Kuwait/incubator/baby story: propaganda, urban legend, or exaggeration. They report, you decide. From Lexis-Nexis.
First Kuwaiti/incubator/baby story on Lexis-Nexis:
Copyright 1990 The Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
September 7, 1990, Friday, P.M. Final
SECTION: Part P; Page 1; Column 3; Late Final Desk
HEADLINE: 171 AMERICANS FLY TO FREEDOM;
REFUGEES FEAR FOR HUSBANDS, TELL OF IRAQI ATROCITIES
BYLINE: From Reuters
DATELINE: AMMAN, Jordan
BODY:
About 170 American women and children flew to freedom today after five weeks trapped in Kuwait, and some said Iraqi troops were pulling premature babies from hospital incubators and cutting the ears off members of the Kuwaiti resistance.
Many of the women burst into tears when asked by reporters about the husbands they left behind in Kuwait after boarding the first U.S. evacuation flight from the occupied emirate.
The U.S. Embassy initially said about 200 people were aboard the flight, but corrected the figure to 171. The women and children and two American men -- one elderly and one ailing -- flew via Baghdad on an Iraqi Airways Boeing 707. "My husband was very upset. He is hiding. It is very scary," said a woman from Wisconsin who asked to be identified only as Joe-Marie.
"He is afraid for his life and I don't know if I will see him again," she added, breaking into sobs. "The Iraqis search from house to house."
A woman who identified herself as "Cindy" from San Francisco said about 1,300 Americans were in hiding in occupied Kuwait.
"Foreigners are waiting. They are begging and begging for them (U.S. forces) to come. They gave me a message when I left – 'Please tell them to come.' Kuwait is destroyed," she said.
She and another woman, who identified herself as "Rudi," said Iraqi troops took premature babies out of incubators in Kuwait.
"Iraqis are beating people, bombing and shooting. They are taking all hospital equipment, babies out of incubators. Life-support systems are turned off. . . . They are even removing traffic lights," Cindy said.
"I know of two Americans who were shot in the hands and had their legs broken when they tried to escape. . . . Other men have been taken and we don't know where they are," she added.
"The Iraqis are beating Kuwaitis, torturing them, knifing them, beating them, cutting their ears off if they are caught resisting or are with the (Kuwaiti) army or police," she said.
She said she had hidden at home with her husband since Iraq invaded Aug. 2 because of house-to-house searches by troops for foreigners, resistance members and Kuwaiti officials.
Patricia Hammer of Denver said she hid with a group of Canadians and that Palestinian friends brought them food. "We never thought we would ever get out," she said.
She said she is divorced from a Kuwaiti who refused to let her leave with their children. "I asked him to send them if it gets worse. I hope he will. I don't know if I will see them again."
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has barred most Western men from leaving Kuwait or Iraq. Many of those not in hiding are being held as human shields against possible attacks by U.S.-led forces in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia.
The evacuees were taken to a hotel near Amman's airport, where they were briefed by U.S. Ambassador Roger Harrison and waited for papers to be processed before heading to the United States.
Harrison told journalists waiting outside the hotel that the Americans were "tired but in good spirits." He said they felt relieved and he expected more American woman and children to fly out of Iraq next week.
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Second Kuwaiti/incubator/baby story on Lexis-Nexis - note skepticism:
Copyright 1990 The Washington Post
September 10, 1990, Monday, Final Edition
SECTION: FIRST SECTION; PAGE A18
HEADLINE: Iraq, Kuwait Waging an Old-Fashioned War of Propaganda
BYLINE: Glenn Frankel, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: LONDON, Sept. 9
BODY:
Call it the story of the 22 babies. What it illustrates is the difficulty of separating fact from fiction in the Persian Gulf crisis, and the way both the governments of Kuwait and Iraq and some of their allies have sought to manipulate public opinion to aid their cause.
The story began circulating last week when Abdul Wahab Fowzan, the Kuwaiti health minister-in-exile, said at a press conference in Taif, Saudi Arabia, that Iraqi soldiers had seized virtually all of the country's hospitals and medical institutions after their invasion Aug. 2. He said the soldiers evicted patients and systematically looted the hospitals of high-tech equipment, ambulances, drugs and plasma.
