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The Lid is Lifted
by
Paul D Kennedy |
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The writer
Paul D Kennedy used his excellent contacts in Kuwait to keep himself informed of what was going on during the Iraqi invasion. Being Irish, he was able to travel around Kuwait and Iraq and witness events at first-hand. He received an award from the US Secretary of State James Baker III for the help he gave the American embassy in Kuwait during the occupation.
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Excerpts
There was a tall yellow mobile crane on the forecourt in front of the Naif Palace. The arm of the crane hung out over the footpath. A man was hanging from the crane, his body swinging slowly high in the air.
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A short time later another half a dozen soldiers came up Hilali Street. They stopped and stared at the prisoners, guns levelled. They started screaming. The men struggled to their feet. The soldiers yelled in their faces and punched them a bit, and the men were scared, cringing and bunching together. The soldiers punched them into line, screaming at them, to form a rough column. Then they marched the civilians down Hilali Street, at gunpoint, towards Fahd Al-Salem, out of our sight.
A few minutes later we heard shooting from lower down the street – short metallic rattles, assault rifles firing in rapid bursts. The firing ceased abruptly.
Tuk and I stood stupefied, looking down at the street that was blocked full of deserted cars.
Dtai lae-ow, Tuk muttered, ‘dead already.’ I could only nod numbly.
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Two warplanes came streaking out of the east. They passed up over the Gulf road and across the City at a quare rate of knots. I did not see any bombs drop. But immediately after they went by there were some very loud explosions and a plume of smoke rose up from the area around the Seif Palace.
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‘Now final item,’ Anthony coughed gently. ‘Just a piece of overblown rhetoric from Baghdad, I’m sure.’ He paused.
‘Saddam Hussein has threatened that, should anyone interfere, he will turn Kuwait into a graveyard.’
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The front of the truck was turned into the kerb and its rear jutted out into the roadway. Four girls are being forced up into the truck at gunpoint. Three of the girls looked as if they were Filipinas. The fourth, very tall, may have been an Arab. They were well dressed, as if they were hotel receptionists or shop assistants in a boutique. The girls were crying.
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‘ … Soldier try fuck her but no get in. She virgin and scared as hell. He no can make it. He get very angry and beat her about. But he still no can make it. He take empty soda bottle from crate in corner and shove it between her legs up. He made her bleed.’
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Just before I put them away I looked again at the photos of the girl being forced to give a blow job at gunpoint and at the frightened girl being raped on the couch.
I looked out across the City. It was dark under the white smoke drifting lazily in the air. I felt something spark in my gut, deep down. My hands trembled slightly. I didn’t know if it was fear or anger or some weird mixture of both.
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In his right hand he was carrying a drawn sword, a very long flat blade shaped like a straight sabre, a work-a-day weapon quite unlike the ornate ceremonial swords common in Kuwait.
The big soldier was in a rage. As they strode back and forth, he was swishing the sword around high up in the air then bringing it down suddenly with a violent chopping motion. We noticed that the other soldiers had backed off to the far ends of the street, keeping out of his way.
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At the top of the street, just before Safat Square, the police station was completely burned out, a hollow shell of blackened walls.
‘They must have put up some fight,’ I said.
‘Guess they had too.’ Mike grinned. ‘There’s no way out the back.’
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Everything moveable had disappeared, even the small machines with which these shops plied their trade. In front of one shop a large hoist and tackle lay on its side in the oily crud, perhaps because it had proved too big and awkward to get onto the flat-bed of a truck.
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At the same time I was impressed and strangely excited. I noticed that Wichan was quite perturbed. Dam picked up the garotte and repeated his balletic performance. The top came off the sweeper pole.
Ngai tee sut, he said. ‘Easy the most.’
Dam offered me the garotte. He wanted to teach me how to use it. I declined.
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The guy went on to explain that the system listens for key words. If a key word is used in a conversation, the recording is flagged for playback by the security services, but if no key words are used, the recording is over-written by the next conversation.
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‘We could always go to the hotels. It might be simpler.’
‘Goddamn! And volunteer for Belsen? Take a bag down to the station and catch the first train for the gas works? Shit. No way, man. No goddamn way at all.’
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‘Iraq has announced,’ the anchor continued straight-faced, ‘that it will detain citizens of aggressor nations and use them as human shields in key military and civil installations.’
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The two guys then cut off the noses of the soldiers, went through their pockets, took their guns, and disappeared back up the laneway.
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‘The American’s name is Mike ...,’ Jake was continuing blithely when Mike grabbed the phone.
‘Chrissake, man, after all what was said about nationalities and names. Why don’t you just call the mother-fuckers up and tell them where we all live? You goddamn asshole, son of a bitch.’
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What happens when you are a natural-born coward and you are held a gun-point, some of your friends are raped, others are killed, your life destroyed?
You get scared, really frightened.
Then ... You get angry!
