By David A. Korn. Mr. Korn is a former Foreign Service officer who is author of (Human Rights in Iraq) (Yale University Press, 1990).
A few days after U.S. and coalition forces smashed Saddam Hussein's army in southern Iraq, an astonishing thing happened at the opposite end of that country. Rebellion swept Iraqi Kurdistan like wildfire through dry brush. In a matter of days, the cities and towns of the Iraqi Kurdish heartland--Suleimaniya, Irbil, Dahok, and even Kirkuk--were all in the hands of insurgents under the banners of Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and son of the legendary Kurdish guerrilla fighter Mulla Mustafa Barzani. The Baghdad government's Kurdish militia rushed to throw in its lot with the insurgency, and other Iraqi military units in the north quickly surrendered. Seldom had power over an entire region fallen so swiftly from the hands of a central government.
Some two weeks later, there was even more astonishing news. As rapidly as it had risen, the Kurdish revolt collapsed, and some 2 million panicked Kurds jammed into cars, trucks, and buses or struck out on foot and horseback for the Turkish and Iranian borders with little but the clothes on their backs. It was a spontaneous mass flight, one of the largest and most sudden of recent times, and it quickly created a human tragedy of immense proportions. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds, Assyrian Christians, and Turcomans--people who had tasted brutal oppression at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime--were soon crowded without food or shelter on mountainsides up against or just over Iraq's borders with Iran and Turkey. They began dying by the hundreds, then by the thousands. As pictures of the dead and deathly ill children flashed across television screens in America and Western Europe, the Bush Administration was forced into a reversal of policy every bit as spectacular as its earlier turnabout from collaboration with Saddam Hussein to confrontation with him after his army invaded Kuwait.
Like the reversal the previous year, this one too, was at least in part the result of the administration's own miscalculation. Once Saddam Hussein's army was beaten (or thought to have been beaten) the administration's nightmare scenario was not that Kurds and Shi'ites would be massacred or flee for their lives by the hundreds of thousands, but that they would seize power, each in their respective zones. Iraq would become another Lebanon, torn apart; Iran would step in to impose a regime steeped in its own noxious brand of extremism, or the Kurds would defy reason and declare an independent state, or both. The one would unsettle our Saudi friends, the other our Turkish ally. So the administration opted for the path of realpolitik. It would stand aside and let the Iraqi army put down the Shi'ite and Kurdish rebellions: Iraq would thereby be kept together and postwar stability assured.
See no evil
The nightmare scenario was realistic, and it couldn't have turned out to be more wrong. One of the reasons it was wrong is that the administration was so afraid of being contaminated by the Iraqi opposition that it wouldn't talk to them. A Kurdish delegation headed by Talabani was in Washington during the last week of February hoping for an appointment at the White House or State Department. For the administration, they were about as welcome as bearers of the plague. An order came down from the White House banning any meeting. Talabani and Hoshayr Zebari, Masoud Barzani's representative, left Washington without seeing anyone from the executive branch--and without anyone from the executive branch's learning from them what was about to happen in Iraqi Kurdistan.
If there was one key event afterwards, it was the administration's decision to look the other way while the Iraqis cut down the Shi'ite and Kurdish resistance with helicopter gunships. In the mountainous terrain of Iraqi Kurdistan, the helicopters gave Iraqi forces a decisive edge. Helicopters could strike where tanks could not, and their armor and the insurgents' lack of surface-to-air missiles or anti-aircraft guns made them practically invulnerable. The president and his spokesmen offered a variety of rationales--none more than marginally persuasive--in justification of the decision to ignore Iraq's use of helicopters: anything the United States might do would violate the principle (suddenly sacred) of non-intervention in Iraq's internal affairs; the president did not "want to risk the life of one American boy" in a "conflict that has gone on for centuries;" helicopters would be too difficult to track, and shooting them down wouldn't do any good anyway, because the Iraqis could still send armor and artillery against the insurgents.
The hands-off policy brought results the administration had not expected. The flood of Kurdish refugees toward Turkey set off a clamor from President Turgut Ozal's government for allied action to halt the Kurdish exodus from Iraq. And the French and the British upstaged and embarrassed the United States by being the first to call for urgent measures to prevent a great human tragedy. Pictures of the Kurds' misery and of their dead wrapped in shrouds awaiting burial dimmed the glow of the great Desert Storm victory, while in Washington, the Democrats did their best to make the administration's apparent indifference a political issue.
