Sheikh Jaber takes POWs cause to UN
Invasion leaves indelible scars on families
This is the 35th in a series of articles on His Highness the late Amir, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Mubarak Al-Sabah (1926-2006), the 13th ruler of Kuwait.
– Editor
was particularly painful for HH Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad and his people, and while the Security Council, the USA in particular, were pressing for the dismantling of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Kuwait was seeking in every way to have her people released.
Liberation
In the aftermath of the liberation, most of those detained in Basra were immediately released by the Iraqi resistance before it was crushed by the Iraqi dictator, the others were released by the World Red Cross, but about 700 remained hidden in some Iraqi prisons. Kept in terrible conditions, they were moved to new places every time the World Red Cross authorities discovered their whereabouts.
Attending the World Summit for Social Development on March 11, 1995 in Copenhagen, HH Sheikh Jaber Al Ahmad stressed on the UN Charter, which rejects all forms of oppression on POWs and detainees wherever they are, and appealed to human conscience in solving the agonizing situation his people were suffering. He made the same appeal on the 3rd September 1998, through his brother, HH Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad, at the 12th session of the Non-Aligned Movement in South Africa. At the meeting, HH Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad emphasized the urgency to put pressure on the Iraqi regime to comply with the Security Council’s resolutions concerning Kuwait’s issues and urging more action in the Middle East peace effort.
For more than one decade, the Iraqi regime continued defying all international laws, while its people were made to bear the consequences of an international boycott that became more oppressive as time went by.
Then the Iraqi regime began threatening the world with a wave of terrorist attacks and noncompliance that prompted the international community to take a more resolute stand against a regime that was becoming too dangerous to world peace and stability to be allowed to remain in power.
Warnings and resolutions were passed to prevent an armed intervention, but, as with the Gulf War, no warning or any attempt at a peaceful solution was of any use when dealing with Saddam Hussein. Indeed, relying on his clever propaganda he was raising widespread world protest against another war.
In Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South America, in the Middle East and the Far East people rose in heated demonstration against a war with Iraq. Even the Vatican spoke against it in its concern for human lives, but those who were suffering under the Iraqi regime – the Iraqi people themselves and those who sought to end the human tragedy of the POWs were all in favor of ending once and for all the unbearable tyranny of a regime, too arrogant to listen to reason and too disdainful of human values to be touched by any appeal to humanity.
To be continued