KUWAIT CITY: A month of sales has just finished in Kuwait City shops, but the biggest reduction of the past few weeks has been in the size of the country: Kuwait, 50 per cent off.
As it was, the country was slightly smaller than Wales. Now the government has drawn a line from the south-western corner to the coast, slicing Kuwait in half, declaring the northern part off limits to its own people and giving Washington and London carte blanche to manoeuvre an armed horde there which, when fully assembled, will comprise about a quarter of a million men and women.
The population of Kuwait is 2.3 million, so the arrival of foreign troops signifies a roughly 10 per cent increase in the number of people in its territory. To put this in perspective, it is the equivalent of 5.6m foreign soldiers pitching their tents in Britain.
There have been no demonstrations against the bisection of Kuwait. Most Kuwaitis still remember with gratitude their liberation from Iraq by the US and its allies in 1991.
But to the trickle of shootings of Americans, the objections of the strongly religious minority to the US military presence, and the hostility of the liberal minority to US policy towards Palestinians, a new, broader note of grumbling has been added. The sealed-off north had no towns or settlements, but it had plenty of Kuwaiti life.
It is not the Kuwaiti way to get angry in front of strangers. But Abu Abdullah, one of thousands of Kuwaiti sheep and camel herders evicted from the north of his country to make way for the American and British army, was very, very annoyed.
His sheep would normally be grazing on the sweet spring grass south of Um Qasr, near the Kuwait-Iraq border. Instead, they are confined to a squalid, crowded lot among hundreds of sheep and camel pens, tents and electricity pylons in the desert south of Kuwait City, eating Australian grass paid for by the bale.
“We always used to graze in the north, because the area is clean and open,” he said. “Here it’s dirty, and the grass is different, and it’s not healthy. Our sheep are getting sick.”
In the Friday market in Kuwait City, past the stalls selling bananas on their stalks and sacks of dried lemons, stand the dealers in the prized faqe truffles, which sprout in the northern desert in spring. The faqe look like a cross between potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes; cooked with turmeric and paprika, they taste somewhere between aubergines and mushrooms, with a faint afternote of damp cellar.
Faqe is normally a lucrative sideline for Kuwaiti Bedouin who gather it at this time of year — it retails for about Pounds sterling 20 a kilogramme. Dealers are having to make do with inferior faqe from Syria and Algeria.
“The Kuwaiti soldiers who are stationed in the desert bring a little, but not the same as before,” said Mohammed al-Fadly, a part-time Kuwaiti truffle hunter, leaning on the counter of a faqe stall. “Of course I feel annoyed, but I have to cooperate for the sake of my country.”
Even after the troops leave, he said, it would take four years for the desert to recover from the destructive effect on the soil of tank tracks and tyres.
Normally, at this cool time of year, before the summer temperatures soar to 50C-plus, the northern desert would be filled with Kuwaiti families returning to their cultural roots by camping. The coming of the US-British force has disrupted the rhythms of the people, forcing them to strike their elaborate tents and move south, or abandon their holidays altogether and sit at home.
The six-lane highway through the northern desert from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border, which had been the campers’ route to their spring playgrounds, was now suffering under the weight of military traffic.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.