And you learn to focus that anger ... to survive and fight back as best you know how.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait on the 2nd of August 1990 I was living in the tallest apartment block in downtown Kuwait City. I had a grandstand view of the tanks and troops as they came swarming in. It was all kinda exciting.
But, six hours later, after the city had fallen, I found I was caught in a trap. As law and order broke down and Saddam Hussein’s undisciplined rabble was let loose, myself and thousands of other civilians came under severe physical threat.
The Lid is Lifted is my story of what happened in Kuwait when the country was invaded by Iraq on the 2nd August 1990. Written in a terse narrative non-fiction style, every word is true.
The Lid is Lifted covers the early days, the most unsettling time of my life. The invasion lifted the lid on all that is vile in human nature and the many civilians trapped in Kuwait became the prey of armed predators. I too was one of those victims.
Fear became the pervading emotion for most of us. My mind was almost destroyed when I was held at gunpoint while two girls were raped in my home. But I managed, somehow, to convert my fear into the righteous anger that enabled me to survive.
The memories of the human abuses that went on day after day still make me angry. At the time it was a good anger … it gave me the courage to face the facts, to plan, to act and to survive, and to carry a few others with me.
However The Lid is Lifted is much more than a litany of horrors and how we reacted to them. The story describes things and events I witnessed but which do not accord with the official accounts of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait … facts that are absolutely true though highly controversial.
For example, I know for sure there were Jordanian troops among the invading forces … we found several empty wooden ammo boxes with marked ‘Royal Jordanian Army’ on the side lying on the streets in the area where I lived.
At the time of the invasion I was a consultant for one of the premier banks in the region and had a wealth of well-informed contacts at senior level on whom I could draw for information and advice. Some of the things you can read in The Lid is Lifted are pretty unbelievable but absolutely true.
For example, scores of Iraqi secret police arrived in Kuwait a week before the invasion and checked-in to the main hotels in the city. As their passport details would have been submitted by the hotels to the Ministry of the Interior, the sudden influx of Iraqis must have been obvious to the authorities, yet they apparently did nothing. I never found out why.
From my grandstand view on August 2nd, I could see that the incoming tanks did not experience any problems finding their way through a strange city. I found out later that Iraq had its own unloading dock in the port area, guarded by its own troops, which it had been given for importing goods during the Iran-Iraq war. This dock was still being guarded by Iraqi soldiers two years after that war had ended, and it was these soldiers who guided the invading army into the city.
Mind boggling stuff …
You will notice when you read The Lid is Lifted that the invasion brought out the worst in human nature.
Kuwaitis understood that they could not liberate themselves but would have to rely on the Western World, primarily America. To curry favour with the West, they instructed their supermarkets to give food to Westerners. At the same time, they refused to serve third-country nationals, even those who were willing to pay in cash.
Personal relationships were tested, often sorely. When Saddam ordered ‘all Westerners of aggressor nations’ to report to the hotels, some Arabs began avoiding their European and American friends and neighbours … a few denounced them to the Iraqi secret police.
Westerners could be just as callous. An American hotel manager refused shelter to two Thai girls who had been raped in order ‘to safeguard his hotel’. To get across the desert to Saudi Arabia, a British family stole a four-wheel drive vehicle belonging to an American family and deprived the Americans of their chance to escape during the first weeks.
And an idiotic junior official at the British embassy refused to replace a lost passport on the spot because it was ‘outside consular hours’, even when I pointed out that armed bands of ill-disciplined soldiers were making travelling around the city critically dangerous.
The looting was mind-boggling.
There was the ‘official’ or politically controlled looting that was overseen by the honchos of the Iraqi Ba’ath party, using grunt muscle provided by the Iraqi army … which began on the first day when big transporters from Basra in southern Iraq followed the army in and got busy with the car showrooms.
There was also the dangerous free-for-all that developed as law-and-order collapsed. We watched from our high-rise building as the shops in the centre of town were ransacked, with every race and nationality in Kuwait joining in.
As you’ll notice when reading The Lid is Lifted, the free-for-all looting was extremely destructive. We watched in awe as large refrigerators were thrown onto the backs of trucks … right on top of TV set and computers! The mindless destruction was one of the triggers for the anger that saved me.
Before the anger came the fear. Fear was probably the dominant emotion felt by everyone who was trapped in Kuwait, especially in the early days.
I’ll never forget the chill I felt when, on the evening of the first day, Saddam threatened to turn Kuwait into a graveyard … or the shock we felt when he announced that we would be used as human shields in key military and civil installations was almost palpable.
Those with the most to fear were women. The Iraqi soldiers seemed to have no qualms when it came to abducting and raping females of all ages, from their early teens to their sixties.
Foreign women were most at risk. I remember some Iraqi soldiers saying in my presence that non-Arab girls were halal (permissible) but Arab girls were haram (forbidden) … their officer, they said, had told them this was in the Koran … a despicable lie that gave the soldiers carte blanche to do whatever they wanted.
