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                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

MIDDLE EAST

A Land of Stones


Remember the Kurds? After a moment in the spotlight, Iraq's
forgotten people cling to fragile autonomy in a home laid waste
by Saddam

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by William Dowell/Sulaymaniyah and
J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus


    Across the rugged mountains and valleys of northern Iraq,
the rubble is coming to life. Almost 2,000 Kurdish villages
that Saddam Hussein's forces systematically dynamited and
bulldozed are inhabited again. Tents and lean-tos dot the snowy
slopes, shattered walls support makeshift plastic roofs, and
open-air bazaars are conducting a brisk business in food, fuel
and clothing. Many of the villages' new residents are doing
their best to rebuild amid desperate hardship and the harshest
winter in 40 years.

    Tenuous and temporary as their grip may be, the Kurds of
Iraq have come tantalizingly close to something like their
centuries-old dream: a state of their own. Sheltering behind a
security guarantee from the U.S.-led coalition, cut off from the
south by a military blockade, the long-suffering Kurds have
taken control of a 15,000-sq.-mi. slice of the country.

    Yet for the 3.8 million people in this de facto Kurdistan
between Turkey and Iraq, their painful success contains more
irony than victory. A year after they fled in panic from their
traditional homes into the snowy mountain passes, they are still
living in hunger and cold, their survival dependent on aid from
abroad. They are safe from attack only because the victors of
the gulf war have warned the Iraqi military to keep its
distance. U.S. and British jets regularly roar low over the
region to remind Iraqi soldiers that they are being watched.
"When I don't hear the sound of the planes," says a Kurdish
refugee, "I can't sleep at night."

    Even that fragile safety could turn out to be fleeting.
The last team of allied military observers plans to leave its
base in Zakhu in June. Aid workers from the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, who have kept the Kurds from
starving, may be pulling out in April.

    In the past, Saddam repeatedly turned his guns on the
Kurds. In 1975 he began forcing them out of their border
villages. In 1988, to punish them for providing aid and comfort
to Iran during the eight-year war, he stepped up the campaign.
All told, he had his army obliterate 4,200 Kurdish villages. At
least 180,000 people disappeared, purportedly into camps in the
south. Most never returned, and some Western experts believe
they were killed. When Kurds -- encouraged then abandoned by
Washington -- rebelled after the Iraqi defeat in Kuwait last
year, Saddam battered them again, sending 1.2 million fleeing
to the frontiers.

    Forced to the rescue, a coalition of more than 20,000
allied troops carved out a security zone for the Kurds near the
Turkish border. They also ordered Saddam to stop flying his
planes in airspace north of the 36th parallel. The refugees came
down from the mountains and tried to put their lives back
together. But after most of the allied security forces left last
summer, the Iraqis rushed into action to subdue the Kurds and
their armed guerrilla units, the peshmerga.

    To Saddam's discomfort, the rebels not only stood their
ground but launched a furious counteroffensive in October,
expanding their control far south of the 36th parallel and
seizing the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah (pop. 1.2 million).
Iraqi troops retreated in disorder, leaving behind long lines
of tanks.

    Saddam then tried imposing a military and economic cordon
sanitaire. His army has dug in tanks and artillery behind mine
fields and fortifications along the southern edge of Kurdistan,
carefully including all of Iraq's major oil fields. Soldiers
have set up checkpoints on the roads, and while they allow local
traffic in and out, they confiscate all but the smallest
quantities of food and fuel. At the town of Kifri, 96 miles
north of Baghdad, in outposts separated by a tense 500 yards.,
Iraqi troops confront bearded peshmerga guerrillas in balloon
trousers and tightly wrapped turbans. "We have been suffering
from two blockades," says Jalal Talabani, leader of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two leading political
groups. "First the U.N. embargo directed at all of Iraq, and
second the blockade Saddam is directing just against Kurdistan."

    The far northwest and northeast serve as the Kurds'
lifelines. In spite of the international embargo, cross-border
trade with Turkey is booming. Hundreds of trucks arrive daily,
carrying everything from food and medical supplies to machine
tools. On their return trips, the rigs ferry thousands of
gallons of illicit Iraqi gasoline and oil to Turkey that are
sold at 10 times the purchase price.

    Panjwin and Qala Diza, villages on the Iranian frontier,
are smuggling centers where a vibrant and imaginative black
market has sprung up. Though the area is under heavy snow,
fast-buck gangs transport tools, machinery, even construction
equipment to sell in Iran, returning with food and spare parts
for cars and trucks. Almost all the eggs in Kurdistan come from
Iran, painstakingly brought in by foot.

