Kuwaiti media cheers end of Saddam rule

Kuwaiti television has trumpeted the joy of Iraqis after the fall of Baghdad to US troops, with a presenter saying it is a “slap in the face” to those Arabs who sided with Saddam Hussein.

Other Arab media were more subdued about the US military success in Iraq.

Kuwait Television showed footage of an old Iraqi man using his shoe to hit a poster of Saddam Hussein and screaming ”This is freedom!”

The state channel’s presenter voiced over the clip: “This is a slap in the face to all those who believed Saddam Hussein could stay in power.”

Kuwait has been heavily criticised in the Arab world in recent weeks for being the only Arab country to openly back the US invasion of Iraq and for granting the United States use of its territory to launch the offensive.

“This is the day of great jubilation, the day of rebuilding Iraq,” a member of the London-based Iraqi opposition, Faek Sheik Ali, told Kuwaiti television.

Ali applauded Kuwait’s media for their coverage of the war, saying Iraqi dissidents were baffled as to why other Arab channels had supported a dictator against his people.

Few Arab television stations outside Kuwait have hosted Iraqis who opposed the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Today, the popular Al-Jazeera satellite channel reported that American tanks had taken up position in front of the Palestine Hotel, where foreign journalists are based and where Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf gave a press conference Tuesday.

“The surreal scene this afternoon was unthinkable until yesterday. Nobody could dream of it. If someone had told me this, I would have told him ‘impossible’,” said Al-Jazeera’s reporter Maher Abdullah.

Abdullah said the US troops were “friendly ... there is a kind of strange harmony between the invading force, now occupying force, and the citizens ... An unusual and unexpected calm.”

At one point, Abdullah referred to a Saddam monument as a statue of “the former president".

On Abu Dhabi TV, a US soldier told the channel that Iraqi civilians were happy to see the Americans and that they appreciated that.

But the channel also screened an Iraqi man who carried a white sheet and appeared to be angry.

“Why did they hit an Iraqi car? They’re civilians. They killed a man and woman, just now. Why? Ask them?” the man told the channel before walking away.

The Lebanese channel, Al Hayat-LBC satellite TV, broadcast an interview from outside the Palestine Hotel with a British woman, apparently one of those foreigners who had come to Iraq to act as human shields against the invasion.

She expressed shock at the speed of the collapse of Saddam’s authority. She also said that Iraq was free until the American and British troops arrived.

An Italian woman in Baghdad, who said her name was Marlyn, told the channel that “American gangs” had come to occupy Iraq “for economic purposes.”

In Khartoum, Sudanese state television had, by early afternoon, reported only that Iraqi civilians were being killed in Baghdad. A presenter delivered a commentary on what he called the injustice of the war.

Kuwait television has been calling the three-week old war the “liberation of Iraq,” and one of its correspondents has been embedded with U.S. troops.

Most of the country’s dailies have sent reporters to southern Iraq. On Wednesday, the Al-Watan newspaper ran a report on prison torture in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, that British troops liberated early this week.

“Basra breathes freedom with a lung it hasn’t gotten used to yet,” said a headline in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas.