The Great War for Civilisation (142 page)

The Kuwaiti authorities claimed that many
bidoon
joined the Iraqi “Popular Army” after the occupation. And when the Kuwaiti government announced in July 1991 that it would hang anyone who had joined Iraq's “voluntary” units, more than 3,000 “withouts”—including women and children—abandoned the Abdali camp and walked back to Iraq. More than 1,000, however, stayed put, arguing that they had never helped the Iraqis, and that those who signed up with the occupiers did so through coercion and never turned up for work. “It was a lie by the Iraqis to call these people a ‘volunteer' army,” one of the
bidoon
at Abdali said. “They were no more members of the Iraqi army than the foreign hostages in Iraq were ‘guests.'”

The
bidoon
of Abdali all carried their official Kuwaiti papers—the policemen showed me laminated government cards with photographs in which they were dressed in smart blue police uniforms—and the Red Cross workers who ran the camp, mostly from America and Europe, did not doubt their authenticity. It was of little use. “All of us want to return to our homes where we were born, where we lived and worked before this terrible war,” al-Kaldi said. “What is our crime? What is the crime of the children here? Nobody cares about us.” In his captivity, al-Kaldi drew a series of sad and beautiful sketches of life during the war. The most moving showed a
bidoon
family burying their policeman son, murdered by the Iraqis during the occupation. A boy near the grave is waving goodbye towards the distant city of Kuwait, identifiable by its water towers. “You see what is happening?” al-Kaldi asked me. “The
bidoon
can die here, but they will not be allowed to live here.”

But if the geographical restoration of Kuwait to its rulers was a measure of the war's worth, its oil fires cast more than a physical shadow over the land. The destruction of the wells remained Saddam's greatest crime in the emirate, their continued burning proof that the war had not yet ended. I had to fly over them to realise the enormity of what had happened. From the air, it was possible to see lakes of oil, hundreds of square kilometres of sludge, the white of the sands turned to blackness. In a hundred years, the evidence will still be there to see. The desert has changed colour for generations to come. Arriving in Kuwait on one of MEA's elderly Boeing 707 airliners, I could physically
feel
the extent of the damage. Sitting on the plane's flight deck, I watched the pilot twisting his aircraft around the oil clouds as if he were performing at an air display. But when we actually hit one of the black columns of smoke on final approach, the old airliner bucked in the sky, juddering and shaking as it smashed into the haze of sulphur.

Standing next to the fires, the very ground vibrated beneath my feet, their roar awesome and elemental. The Kuwaitis were more than willing to take reporters to these scenes of Saddam's environmental and economic crimes. We would drive in our own cars out of Kuwait City that dazzling, cooking August to be confronted by fires so bright they hurt our eyes, the heat so powerful that every few seconds we would instinctively turn round to cool the left or right side of our faces and arms. “The Iraqi who did this arrived about three months after the invasion,” Mahmoud Somali told us as we stood beside one of these thundering, squirting torches of oil, the smoke above us so thick that I could not have seen my own notebook but for the golden fires. “He was a very ordinary sort of guy, I've even forgotten his name. He was very friendly to us, not hostile at all. He chatted a lot, had coffee with us in the Ahmadi canteen each day. He said he was a good Muslim and every Friday he went to the mosque. But then he put the mines down the wells and he told us this was his duty, that he had to do his duty.”

Was this the banality of evil, this man with the forgettable name—an official from the Iraqi oil company, most of the Kuwaitis at Ahmadi now believed—who dutifully, efficiently, committed what must qualify as a war crime as well as an environmental catastrophe? For let us not deny his professionalism. Of Kuwait's 940 or so producing oil wells, he set off mines in 732, turning 640 of them into basins of fire. Stand beside the burning lagoons of the Burgan oil field even now— more than five months after the coffee-drinking Iraqi with his religious observances had left—and you could only wonder at the implications of his act.

