Campaign to free Kuwaitis

(First Edition)

IT IS a long way from Saddam Hussein's jails to the Grosvenor House Hotel in London's West End. It was there that, under the chairmanship of that indomitable battler for freedom, Lady Olga Maitland, the International Committee for Solidarity with Kuwaitis Missing and Held Prisoner of War was officially organised.

The assembled Arab ambassadors had little direct experience of the life of the hostages. Yet they wore yellow carnations in their buttonholes in memory of the 627 PoWs and hostages taken from Kuwait and still held in Iraq. as American families tied yellow ribbons worn to remember POWs in Vietnam. The food in Park Lane - plates of salmon and lamb - was better, too, than the diet of rice and cucumber that Joe Wild, working with the Kuwaiti navy, had was forced to survive on after Iraqi troops dragged him from his flat in from Kuwait five weeks after the invasion in 1990. He and others gave searing accounts of their time in Iraqi jails. A Kuwaiti woman, Mashal Mourad, said she could not do what every young woman wanted and get married until her brother was returned from Iraq, where he had been taken during the occupation.

It is two years since the Kuwaitis set up their own national solidarity committee. Why had it taken so long for this international pressure group to form? Sheikh Salem al-Sabah, the former deputy prime minister and chairman of the national committee, said they had to wait a long time before they found the right defender of freedom and 'believer in principles of human rights' in Lady Olga. Was not the committee in part a in response to fears that the coalition showed signs of going soft on Saddam Hussein? 'The recent message sent through the Tomahawks was very clear.'

The British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, lent his support to for the campaign and warned Iraq that force was still an option. 'We will not hesitate to use force if necessary to ensure compliance with (UN) resolutions,' he said. All sanctions would continue.

'We can't. . . relax those pressures until those resolutions are fulfilled.'

Lady Olga was adamant that the memory ins of the Iraqi invasion would endins not fade. 'Let the world not forget as it passes to other fields of conflict. There is unfinished business.'