Kuwait journey.

We were treated like royalty. Seated in the sleek and gilded Kuwaiti parliament house recently, four other human-rights activists and I sipped mint tea from golden cups and awaited Ahmad Baqr, a prominent member of Kuwait's newly elected National Assembly.

We had come to Kuwait to plead for the lives of sixteen men - ten Palestinians and six Iraqis - unjustly condemned to death for "collaborating" with Iraq during the Persian Gulf war. We hoped that Baqr, who is known in Kuwait as a humanitarian, could intervene in their behalf.

He emerged from behind a wooden parapet carved in a geometric Arabic motif. All in white except for a few tufts of gray in his thick, snowy beard, he joined us where we sat on silken couches beneath a wall covered with the portraits of Kuwaiti princes.

After brief introductions, Baqr told us of his warm feelings for the United States and thanked us as Americans for coming to his country's aid three years ago during the Persian Gulf war. Without America's leading role in the liberation of Kuwait, he said, Saddam Hussein's army would still have his tiny country in a stranglehold.

Because none of us supported the U.S. role in the war we could not take credit for our country's military success. We smiled politely, however, and tried to steer the conversation in another direction. We had not come to Kuwait to talk about the politics of the Gulf war. Rather, we had come to prevent it from claiming more casualties. The sixteen prisoners we were there to discuss had been arrested and tried in the chaos surrounding the war. Their charges were based on confessions elicited by the most brutal forms of torture. We wanted to express our concern for their lives to Baqr.

But Baqr preferred to linger on the U.S./Kuwait friendship and compared the two countries. "We consider ourselves as part of the free world, along with the people and the countries who helped us, who felt our crisis and our problems," he told us. "They honestly came, not for oil or for money; they came because of what we were suffering .... During the occupation, no one expressed what Kuwaitis were suffering like Bush," Baqr said, his eyes now filling with tears. "I could feel the humanity in George Bush's speeches."

Trying to conceal a look of disbelief, I slid back on my silk-covered seat and thought about that day, January 16, 1991, when the United States began its barbaric bombing raid on Iraq. In Chicago thousands of citizens, including me, took to the streets in protest.

I pictured Bush, whose crooked smile always seemed to me to be an outer reflection of the inner man. In gearing up to storm the desert, Bush spoke about preserving human rights, democracy, and freedom in Kuwait.

But our delegation learned that three years after the war, Kuwaiti democracy remains a democracy for the few. Almost half the population is denied all citizenship rights. The large corps of "guest workers" from other Arab states, Sri Lanka, India, and the Philippines, comprise an exploited servant class.

This caste-like social structure has secured all of the power and wealth in the hands of the "first-class" Kuwaitis. Iraq's invasion threatened their privilege and their lifestyle. Immediately after the invasion, anyone remotely sympathetic to Iraq was branded an enemy of the state - a "bad Arab." Palestinians were run out of Kuwait with a vengeance. The official Kuwaiti explanation our group heard so often was that the Palestinians "ran away." In fact, the Palestinians had been running Kuwait. Recruited for their high level of education and skills, they came from the Gaza Strip in the 1950s to be teachers, engineers, doctors, and lawyers in Kuwait. But the Palestinian community had grown uncomfortably large.

The war brought just the right excuse to get rid of them. Yasser Arafat's approval of Saddam Hussein was enough for the Emir of Kuwait to cancel all Palestinian job contracts with Kuwaiti employers. Without work, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave the country.

"We were threatened by the Palestinians," a Kuwaiti official told us frankly. "Now they are gone, and we're glad they're gone." Dr. Rasha Al-Sabah, the under secretary of education and a member of the royal family, added: "The Palestinians stabbed us in the back. We had the right to kick them out." She could have added "and the right to kill them." The sixteen Iraqi and Palestinian men languishing in the "high security" section of the Kuwait Central Prison could be hanged because of their national origin and their political beliefs. Many of them are members of the Arab Liberation Front or the Ba'ath Party, affiliations which became illegal only after Saddam's invasion.

I asked Baqr why he thought the United States acted so quickly to end the Iraqi occupation when it had ignored other occupations in the Middle East condemned by the United Nations, such as Isreal's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Southern Lebanon, and Syria's Golan Heights. His reply was very strange. "Kuwait was good really,"' he said, smiling, "like the humble, good man, attacked without doing anyone any harm."

Was I meant to infer that the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the Syrians somehow deserved to be occupied, but Kuwait did not? Did Kuwait, like Israel, see itself as a nation of "God's chosen people," who were confirmed in their special identity by U.S. support?

Unable to accept the simplicity of Baqr's "some Arabs had it coming" rationale, I asked him if he really believed that the United States had defended his country without any other motive. "You know, for your natural resources - for oil maybe?"

"I can't exclude the human reason," he answered, now losing patience. With that, he glanced hurriedly at his watch and said he had another appointment.

Baqr understands that today's world order calls for unity with the West. So, even though he was a bit perturbed by our suggestion that human rights, democracy, and freedom should be granted to all people living in Kuwait, he let us have our say. After all, we were comrades from the "free world."