by Marlon Menezes

It was on the 2nd of August that I woke up to the familiar wail of Arabic on my radio, but I immediately realized that I was listening to the wrong language in the wrong country. I was in Canada and the Arabic I heard was a plea for help from Radio Kuwait that was re-broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a lead-in to their headline story that morning.

Eight hours earlier, I had spoken to my parents about the on-going border tensions between Iraq and Kuwait. There were US intelligence reports of large-scale troop movements from the Iraqi side. They admonished me and told me to go to sleep rather than worry. 

As I later learned, my parents kept to their routine and headed out to work after I had spoken with them. After dropping off my mother at the bank where she worked, my dad drove off to his office. His usual route took him near Kuwait’s parliament, but this time he noticed tanks around the building. As he got closer, he realized they were Iraqi tanks that were in the process of attacking the poorly armed police force that was defending the structure. A significant portion of Kuwait’s army and its elite were on vacation abroad, allowing for an easy breech of the country’s border. My dad found himself detained by the Iraqi troops. Released a few hours later, he witnessed violence on the streets on his way home. Years later, he still does not talk about those events or how they made him feel.

All lines of communication to Kuwait were cut within a few hours and I was unable to get in touch with my parents for several months after that. I would come to find out that with little value in their Kuwaiti (and Iraqi) currency, they resorted to bartering their valuables for food and US dollars. They even raided my foreign currency and coin collection.

Despite these hardships, one small bit of freedom they experienced during the invasion was the availability of alcohol. It was legal in Iraq, but had been banned in Kuwait. But now, with open borders between the two nations, alcohol could be transported from nearby Iraqi cities like Basra. However, one had to be careful as some unscrupulous sellers tainted their bootleg with toxic methanol. Unfortunately, one of my friends was a victim of this, resulting in him losing most of his vision.

The Iraqis generally left the South Asian population alone. Until the Iran-Iraq war, India had extensive military and economic ties with Iraq. The Indian Air Force formed one of the largest foreign cadres of trainers in the Iraqi Air Force. But war renders all unpredictable. Many of the Iraqi troops that came into Kuwait were poorly resourced and often went door to door begging for food. In many cases, soldiers would simply break into Kuwaiti homes in search of sustenance. My family could see and hear such acts of violence in Salwa, the neighborhood they lived in which was predominately Kuwaiti in constitution. Stories of Kuwaiti prisoners being tortured and killed at the local police station, whether true or rumored, became a source of concern. As a result, my parents eventually left their home and moved to another family member’s home that was in a neighborhood that had a lot of residents from South Asia.

Nonetheless, even here they had surreal encounters with the Iraqi forces.

One time, my dad was stopped at gunpoint by Iraqi soldiers and was made to drive them to a retail store. He saw the Iraqis help themselves to various personal items. After the soldiers were done, they made him drop them back to their original post. While departing, one of the soldiers slid my dad a shirt he had picked up at the store as thanks. Generally speaking, the Iraqis tended to have less fear of, and exhibited less aggression towards, South Asians as compared to their Arab, and especially Kuwaiti, counterparts.

It would be two months into the invasion before I finally got a call from my parents. Unexpectedly, it was not from Kuwait but Baghdad. They were very vague. I immediately understood that they were attempting to leave the war zone and needed to be discreet. They were concerned that Iraqi intelligence may have been monitoring them and did not want to provide any reason for the authorities to detain them or worse. I played along. I later learned that my parents had sold their valuables so that they could pay for their exit from Kuwait and then Iraq. They took a bus to Baghdad and stayed at the well-known Al Rasheed Hotel for two nights. Later in the war, this hotel would become the vantage point from where CNN covered the air assault by the US coalition on military targets in the capital. It also served as a base for western media during the second US war in Iraq.

While in Iraq, my parents visited the Church of the Virgin where they met a lot of Iraqi Christians who expressed sympathy and kindness towards them. Before their departure, my parents gave their remaining food to an Iraqi family they had befriended. From Iraq they flew to Jordan and were airlifted by the Indian government to Mumbai, with a final overnight bus ride to Goa. They came with nothing but were finally home.

This period was a time of great uncertainty in our lives. It disrupted my brother’s plans to go to college in Cyprus. My situation was not as severe. Although studying abroad, I shared my room with four others. My rent was low and I was on track to receive scholarships to attend graduate school. My future wife had her brother studying in the United States. As a foreign student, he relied on funding from his parents. This now an impossibility, he had to change his legal status so as to be able to work. In a time prior to the internet, this meant driving his paperwork over to the immigration officials. The trip took him from his university in Rapid City, South Dakota to the Immigration and Naturalization Services office in Bismark, North Dakota – a journey of some 300 miles. He suffered a fatal accident during the overnight drive.

Months after my parents returned to Goa, I eventually got the letter they had sent from occupied Kuwait. It is unique because the stamp depicts Saddam Hussain, but with a Kuwait postmark on it. On the back, my dad had put his Kuwait address, but the Iraqi handlers made sure to “complete” it with Iraq emblazoned below the inclusion of the “Province of Kuwait.” 

I was very active in the student community at my college and connected with the well-resourced Kuwait Embassy across the border in Washington DC to distribute promotional materials supporting the liberation of Kuwait. When the US-led invasion started in 1991, I was overjoyed.  However, that was tinged with some sadness when I saw the bloody images of Iraq’s highway of death, for I knew that the majority of Iraq’s “vaunted” occupation force were poor, ill-trained conscripts who were themselves in dire economic need. 

My father did return to Kuwait after the war to pick up the remnants of my family’s former life there. Our home was in poor shape and had obviously been lived in by squatters during my family’s absence. There was not much of value left since my parents had sold what they could before their departure. Thankfully, many personal items were still there. Except for my parent's wedding album. We never understood why someone would want to take something as personal as that. 

At the end of the war, my parents decided not to return to Kuwait, instead making Goa their permanent home. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it allowed them to re-establish bonds with their friends and family while they were still relatively young and healthy. This would serve to be a boon in their twilight years as they could count on support from a large community in their time of need. To replace their lost wedding photographs, my parents cobbled together black-and-white pictures of themselves from their youth. Their wedding album may not have survived the invasion, but Kuwait did. It would continue to be a part of their lives even when it ceased to be the place they called home.

Marlon Menezes was born in Goa and spent his youth in Kuwait. He later attended St. Mary’s School at Mt. Abu, India, but would return to Kuwait to his family every summer. He then moved to Canada and completed high school and his BS in Engineering there before going on to a PhD in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Menezes established Goa’s first website, Goaweb, which later merged with Goacom. He resides in Austin, Texas and works for an Augmented Reality start-up. His passions include his family, bee keeping, gardening, and competing in triathlons.

Banner image of Kuwait is by Kevin Olson and downloaded from unsplash.com