Transcript
HOST: Last year, in the early hours of the morning, on March 2, a man entered the home of a Lebanese father, his 20-year-old son and his 32-year-old daughter in Kuwait City. The man killed both the father and the son. The daughter, after being raped and shot in the head, survived to tell the story to another brother living in the United States. She says the intruder claimed to be an officer in the Kuwaiti army and that he had orders to kill the family for collaborating with the Iraqis during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The family told him he was wrong, that they had actually helped fight the Iraqis. From member station KUSP in Santa Cruz, Spencer Critchley reports.
[00:00:40] SPENCER CRITCHLEY: For 21 months, Santa Cruz art dealer Naim Farhat has been telling the story of the attack on his family in Kuwait. He is now almost dispassionate when he describes the assault on his father Ismail, his brother Osama, and his sister Naimat.
[00:00:53] NAIM FARHAT: He raped her, actually twice, and then he told her that he’s tired of killing, h e’d killed too many people, he didn’t want to kill anymore, but all she has to do is close her eyes. And then he will shoot two bullets in the air, which gives the message to his colleagues outside that he killed the family. She closed her eyes, but it seemed like he was lying to her because he shot her in the head and walked to the other room and shot my brother, and then he shot my father after that.
[00:01:22] CRITCHLEY: After he heard what had happened, Naim spent six months getting his sister to California for surgery. He also started trying to get the Kuwaiti government to launch an investigation, but to date he has had no success.
[00:01:33] FARHAT: I contacted the U. S. Ambassador in Kuwait, the State Department, and also contacted my Congressman, Leon Panetta, who had raised the case, also with Alan Cranston and John Seymour, to the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, D. C. And to the Emir of Kuwait.
[00:01:52] CRITCHLEY: What has the response been so far from the Kuwaiti government?
[00:01:55] FARHAT: Silence.
[00:01:57] CRITCHLEY: As Naim continued to press for an investigation, he got in touch with human rights monitoring organizations that had turned their attention to post war Kuwait.
[00:02:05] AZIZ ABU-HAMAD: The Farhat case is one of many, but it is one of the most brutal attacks that I came across.
[00:02:12] CRITCHLEY: Aziz Abu-Hamad is Associate Director of the Washington-based Middle East Watch. Hamad travelled to Kuwait to interview survivors of and witnesses to arrests, torture, and executions that allegedly took place in the months immediately following the Gulf War. His interviews led him to corroborate the story told by Naim and Naimat Farhat. Hamad’s findings were published in the Middle East Watch report.
[00:02:32] HAMAD: There were more than 40 cases of extrajudicial killings. There were more than 100 cases of disappearances. In addition to that, there were 6,000 people who were detained during that period. And unlike other situations where we have encountered, almost all were tortured.
[00:02:52] CRITCHLEY: The Middle East Watch report said the attack on the Lebanese Farhats was part of a government-led campaign against foreign nationals living in Kuwait. Naim Farahat is about to submit a petition to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights asking it to investigate the situation in Kuwait. The petition was prepared by Beth Stephens, an attorney for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
[00:03:14] BETH STEPHENS: The Farhats are presenting their own case as an example of what was done to thousands of other people for the four or five months after they came back into power. If anything, the Kuwaiti leadership was inciting abuses against non-citizens, talking about traitors in their midst, and and harping on the theme that the Kuwaitis needed to retake their country from those who had lived there for so many years.
[00:03:40] CRITCHLEY: Officials at the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington did not return calls made for this story. But in previous comments, Kuwaiti officials have described the Middle East Watch report as exaggerated. They say any abuses that may have occurred in Kuwait happened before the reestablishment of full government control. Beth Stephens says that statement doesn’t survive scrutiny.
[00:03:59] STEPHENS: Even if you argue that the particular attack on the Farhats, or any other attack, was taken by a small group or by groups operating on their own, the fact that the government has made no attempt to punish those people is just damning under international law.
[00:04:17] CRITCHLEY: Thursday, Stephens plans to file the Farhats’ petition with the U. N. Commission on Human Rights. She says there’s no guarantee the Commission will take any action. She charges it is subject to political pressure and that it bowed to such pressure from the Bush administration over a previous resolution against Kuwait. But she says public testimony before an international body is likely to bring its own kind of pressure to bear on the Kuwaitis as well as on the new Clinton administration. If the U.N. Commission doesn’t act, Naim Farahat says his next step will be to launch a lawsuit against the Kuwaiti government. He says he will not stop until justice has been done.
[00:04:51] FARHAT: I want them to put on a trial with attorneys and, you know, have it in a civilized way. Actually, my family got killed without, you know, having the chance to defend themselves, and I’m giving the Kuwaiti government to put those criminals on a trial and defend themselves.
[00:05:11] CRITCHLEY: Farhat is organizing demonstrations to occur in mid-January outside the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington and the US Federal Building in Los Angeles. For National Public Radio, I’m Spencer Critchley in Santa Cruz.
[00:05:23] HOST: It’s 11 minutes before the hour.