Patients had died as a result, Fowzan claimed, including premature babies who were being treated in incubators at the maternity ward of Al Adan hospital in Ruga, a northern suburb of Kuwait City. Fowzan later put the number of babies who died at 22, saying he got the figure from local health officials who had helped bury the infants. The claims were repeated in a letter Friday to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar by Kuwait's U.N. representative, Mohammad Abulhasani, who said all of the exposed babies had died. The letter pleaded with Perez de Cuellar to press Iraq to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter Kuwait and monitor the treatment of the population under Iraq's military occupation.
Because Iraq has sealed off access to the area and quarantined diplomats, no one could independently confirm the accusations. Other accounts indicate that at least some of the hospitals are still operating, although under strict Iraqi supervision.
"We've heard these stories," said a spokesman for the British Foreign Office. "But our people are confined to the embassy compound and we simply have no way to gather evidence one way or the other. We simply don't know the truth."
In the old-fashioned propaganda war being waged between Iraq and Kuwait, the suffering of children is an emotive and potentially powerful weapon. That suffering is invoked by Kuwaitis to illustrate the horror of occupation in an attempt to maintain international pressure on Iraq to withdraw, and by Iraqis to illustrate the cruelty of U.N.-mandated sanctions in an attempt to break them.
Thus, in his address to the Iraqi people Wednesday night, President Saddam Hussein claimed the embargo was starving Iraqi babies. "Children in Iraq are dying because of a foolish decision taken by certain people," he said. "The children of Iraq are dying because they are being deprived of their food and milk and medicine."
Iraq has presented no evidence to support this claim and none of the Western journalists allowed into the country recently has reported scenes of hunger or starvation, although there has been a shortage of infant formula reported in Baghdad.
Nonetheless, both China and Iran have since indicated that they may ship food and medicine to Iraq for humanitarian purposes. And today, in a joint statement issued after a one-day meeting in Helsinki, President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev stressed that the U.N. sanctions against Iraq do permit the importation of food "in humanitarian circumstances," with "special priority being given to meeting the needs of children."
The invasion and occupation of Kuwait has produced many such fragments of information, some of which have been accepted by the Western press and printed as true, while others have been dismissed. Few, if any, are confirmable by the same standards reporters would apply to stories back home.
Some accounts come from official sources. Last month, many newspapers reported the rape by an Iraqi soldier of a British Airways stewardess. It was described by a Kuwaiti hotel manager whose access to the press was arranged through the Kuwaiti Embassy here in London. The airline itself confirmed that an assault had occurred.
But last week, after a dozen stewardesses had returned from Kuwait with the first hostage release, British Airways backtracked, saying it was reexamining the matter. "We can't say for certain what happened," said a company spokesman. "We were certainly led to believe it was true at the time."
There are other accounts that are suspect as well and are treated with skepticism. For example, Kuwaiti resistance leaders have claimed to reporters in Saudi Arabia that they are killing up to 70 Iraqi soldiers per day inside Kuwait. Yet Caryle Murphy, a Washington Post reporter who was the only American journalist in Kuwait at the time of the invasion and who fled recently, said
resistance leaders inside the country had freely admitted that they could not know how many soldiers they had killed or wounded in any given attack.
The Associated Press, reporting recently from Amman, Jordan, cited anonymous "Arab diplomats and security sources" as saying Syrian forces had killed dozens of pro-Iraqi demonstrators in what was described as the worst violence inside Syria since the crushing of Moslem fundamentalists in Hama in 1982.
Western diplomats said they cannot confirm the account, and many said they strongly doubt its veracity. Other reliable Arab sources here have contended that the report was a deliberate plant by a group of Palestinians seeking to discredit regimes opposed to the Iraqi invasion, including Syria's. Some State Department analysts have drawn a similar conclusion, according to a U.S. official.
