Long lines form each day in front of supermarkets, bread-distribution points and the special AT&T telephone exchange where residents can make overseas calls - but few local ones. In one supermarket in Hawali, a Palestinian neighborhood, all that remained on the shelves at noon one day last week were bottles of baby oil and tubes of depilatory. “People’s patience is going to run out very soon,” predicted an engineer who watched one bread line turn into a near riot when residents were told there would be no deliveries that day.
So far, at least, serious trouble has not erupted. About two dozen women peacefully demonstrated at a local school, calling for the restoration of power, food and water. When soldiers stopped by and told them to go away, they did. And while the government seemed unwilling to disarm various gun-toting groups, including resistance fighters, incidents of street violence were hard to find.
Kuwaitis continued to vent their frustration at Palestinians and other foreigners. Four residents - two Iraqis, two African workers - in the town of Safwan told of being tied up and beaten by Kuwaiti men in uniform. One man, displaying huge bruises on his back and thighs, said he was left bound, blindfolded and without food or water for four days. “After Iraq’s persecution, we should be the last ones to give in to a vengeful spirit,” said Minister of Planning Suleiman al-Mutawa. “If [such incidents] are confirmed, we ought to be ashamed.”
Fear of Kuwaiti reprisal has prompted an estimated 200,000 Palestinians to flee. The jobs they held - professionals, merchants, bureaucrats - now go undone. This has hampered the restoration of even basic services. Meanwhile, a U.S. electrical contractor’s 75-vehicle convoy of power-generation equipment was held up for three days on the Saudi Arabian side of the border by Saudi red tape while Kuwait’s government floundered. The Kuwaiti royal family “didn’t pull together the ministry structures while in exile,” said a diplomat in Kuwait. “Down in Taif, five people with a bulletin board on the third floor of the Sheraton made up a ministry.”
Since returning from exile, the royal family has not made impressive strides in reasserting control, other than to issue vague promises to return to Kuwait’s 1962 Constitution - and to impose martial law. The government hasn’t even used the media to lay out its plans, much less to buck up its citizens or to instruct them on how to help out with reconstruction. “There are a lot of people complaining and itching to get their shirtsleeves dirty,” said a Western diplomat in Kuwait City. “But they say the government won’t tell them what to do.”
Disorder turned Kuwaitis, who are not accustomed to hardship, into scavengers. The abandoned cars that line Kuwait’s streets became the targets of even well-dressed people, who discreetly carried off prized spare parts - hubcaps, batteries, a set of decent tires. A car that ran was a special treasure. You could fill it with free gasoline and visit a friend who was otherwise out of reach because the phones didn’t work. Or you could drive past mounds of uncollected garbage and the decomposing bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers outside the city - and try to recall the opulence that was Kuwait only eight months ago.
