Fate Of Kuwaiti Pows Haunts Relatives

Dr. Fawzia Mandani’s 5-year-old son has never seen his father, whom Iraqi soldiers shot and tossed in a truck after the invasion of Kuwait. She doesn’t even know whether her husband is alive - because Saddam Hussein refuses to account for more than 600 Kuwaitis detained in Iraq.

At the first international conference on Kuwaiti prisoners of war, which opened Tuesday, former President George Bush, British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and other world figures called for international pressure on Iraq to release information about these missing men, women and children.

But it was Mandani’s story, told through tears and a constantly cracking voice, that drove home the pain.

Her life changed on Aug. 21, 1990 - less than three weeks after Saddam’s troops crossed into Kuwait - when Iraqis entered her home, shot and beat her husband, dragged him out by his wounded leg and threw him in the back of a truck.

“That was the last time I saw him. I have to this day the constant reminder of that terrible moment - the blood of my husband indelibly marked on the living room walls,” she said, her voice breaking.

“These lives cannot just be unaccounted for,” she said tearfully. “Why should actual criminals live without punishment? And why allow the suffering to be going on for more than five years, on my family, my daughters, and for this little boy?”

The conference had many prominent speakers, including Rolf Ekeus, the chief U.N. inspector overseeing the destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. None had an answer for the predicament of the Mandanis and other families.

Salem al-Sabah, chairman of Kuwait’s National Committee for Missing Prisoner of War Affairs and a former deputy prime minister, said there is evidence Iraq detained the 604 Kuwaitis.

But Iraq has provided no information except to say it arrested 126 Kuwaitis and other nationals during the occupation and lost track of them during the uprising by Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq that followed the Gulf War.

Bush, the prime mover of the international military operation that drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, was applauded when he said: “We must not end any single sanction against Saddam Hussein until every single one of these people is accounted for.”