Toward A New Kuwait

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Most people know only one thing about Kuwait: that George Bush has pledged to free it. Nevertheless, a pernicious notion has taken hold. Kuwait, it is alleged, was an arrogant, undemocratic handkerchief of a country no one would care about were it not for the oil beneath its sands. Is that view accurate? And if so, could the nation change after its liberation? Kuwaitis themselves have a vested interest in the answers to those questions -- but so does the rest of the world, and particularly the half-million allied troops massed for war in the gulf. For now that Saddam Hussein has released his foreign hostages, the question has become simpler: Is Kuwait worth dying for?

When he thinks about it at all, which he tries hard not to do, Ali Basa can remember in detail exactly when his luck ran out. It was shortly after 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 28, at a point in the Kuwaiti desert about 14 miles north of the Saudi border. On eight previous smuggling runs, the midday heat had protected Basa's overland enterprise. The Iraqis, everyone knew, were creatures of habit who invariably shunned the harsh sun.

But not on this day.

The cloud of dust that moved furiously toward Basa's three-vehicle convoy telegraphed the worst news possible. An Iraqi patrol -- two armed jeeps -- was converging on Basa's position. As planned in advance, Basa quickly shifted his Nissan out of four-wheel drive. In a moment, he was stuck in the loose sand. In another, he was in custody. But Basa's confederates got away, their Chevy Blazers roaring off for Kuwait City. By nightfall they would resupply the Kuwaiti resistance with 90 AK-47 assault rifles, 17 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 5,000 rounds of ammunition and, at $25,000 each, three more mobile telephones equipped with portable satellite dishes -- high-tech communications systems capable of connecting those "inside" with the outside world.

To close friends familiar with Basa's activities, his daring had earned him a nickname. He was the "Hero of the Crossing," the same admiring sobriquet awarded Anwar Sadat after the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal during the 1973 October War with Israel. Now, at 40, with a wife and nine children safely out of Kuwait, Basa was headed for jail with phony papers identifying him as a citizen of Qatar. "That's what saved me," says Basa, recalling the story he had carefully rehearsed against the possibility of capture. "I told the Iraqis that I was just another expatriate who had worked in Kuwait. I told them that my mother-in-law was a Kuwaiti, that she was ill, and that I wanted to bring her out for medical treatment at 'home' in Qatar. There was nothing to say otherwise. I had nothing on me, and the truck was empty. I was the decoy, and no one could prove it."

But many tried. It would be 10 days, three beatings and more than a dozen interrogations before Basa's elaborate lie finally stuck; 10 days of hell before he was released by being tossed from a moving car near one of the new statues of Saddam Hussein in the middle of Kuwait City.