    Much of the material sold by the Kurds is stolen property.
Some is simply hauled away from building sites and dams, and
some is taken from Kurds by Kurds at gunpoint. Law and order
are in short supply in the region, where militias have seized
control of many of the hills and valleys. Widespread corruption
and factional rivalry cast a shadow over the Kurds' future.

    Because there is no formal government, decisions are made
by the Kurdistan Front, which consists of eight major groups.
To create something closer to civil administration, Kurdistan
will hold elections on April 3 for its national assembly, which
Saddam originally set up just for show. The vote "is also to end
the rule of the militias," says Massoud Barzani, head of the
Democratic Party of Kurdistan, the other leading political
movement. "When the militia rules, the law does not." But a U.S.
analyst fears that instead of burying dissension, the vote may
actually accentuate it.

    For most Kurds, simple survival is the issue. Residents of
the mountain town of Sayid Sadiq, where U.N. aid workers have
set up a camp, are barely coping. With international help, they
have rebuilt some walls and put up tents. In the biting cold,
children play among the broken stones. On the main road, a
thriving market offers dresses, cigarettes and eggs. Says Rejau
Faraj, 25, who fled with her children from the village of
Chamchamal: "We don't know how long we will stay here or where
we will go next."

    Most of the Kurdish political and tribal leaders assume
that Saddam will attack them as soon as the allies and the U.N.
depart. They are training their eager but poorly equipped
peshmerga accordingly. But they disagree -- as they do on so
many issues -- about whether there is any sense in trying to
negotiate an autonomy agreement with the Baghdad dictator. Such
accords were reached in 1966, 1970 and 1984, and Iraqi
governments broke them all; Kurds ask why they should trust
Saddam now.

    Barzani has met with the Iraqi President, and though the
talks broke off when the blockade was imposed, the Kurdish
leader has not given up on a political settlement. He realizes
most of the countries involved do not want to see a complete
breakup of Iraq, with the creation of an independent Kurdistan
in the north and a Shi`ite state in the south friendly to
fundamentalist Iran.

    Turkey is already fighting a counter insurgency war in its
eastern provinces against the Workers' Party of Kurdistan, a
Marxist, terrorist splinter group. Both the Turkish and Iranian
governments would view an independent Kurdistan as a magnet for
separatists in their countries and a potentially powerful
destabilizing force.

    The Bush Administration takes a similar view. Even though
it hates Saddam, it does not want to depose him if that means
the Kurds will break Iraq apart and threaten Turkey's
stability. Having abandoned the Kurds once, the Administration
does not want to find itself permanently enmeshed in byzantine
Kurdish politics or see more Kurdish blood spilled if another
rebellion were to go poorly. "We draw the line at acquiring
commitments that would keep us involved over the long term --
or that we would end up having to break," says a U.S. official.

    The U.S. is willing to continue humanitarian aid, but
leaders like Barzani are fed up with Kurdistan's being treated
as an assignment for relief agencies. "We need the world to see
our problem as political," he says, "and not as a refugee or
humanitarian problem. All our problems result from politics."

    No negotiations are under way to settle the fate of
Kurdistan peacefully. Saddam is playing a waiting game, watching
the suffering while sticking the U.N. and the allies with the
cost of supplying the Kurds. "It has become clear," says U.S.
Army Colonel Richard Naab, who heads the allied observer team
in Zakhu, "that he is trying to negotiate with a gun at their
heads. He thinks time is in his favor, and he is waiting for
revenge."

    Saddam's route to revenge is not guaranteed, even if the
allies and the U.N. withdraw on schedule. If the Iraqi army
storms north, there will be a repeat of what local officials
call "the CNN winter" -- the spectacle on worldwide television
of more than a million Kurds in flight through the mountains.
A "CNN summer" would put pressure on the West for another
intervention, and possibly a fatal blow against the Iraqi
dictator.

    Saddam's fear, says Talabani, is that an attack on the
Kurds "will set a spark to the Shi`ites and push them toward a
new uprising." A second round of rebellion on two fronts could
finally topple Iraq's President from power. These considerations
should make even as imprudent a leader as Saddam ponder
carefully before he orders a strike into Kurdistan. Meanwhile
the Kurds try desperately to survive in their land of stones.