Free Kuwait?

Free Kuwait?

Connections: Free Kuwait

SBS Television

Screens Friday, February 26, 8.30 p.m. (8 p.m. in Adelaide)

This hard-hitting documentary made by Britain's Channel Four looks at how non-Kuwaitis are suffering persecution, deportation and loss of human rights in the country they helped build and helped defend against Iraqi invasion. It exposes the reality of the "freedom" in Kuwait that the US went to war to save, killing 250,000 Iraqis along the way.

Prime victims of Kuwait's postwar policies have been the Biddon community — the 200,000 officially stateless people who make up the bulk of the Kuwaiti army and who have been resident in Kuwait for generations, but cannot obtain citizenship. Since "liberation" they have been banned from returning to their jobs, they are harassed by the security forces, their children cannot go to school, they cannot hold a driving licence or even get married. Ironically, their only alternative is leave for Iraq.

More than 2000 domestic servants in Kuwait, nearly all migrant workers from countries such as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Egypt, have fled their homes, following physical abuse by their employers and pitifully low wages.

Before the war, Kuwait had a community of more than 400,000 Palestinians. Mass expulsion has reduced the size of the community to less than 30,000.

The program also focuses on the unequal position of Kuwaiti women, who are unable to vote and face particular discrimination if they have married non-Kuwaitis.

With the US-backed Kuwait government's policy of "ethnic cleansing" and its record of human rights abuse, the notion of Kuwait's "liberation" has a very hollow ring.

From GLW issue 88