My own fear is well documented in The Lid is Lifted. One example stands out – an angry Iraqi soldier slashing the air inches in front of my nose with a bowie knife, working himself up to kill me, after I had witnessed a double rape. That and several other incidents were the food for many weird dreams and nightmares.
The Iraqi invasion was a time of learning … on how to survive in conditions of urban strife. The things we learned when the lid was lifted can be applied in any situations in which civilians are trapped … all detailed within this exciting story.
We discovered early on that being in a large group was the safest as large bodies of civilians seemed to overawe the marauders. However, it soon became apparent that any discord within a group, which in normal circumstances might be considered healthy, can threaten everyone’s survival.
We also learned that we had to be very cautious using the telephone. The telephones continued to work in most areas of Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation. However it had a monitoring system that could be activated by the use of particular keywords and so, to avoid triggering a search, we had to be ultra-discrete on the phone. For some reason, a few of us found this difficult to do and telephone gaffs were a source of considerable friction.
One of the most useful things I discovered was how to create a ‘safe’ room, a room in which I could survive even during a chemical attack. Another, not so useful, thing I learned was that you can make weapons such as garottes out of every day items like guitar strings.
The Lid is Lifted is an exciting story that is hard to put down. At the same time it contains lots of facts that are not generally know about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
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Excerpts
I had always thought anger was a destructive emotion. But it can turn natural cowardliness into bravery and give you the guts to do things you could not otherwise do. First, however, you have to learn the knack of focusing your anger.
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The Big Fella pressed his left forearm hard across my chest and pinned me to the wall. I saw his right hand coming from behind his back. It held a very large bowie knife. He let me see it, and then brought it up under my chin.
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Then I tried to clamp the metal cup into the underside of the espresso machine. I could not get it to seat properly. Even my elbows were shaking. I could not get the effen thing to click into place. I dropped the metal cup. The coffee spilled again. I gave up on the fucken espresso.
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Benson smiled. There was a sort of relief on his face. And I felt the same relief. The girls were gone and, with them, a major attraction for the soldiers. I felt quite guilty because I felt that relief.
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Shards of glass crunched under my feet. Every second car had been broken into, windows smashed, doors sagging, radios and stereos gone. A few had wheels missing and some were up on blocks.
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They were a real ragbag army, trousers too short, jackets too large, sleeves barely reaching mid-arm – some in camouflage, some in plain green, some wearing a bit of both. Sad and pathetic, I thought.
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Everything moveable had disappeared, even the small machines with which these shops plied their trade. In front of one shop a large hoist and tackle lay on its side in the oily crud, perhaps because it had proved too big and awkward to get onto the flat-bed of a truck.
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But nobody was buying or selling. It was grab-what-you-can-time. The looters, Arabs and third world nationals, were having an ugly angry ball.
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Several soldiers were loading Iraqi-plated camions under the watchful eyes of their officers and a few fat Baathi businessmen.
The businessmen had tally-sheets in their hands. They were ticking them off and chatting to the officers, while civilians were scrambling to grab what was not on the lists of the official looters. The cupidity was staggering in its intensity.
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The soldiers did nothing and the smug carpetbaggers looked on the scrimmage for their leavings with cynical contempt. Here and there a few men in dishdashas or turbans stood staring numbly as their wealth tumbled away in the flood around their feet.
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‘It was the same in Al-Rai,’ Big T creased his brows. ‘The same all over. But why?’
I looked at the small groups of soldiers standing around, watching, doing nothing,
‘Perhaps when the lid is lifted, when no one is around to stop it, no cops, no threat of retribution, everyone starts stealing.’
‘Sure, that’s obvious. But why? We all know the difference between wrong and right. Muslims, Christians or whatever we are, it doesn’t matter a shit. We don’t need policemen to make us behave.’
‘Perhaps we do.’
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But I knew I wasn’t going to hold onto the garottes. I lacked the balletic ability to be sure of my target and I was pretty certain that I did not have the moral balls to kill someone. And I knew bloody well that I would be in deep shit if the soldiers ever searched the flat and found the garottes.
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The soldiers got really angry. One of them grabbed the Filipino by the shoulders from behind and made him kneel down on the ground. The officer went around him and pointed his pistol into the nape of the man’s neck. He held it there, his arm out straight.
We were all frozen, staring.
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There are two basic kinds of military gas, he said, mustard gas and nerve gas. The Iraqis have both types. Mustard gas is heavy, designed to fall into trenches, so it is usually exploded in the air over the army below. Nerve gas is lighter and blows around much more, so the bombs are designed to explode at ground level.
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The gist of the order was summarized in English subtitles at the bottom of the screen: All Westerners of Aggressor Nations in Kuwait are to report to hotels. This is for their own safety.
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‘Of course, m-m-m-my apartment n-n-n-number here. How else would they k-k-k-know where to find me. We can’t b-b-become thieves like the Iraqis.’
‘Suppose an Iraqi officer who reads goddamn English finds the note?’ Mike asked quietly. His flat was immediately opposite Jake’s.
We all stared at Jake.
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