Along the Iraq-Kuwait Border, an Escalation of Tensions

UMM AL QASR, Iraq — In the briefing room of a former Iraqi naval hospital here in the disputed Demilitarized Zone between Iraq and Kuwait, U.S. Army Maj. Dennis Kolb interrupted his recent slide presentation to remind visitors, “It’s easy to get turned around and disoriented up here.

“Life in the DMZ,” he added later, in military understatement, “can be both difficult and dangerous.”

Indeed, just a few hundred yards from the hospital compound that now serves as headquarters for the U.N. Iraq-Kuwait Observer Mission, three Swedish telephone technicians were tantalizingly near to freedom when they were detained by Iraqi officers a month ago. The result: All three Swedes have been sentenced to seven years in Iraqi prisons.

And Friday, U.S. officials confirmed that an American--one of the hundreds of foreign experts hired by Kuwait to clear the DMZ of hundreds of thousands of tons of land mines, heavy ordnance and ammunition left after the Persian Gulf War--was captured by an Iraqi patrol about a mile from this compound. Intensive negotiations were under way to free the American, identified as Chad Hall.

But based on interviews with contractors and U.N. personnel on a DMZ trip last weekend, it appears that Iraq increasingly is using actions on the disputed border to pressure the United States and its Gulf War allies and to express its defiance of the U.N. cease-fire resolutions that ended the war.

U.N. observers, who have taken pains to enforce the 9.4-mile-wide DMZ during 18 months of day-and-night patrols, reported this week that most border violations have been committed not by the Iraqis but by the Kuwaitis, Americans or coalition allies.

Since the patrols to enforce bans on armed soldiers and on military flights over the border began in April, 1991, Iraq has registered just 52 violations. That compares with 168 violations by Kuwaitis and 186 by Americans and other coalition allies.

But the Iraqis clearly also have taken an increasingly aggressive stance against Westerners working in the DMZ, as was shown by their handling of the Swedes.

The three men--employed by a Stockholm-based firm, Ericsson telecommunications, which was under contract to the Kuwaiti government to install new phone systems in the border regions--were looking for a shortcut to Kuwait city from their DMZ work site. They took a wrong turn that led into the port of Umm al Qasr, most of which falls in the Iraqi part of the border.

In their van, laden with sophisticated communications gear, the Swedes made it as far as an Iraqi police check post a few hundred yards from the entrance to the U.N. observer headquarters in Umm al Qasr. But Iraqi authorities arrested them, took them to Baghdad and, despite the intervention of Swedish diplomats in Iraq, sentenced them to seven-year jail terms; Stockholm is appealing those harsh punishments.

That incident followed a similar sentence imposed on a British tourist last summer. The Iraqis, however, have been far more lenient in other cases. An American, detained with two Filipinos while performing a similar ordnance-clearing mission on the border soon after the war ended, was released within 29 days of detention.

But sources in the border region reported this week that tension has been increasing sharply.

At the observer base just south of the Iraqi town of Safwan, Russian, U.S. and Pakistani officers told of an Aug. 30 gun battle that left a Kuwaiti policeman dead and a Swedish U.N. observer wounded. The battle broke out when the United Nations tried to negotiate between armed Kuwaiti patrolmen and a dozen or so Iraqis in civilian clothes who “suddenly appeared with automatic weapons,” they said.

Earlier this week, there was another shooting in the DMZ. Details are sketchy, but the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry reported Wednesday that three of its police were wounded Tuesday by Iraqis armed with machine guns and bazookas.

The heart of the border conflict is Iraq’s refusal to accept the results of the U.N. Border Demarcation Commission, which has delineated the Iraq-Kuwait border laid down by British colonialists earlier this century and plans to begin laying concrete border pylons next week.

“The entire border is in dispute, and always has been, because it has never been demarcated,” Kolb explained in his briefing. “Nobody ever went out and drew the line in the sand and said, ‘This is one side, and this is the other.’ ”

Further complicating the border chores for U.N. military observers, Kolb said, are regulations that forbid them from carrying weapons, a policy that would have rendered them powerless to aid Hall and the other contractors who have been captured in the DMZ.

At one of the 18 monitoring posts in the DMZ, officers reported that both sides had agreed to respect each other’s turf, at least until the demarcation commission finishes its work.

But they added that they expected the tension to mount in the DMZ before then.