still preferable to murder. There are fewer reports now of atrocities than during the free-for-all that roiled Kuwait in March, when vigilante groups joined Kuwaiti police and military officers in seeking revenge. The Palestine Liberation Organization estimates that about 400 Palestinians were killed then. "If anything, that figure is probably low by about 600," says Abdul Rahman al-Awadi, the former Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs who continues to advise Prime Minister Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah...
Today's big squeeze is hardly subtle. Of the approximately 230,000 Palestinians who fled Kuwait following Iraq's invasion, none are being allowed to return. Except for those expressly needed in critical government posts (perhaps 2,000 in the ministries of Health and Electricity and Water), most of the 170,000 remaining Palestinians have been fired from their jobs. At the same time, the government is demanding back rent, and private Kuwaiti landlords are doing the same. Free medical care and public schooling, heretofore rights for expatriates, are history. Private schooling is still possible, but the 50% government subsidy...
Jobless, stateless, without access to Kuwait's welfare system and with rent and other bills to pay, "how are those of us without protected employment to live?" asks Ali of the Plaza Hotel. "Obviously we are being forced to leave." But even leaving is difficult. Approximately 30,000 Palestinians hold Egyptian travel documents, but Cairo is less than eager to take them. Jordan is the only available haven, but Saudi Arabia has refused overland transit to Amman, Iraq has allowed it only sporadically, and the only other way out, by air, is costly. The result is a general milling about...
Officially, none of this is happening. "Most of the Palestinians helped Kuwaitis during the Iraqi occupation," says Prime Minister Saad. Yet Saad's failure to define collaboration has made it impossible to distinguish between true disloyalty to Kuwait and acts undertaken merely to survive. The elaborate money-distribution scheme that provided almost $200 million for bribes and food during the occupation served only Kuwaitis. "Why is someone who worked in order to live -- and only because the government wouldn't support him as it was supporting Kuwaitis -- a collaborator?" asks Sana Salah, a Palestinian computer programmer...
...members of the ruling family actively aiding the Palestinians is Ali Salem al-Sabah, the resistance leader who left his doctoral studies in California to return to Kuwait after Iraq's invasion. With the help of his father, the commander of Kuwait's national guard, Salem has moved 800 jailed Palestinians into Kuwait's juvenile prison. "Life is better for them at what we call Ali's prison," says Salman al-Sabah, the head of Kuwait's state security service. "Ali has spent thousands of dollars of his own money for ! mattresses and linens and to have food catered...