KUWAIT: At first glance, Kuwait's Liberation Day festivities were as bold and noisy as might be expected of a country celebrating its escape 12 years ago from Iraqi rule.
In scenes reminiscent of the first days of liberation in 1991, processions of cars drove up and down the streets of Kuwait City yesterday, car horns blaring and Kuwaiti and American flags streaming out of windows.
From a rooftop a young Kuwaiti stood and bellowed out the national anthem before breaking into the lyrics of a song by Eminem, a fitting emblem of the youthful, Westernised society for whom the first Gulf War is remembered as little more than a long holiday in Saudi Arabia.
Two-thirds of the population here is under 25, but for the older generation who lived under the seven-month rule of Saddam Hussein, the scars are far from healed.
Mr Abdul al-Ezmi, a retired government employee who was detained by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait for two months, watched the processions from his living-room window. "Of course I danced and sang when I was freed by American soldiers 12 years ago. But the young people today have forgotten or else never knew what it was like back then."
Mr al-Ezmi opened a photo album containing pictures of himself after his release. These show a gaunt, ill-looking man with back and chest criss-crossed with wounds and bruises from the beatings by Iraqi security forces. "Do you know why I was tortured? Because I, along with a friend, arranged a bakery in order to deliver bread to hungry families."
At the Kuwaiti House for National Works, accounts like Mr al-Ezmi's have been recorded and a campaign launched to publicise them so that, following the centre's motto, "Kuwait never forgets". In the weeks after liberation, stories of mutilations and mass killings by Iraqis abounded, many of them untrue, and the centre is not adverse to a little mythologising in the plastic models and sound-and-light show it uses to garnish the events of 12 years ago.
But Mr Jagub al-Ghanim, a curator at the centre who, like Mr al-Ezmi, was briefly held by Iraqi forces, believes the facts speak for themselves: 422 Kuwaitis were killed, there were 720 recorded events of torture and rape, and 605 Kuwaitis are still unaccounted for.
But there are Kuwaitis for whom Liberation Day marks a different sense of regret and anger.
Kuwait's small liberal elite also remembers the speeches made in exile by the Kuwaiti leadership in 1990 for the free and democratic society that would rise out of the wreckage of the liberated country.
Ms Laila al-Othman, a writer convicted of seditious writing three years ago and whose books have been banned, said: "We realise now that was just rhetoric to catch the ear of the West to convince them to help us. Nothing has changed in this country."