Analysts said such stories thrive in part because the closed nature and police-state atmosphere of many Arab countries make it impossible for independent sources such as journalists, diplomats and human rights groups to monitor events. Facts in such societies are not neutral, but serve as weapons to be wielded by regimes and their opponents.
The Kuwaiti baby story originated with a letter from a senior Kuwaiti public health official that was smuggled out of the country by a European diplomat late last month, according to Hudah Bahar, an architect who received the letter here in London. It was supplemented by information gathered from fleeing Kuwaitis and other sources by Fawzia Sayegh, a Kuwaiti pediatrician living here.
The letter claimed that Iraqi soldiers ordered patients evicted from several hospitals and closed down critical units for treating cancer patients, dialysis patients and those suffering from diabetes. Bahar and Sayegh said the Iraqis hauled sophisticated equipment such as dialysis machines back to Baghdad, part of the haul of cash, gold, cars and jewelry that is said by Arab banking sources to exceed $ 2 billion. Among the equipment taken were the 22 infant incubator units, they said.
Sayegh said her sister-in-law was evicted from the cancer unit at Sabah hospital. She also cited the case of a 48-year-old man, Abdul Aziz Daher, who reportedly died of renal failure after allegedly being denied access to biweekly dialysis treatments, and the case of a man who died of heart failure after being evicted from the intensive-care unit.
Bahar said she knows of two other cases -- both women, one a dialysis patient, the other a seriously ill diabetic -- who died after being evicted from the hospital by the Iraqis.
Salwa Darwish, an Egyptian anesthetist who recently escaped overland from Kuwait, offered some confirmation of the Kuwaiti charges. She told the Independent newspaper here that Iraqi authorities evicted civilian patients from the Razi hospital in Kuwait City in mid-August to prepare for what they feared would be an all-out U.S. attack.
The situation has been exacerbated, witnesses said, by the exodus of hundreds, even thousands of foreign health workers, including doctors and nurses, leaving hospitals, nursing homes and child-care facilities desperately short of staff.
Still, at least a handful of hospitals remain open in Kuwait City. The wife of a U.S. Embassy employee who broke her hip was treated for a week at a local hospital recently, according to State Department officials. Washington Post reporter Murphy said she saw patients being treated at the Sabah medical complex -- now renamed for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- in the first days after the invasion.
Pediatrician Sayegh said the situation illustrates the ways Iraq has violated Geneva Convention rules governing military occupation and the need for an independent body to be allowed into Kuwait. But Iraq has insisted that Kuwait, now annexed by Saddam, is no longer occupied territory and not subject to the Geneva Convention.
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Kuwaiti/incubator/baby story # 29 on Lexis-Nexis:
Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
View Related Topics
February 6, 1992, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 11; Column 1; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 669 words
HEADLINE: U.S. OFFERS DETAIL ON IRAQI ATROCITY
BYLINE: By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr., Special to The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Feb. 5
BODY:
The United States Embassy in Kuwait has sent the State Department details to bolster disputed accounts of how occupying Iraqis killed babies at Kuwaiti hospitals in 1990 by disconnecting their incubators.
Citing three witnesses and a number of second-hand accounts, the cable said embassy officials "are convinced that premature and newborn babies died when Iraqis removed life-support systems from Kuwaiti hospitals." In angry tones, the cable, sent this week by Ambassador Edward W. Gnehm, called recent reports casting doubt on the reported atrocities "smug and cynical," "revisionist" and "outrageous."
The Ambassador harshly criticized two human rights groups, Amnesty International and Middle East Watch, and news organizations for saying since the war that their investigations had failed to substantiate the reports.
A Young Woman's Account
Accounts of babies being removed from incubators to die were widely reported before American forces expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait and lent emotional power to the Bush Administration's and the Kuwaiti Government's oratory as the allies prepared to go to war. But since the war, the unproven assertions have been questioned frequently.
The dispute was revived last month when it was disclosed that a young Kuwaiti woman who had testified in 1990 before a Congressional caucus, tearfully describing infanticide at a hospital, was the daughter of Kuwait's Ambassador in Washington. Although her account was not disproved, its credibility was questioned in an article on the Op-Ed page and in an editorial in The New York Times, and in other news accounts.