The clichés were long ago exhausted: the fires of hell, darkness at high noon. All had an element of truth about them. Across the black lakes, reflecting the fine, brown-gold light of the fires, the curtains of smoke that smothered the sun—a button of pale yellow light immediately above us—were almost as frightening as the thunder of the burning wells. At Burgan, I scribbled these observations into my notebook until I realised that the pages were becoming spotty and then soaked in a slippery brown substance that was settling on our clothes, our shoes, faces and hair. We were breathing crude oil. We coughed for hours afterwards. It was then that it dawned on me: Saddam Hussein did use chemical warfare.

What, after all, were a few mustard gas shells compared to the 2 million tons of carbon dioxide and 5,000 tons of soot spurting into the sky over Kuwait every day, drifting as gently as any sarin or tabun across the Gulf? Everyone was a witness. Mr. Somali's daughter was asthmatic, and he had to move accommodation to protect her lungs every time the wind changed. Down at the al-Ahmadi headquarters, an Iranian drilling team had arrived to help the Kuwaitis put out their fires, serious, inevitably bearded, genuinely shocked men who had never seen anything on this scale, not even in the eight years of Iraqi destruction in their own country.

“Of course it is an environmental disaster, and not just here,” Homayoun Motier, the drilling engineer from the National Iranian Oil Company, said to me. “I come from Ahwaz and this smoke has covered us there—there is pollution from these fires all across southern Iran. Do you realise that there is soot all over our Zagros mountains a thousand kilometres away? I have seen it there. It lies in layers beneath the snow, frozen in layer after layer.” Later, as the Iraqi invasion receded, the Americans and the British would paint Iran in the same dangerous colours as Iraq—partly to persuade the Arabs to buy more weapons—and Iran would be touted as the next aggressor, the next threat to the Arab Gulf states, just as it had been in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution. And the work of Homayoun Motier and his men would be forgotten.

Watching the fountains of burning oil and the fires spreading across the lagoons, you could not avoid the conviction that the Gulf War had not ended. And that Saddam Hussein did not intend it to end when he was driven from Kuwait. The statistics changed each day, but by 5 August three American teams and a Canadian unit of firefighters had capped and controlled 274 of the 640 burning wells, most of them in the biggest fields of Burgan (total wells: 426), Maqwa (total wells: 148) and Ahmadi (total wells: 89). They were spraying tons of sea water onto the fires—using the original oil pipelines to pump the salt water back into the fields—to cool the superheated coking that had built up around the flames. The 115,000 barrels of oil that the Kuwaitis were now able to export each day almost all came from the Maqwa field. Yet more than 60 million barrels of oil and gas a day—from an original loss of more than 110 million each day—were still being burned away, transformed into the chemicals that were now poisoning the land and seas as far east as the Himalayas.

Mahmoud Somali had been twenty-two years in the Kuwait Oil Company's drilling department and had no illusions about what happened. “When the Iraqis came here in the first week of the occupation, soldiers and a lot of Iraqi civilian technicians arrived,” he said. “The soldiers did not allow us to go into the fields. The technicians, they wanted to start up the oil exportation again. They told us we must increase production. They wanted to export Kuwaiti oil. This was before the sanctions. Then one day, after the UN decided on sanctions, we had an accidental gas cut-out and the soldiers took me out to the field to repair it. When I got there, I saw at once a series of white wires running to the wells. They were very professional. The wires went down below the master valves so that if they wanted to blow them up, we couldn't turn them off. And that's what happened. Three months later, the Iraqi came who was in charge of the mines and he was the one who put the explosives down the wells . . . from the start, the Iraqis were thinking of destroying our oil.” Somali had few doubts that innocents were going to die from all this—of chemical poisoning, of cancer—not only in Kuwait but in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. “Probably yes, they will die,” he said amid the darkness of Burgan. “But who is going to take responsibility? Saddam?”

The Kuwaitis claimed they were now exporting 115,000 barrels a day, a total that rose to 200,000 if you included the oil from the Neutral Zone. If the fires in the al-Maqwa and al-Ahmadi fields could be extinguished by the end of August, the emirate could be producing half a million barrels by the New Year of 1992, a victory of sorts, but nothing like Kuwait's pre-invasion OPEC quota of 1.5 million barrels a day—and much less than its actual oil overproduction of 2 million barrels that provoked Saddam to invade. To defend this reconstituted source of wealth, the United States was now forced to maintain a combat brigade in Kuwait, which is why, at the Mutla Ridge, the same American M1A1 tanks I saw five months earlier were still patrolling the highway to Iraq.

