On The Disco Front

It is a quarter to one in the morning, and Medo, a 16-year-old Kuwaiti, is chatting with his friend and compatriot Khaled, 22, as they prop up a wall at Sultana's, the third-floor disco at Cairo's Semiramis Inter-Continental. "Cairo is boring," grumbles Medo. Khaled murmurs in agreement as he eyes the action on the floor. "I come here every night," Medo says. "There's nothing else to do."

Nothing to do! Their country has been snatched by a thief; Americans, Egyptians, Britons and Saudis, among others, are braving the gulf deserts and Saddam's rockets to win it back for them, and these two able-bodied young men say there is nothing to do. For those who do not think Kuwait is worth the fight, the habits of Medo and Khaled are all the anecdotal evidence needed to prove the Kuwaitis are a spoiled and arrogant bunch.

But Kuwait's elders do understand the problem. One exile group in Cairo has sent flyers to the 7,000 Kuwaiti families in the city, asking them to behave modestly and stop gathering conspicuously in public. Sober-minded Kuwaitis insist that their boogie-loving brethren, featured prominently in the Western media, make up only a tiny minority of their countrymen. "A lot of the criticism is bitter and not deserved just because there are a few crazy people," says Adeeb Essa, spokesman for the Association for Free Kuwait in London.

In fact, while Kuwaitis were the most notorious among the gulf nationalities for flaunting their wealth and easy life-style, the Aug. 2 invasion was a cold shower for most of them. Though a few youths still dance the nights away, many of their peers are at the front. An estimated 23,000 Kuwaitis are believed to be under arms in Saudi Arabia. Only 7,000 are military personnel who escaped from Kuwait; the rest are volunteers. When an exile group in Cairo organized a training program for nurse's aides, 500 Kuwaitis applied for the 120 slots. Other displaced Kuwaitis are preparing for new lives in a liberated Kuwait by taking courses in such things as automobile repair, plumbing, electrical wiring and, for women, housekeeping. In the past, foreign laborers did such work, but the new Kuwait is expected to be much more self-sufficient. Perhaps Medo and Khaled figure they'd better party while they can.