Kenneth Roth, director of Middle East Watch, responded to the cable today by saying that his group could not absolutely rule out isolated cases of baby-killing, but that painstaking research last year had disproved reports of widespread infanticide.
"We can say almost certainly that there was no mass theft of incubators and no mass killing of infants," he said.
Amnesty International, after initially accepting the accounts, said last April that upon visiting Kuwait to interview doctors and inspect cemeteries, its investigators "found no reliable evidence" to support the accounts.
U.S. Names 2 Doctors
Mr. Gnehm's cable named two doctors and a nurse who gave embassy officials detailed first-hand accounts of Iraqis killing babies at two hospitals. The State Department asked that the names of these witnesses be kept private.
The cable also cited corroborating testimony from ambulance and cemetery workers who told of handling the remains of scores of infants.
The cable reported eyewitness accounts of two incidents in which eight babies died.
A health worker at Al-Adan Hospital, the cable said, recounted arguing with Iraqi soldiers who demanded that babies be removed from incubators and respirators. One baby died "almost immediately" and four died within 24 hours, according to this account.
Two health workers at Al-Jahra Hospital, the cable said, reported that an Iraqi military doctor had ordered 12 babies removed from the neonatal intensive care unit on Aug. 26. Eight were removed from incubators and two from ventilators. Two died that day and another later, it said.
But Mr. Roth said that Middle East Watch had interviewed about two dozen health professionals who had worked in all of Kuwait's maternity hospitals throughout the occupation, and that despite many second-hand reports, "no one we spoke to was able to confirm any instance in which the Iraqis had taken incubators or left babies to die."
He said the human rights group had not talked to the three medical workers mentioned in Mr. Gnemh's cable.
Ambassador Gnemh said the embassy was told that approximately 250 babies might have been buried in mass graves at Al-Riqqa cemetery in Kuwait in August and September 1990.
Mr. Roth sharply disputed this, saying that Middle East Watch investigators had thoroughly examined the records at Al-Riqqa, which appear to have been meticulously kept.
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Eyewitness report:
Copyright 1992 Newsday, Inc.
Newsday
February 11, 1992, Tuesday, ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 14
LENGTH: 135 words
HEADLINE: Iraqi Atrocities Told
BYLINE: COMPILED FROM NEWS DISPATCHES
BODY:
A Kuwaiti baby died in a nurse's arms after Iraqis ripped tubes from the child's face and removed it and other infants from hospital incubators during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, a nurse said.
Salwa Ali, head nurse at Kuwait's al-Adan hospital, said she saw at least eight babies removed from life-support machines by Iraqis who wanted to send vital medical equipment to Iraq. The Iraqis took about half the unit's 16 incubators - the newest ones - away by truck, leaving the rest behind, she said.
Her testimony supports reports from Kuwaiti doctors and medical students at other hospitals who allege that Iraqi officials had orders to take Kuwaiti medical supplies and equipment to Iraq. Human-rights groups had contradicted earlier U.S. accounts of the alleged incubator atrocity.
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And finally, the punch line. Iraq gives incubators back to Kuwait.
Copyright 1992 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)
September 7, 1992, Monday
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS PAGE; Page 10
LENGTH: 168 words
HEADLINE: Iraq gives back stolen incubators to Kuwait
BODY:
Kuwait City (Reuter) - Iraq returned 98 lorryloads of medical equipment stolen from Kuwait, including two baby incubators, which its Gulf war enemies made a symbol of Iraqi brutality. The US-made incubators are damaged beyond repair, as are eight ambulances and tons of blood-testing, dental, ophthalmic and other equipment recovered under UN ceasefire terms. During the Gulf crisis President George Bush cited reports that Iraqis tipped babies out of hospital incubators as an example of the way Iraqi forces were treating the Kuwaitis. It became the atrocity story most quoted by Western leaders to rally world opinion against Iraq's President Saddam Hussein. |