However strong the U.S. Air Force might remain in the Gulf, there was not much else on land to defend Kuwait. When the Saudis decided they no longer wanted Egyptian and Syrian troops on their soil, the whole projected edifice of an Arab Gulf security force collapsed. And the Kuwaitis could no more mount a defence of their emirate now than they could a year earlier. On this mournful anniversary, however, we were encouraged to look elsewhere, to the peace conference in Madrid that would end the Middle East conflict for ever. Here at last, it was suggested, we would see the real fruits of war, provided we could forget what war actually meant, if we could ignore the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead bulldozed into their mass graves by the allies, the thousands of Shiites who were put before Saddam's mass execution squads, the epic tragedy of the Kurds. If we could accept that the New World Order was merely the Old World Order put on good behaviour, then maybe we could believe in the impossible.

In one sense, a peace conference—or, more to the point and far more difficult, a peace settlement—would be a restoration of the integrity of the frontiers drawn up after the 1914–18 war, with the creation of the original 1948 Israel grafted onto it. It would be about a return to accepted borders. It was about the Old World Order. For that is what lay at the roots of Western policies in the Middle East. We should have realised this when the Americans allowed Saddam's domestic opponents to be massacred. Faced with the alternative of allowing Iraq to disintegrate, or of permitting the people of Iraq to remake their own map of their part of the Middle East, the West opted for Saddam on good—or at least internationally harmless—behaviour.

This is what the 1991 Gulf War should have taught us: that it was the West that was going to decide the future of the region, in however benign or disastrous a fashion, just as the Western superpowers had done for more than seventy years. Those regional leaders who stepped out of line—including Saddam—would pay the price, even if it was individually less terrible than the fate of those in the mass graves on Mutla Ridge.

Against this frightening horizon, Kuwait's own continuing pain—its demand for the return of 850 “missing” citizens who remained captive in Iraq—might have seemed diminutive, even irrelevant. But missing they were, and the “sighting” of these men and women—in many cases, seized by the Iraqis in the last hours of their occupation—was to be a bruising experience for thousands of Kuwaitis in the years to come. You only had to visit the gymnasium-size hall in which the Kuwaiti “National Committee for Missing Persons and POW Affairs” had installed itself in the suburb of Sabaha Salman to understand; it was filled with silence and photographs. Some were studio portraits of young men in white or brown robes, others of grinning students in black gowns nursing American college degrees. Around the walls there were pictures of officers in police uniforms, soldiers and doctors, children and women in scarves, re-photographed snapshots and cutaways of Kuwaitis at parties and weddings and anniversaries, smiling with all the wealthy, carefree confidence of pre-invasion Kuwait. No one wished to divide these pictures into the quick and the dead—although most were, already, in mass graves.

As the years went by, these 850 souls became part of Kuwait's
raison d'être
, its proof of victimhood, the vital statistic that would help to distract the world's attention from the new life of misery that Iraqis were now entering north of the border. Their plight was emblazoned like an Olympics advertisement on the fuselage of Kuwait's restored national airline. “Return our 850 POWs” was painted next to every aircraft passenger door. What were 850 missing Kuwaitis compared to 100,000 Iraqi dead? The Kuwaitis would politely reply that the Iraqis were the invaders while the 850 were innocent victims of that aggression.

But by the mid-1990s, the horrors of Bosnia, the slaughter and mass rape of Muslims in the old Yugoslavia had also long surpassed the sufferings of Kuwait under Iraqi occupation. And Kuwait's own act of “ethnic cleansing”—the expulsion of the 360,000 Palestinians from their homes after the liberation—had squandered much of the international sympathy that might have been forthcoming for the families of those Kuwaitis who were trucked off to prison in Basra and Baghdad, Nasiriyah and Samawa. In his autobiography, General Schwarzkopf admits that the return of Kuwaiti civilian prisoners from Iraq was the one ceasefire condition that Saddam Hussein's generals refused to discuss—perhaps because they knew that most of them were already dead.