A Day that will live forever in ignominy

Tomorrow is August 2nd, a date that probably does not mean much to most people around the world. Yet for me, this date represents one of the defining events of my life. I am referring to August 2nd, 1990 and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi forces. It was a hot summer that year, the middle of my vacation from school, and unlike most other families in Kuwait that year, we had not gone anywhere for the summer. I will not go into the details of the events following the invasion and the subsequent liberation of Kuwait with the help of US forces - the First Gulf War. This, of course, led to a chain of events culminating in the Second Gulf War in 2003, and this time a full scale invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussain. But this post is not an exposition on that either.

Personally for me, and almost anyone who I have ever met that grew up or lived in Kuwait during "the Invasion" (as we refer to it), will never forget that date and the significance of it. Overnight, most of us went from never having to worry about anything materially, to becoming International Refugees and losing all our property - my family and I escaped Kuwait to go back to my native Bangladesh with just 2 suitcases. When we got back, after "the Liberation", our house had been looted and everything that I had grown up with, all my childhood memories were gone. One of my mom's friends, carries her children's pictures with her everywhere she goes (that is all she managed to get out of Kuwait back in 1990), and even though she and her family have returned back to Kuwait, and rebuilt their material belongings - in many cases many folds more than people ever had before the invasion, no matter where she goes she always carries those pictures in case such an eventuality were to pass again.

So for me, this date, August 2nd, even 17 years after the fact, brings a day of reflection and thinking about how fragile life really is. In a matter of 7 fateful hours, while Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, the life and livelihoods of over 2 million of Kuwait's residents (and ALL the millions of families of expatriates whose lives depended on the remitances coming from Kuwait) were turned upside down. More than anything else, I know never to take anything for granted.

Comments

[Toby Getsch]

Wow.

There are always other perspectives and other viewpoints. Thanks for sharing your experience. You opened my eyes and mind to thinking even more about how we never really know what experiences other people have had, where they've been and why they may be who they are. It takes time to learn those things. Sometimes it takes bravery to share them with others.

Thanks.

[Zorro]

A very insightful account. It seems this 'Invasion' scourge has not gone from the world's psyche. That another group of people are suffering the consequences of a devastating Invasion shows our failures as a race. Until the planet realizes that ill thought human actions cause human sufferring regardless of their skin color or religion, whether they are affluent kuwaties, wall street bankers, innocent iraqis, flood victims in louisiana, we will never progress.