A few days earlier, the White House had announced a paltry $1 million contribution to Kurdish relief, to be handled through UNICEF. Now it did a swift about-face and launched a massive U.S. military airlift of food, blankets, and tents. And then the president did what he had vowed he would not do: he ordered U.S. forces into northern Iraq, to establish a safe haven for several hundred thousands Kurds and others who had fled toward Turkey.
A divided people
Old Middle East hands in Washington, in and out of government, like to think of the Kurds as a quaint people who wear baggy pants and colorful turbans and periodically amuse themselves by firing World War I vintage rifles down from the mountains against government troops that come inconveniently to disturb their backward way of life.
So it may have been, once upon a time. Today, many Iraqi Kurds still wear baggy pants and turbans for ceremonial occasions. But the majority are now urban, and many are middle-class professional: physicians, engineers, architects, accountants, teachers, civil servants, and businessmen.
The Kurds are the Middle East's fourth-largest ethnic group, after the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks, and they are the only major one not to get a state of their own. Nobody knows exactly how many Kurds there are; estimates range from a low of 15 million to a high of 30 million. The reason they never got a state was that in the new order that emerged out of the defeat of the central powers in World War I, the Kurds found themselves divided among Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, with smaller numbers in Syria and the Soviet Union. That too is why nobody knows how many of them there are. Neither Turkey, Iraq, Iran, nor even Syria has ever allowed a census to be taken among its Kurdish population. A good estimate would probably by 10 to 12 million in Turkey, 3 to 3.5 million in Iraq, and 5 to 6 million in Iran.
Emerging political identity
Down through the centuries, Kurdish tribes in the secluded northern Zagros mountains resisted the encroachments of governments, but the idea of a Kurdish national identity did not take root until the 20th century. The Treaty of Sevres, signed between the allied powers and the defeated Ottoman Empire on August 10, 1920, called for establishing a Kurdish state under a League of Nations mandate with a vague promise of independence to come later. But the allies backed down after Kemal Ataturk defeated the Greek Army in Anatolia and seized uncontested control of the territory we now know as Turkey. In the 1920s and 1930s Ataturk's government launched repeated, brutal, and highly effective campaigns to suppress not just the nationalistic aspirations but the cultural identity of the Kurdish population. The Turks barred the public use of the Kurdish language and carried matters to the absurdity of denying that there was such a people as Kurds within their borders. "Mountain Turks," they called them.
In Iraq, things were different. Iraq had no true historical antecedents and no nationalistic strongman to throw out the foreigner and impose unity. It was an entirely artificial state, pieced together by the British at the end of World War I from the shattered remains of the eastern flank of the Ottoman Empire. The British insisted on including in this mainly Arab state the largely Kurdish Ottoman Wilayet of Mosul, because oil had been found there in substantial quantities, and London wanted to ensure that its latest vassal would not be a drain on the treasury. The Kurds objected, though at that point not strongly, for their world was still mainly tribal and their loyalties were to tribal leaders. The British bought them off with vague assurances of autonomy. The League of Nations exacted from the government of Iraq, as the price for accession to independence and admission to the League, a promise to respect Kurdish cultural, linguistic, and administrative autonomy.
When successive governments in Baghdad ignored these promises, the Kurdish tribes of Iraq rose in revolt. Little by little, in the cauldron of Kurdish revolt and Iraqi government repression, there was forged a sense of Kurdish identity and nationalism that transcended tribal limits. Every Iraqi regime has had a part in this process, but none has done more to make Kurds think of themselves as Kurds and want to lead an autonomous existence than the Ba'ath Party, which seized power in Baghdad in 1968. And no Iraqi leader has been a more cruel, treacherous, and implacable adversary to the Kurds than the Ba'ath strongman, Saddam Hussein.
Empty promises
One of the first thing the Ba'ath did after taking power in Baghdad was to launch a military offensive against the Kurds. By late 1969, however, it had become clear that Iraq's army lacked the means to crush Kurdish resistance. So Saddam Hussein turned to his own particular brand of dual-track diplomacy. He opened talks with Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani for a special status for the Kurds within Iraq, and he put out feelers to Moscow for a friendship treaty and for the arms he would need to resume the war against the Kurds.
On March 11, 1970, the Iraqi government and Barzani's negotiators reached agreement on a text that recognized "the national rights of the Kurdish people and of other minorities within the overall context of Iraqi unity." Kurdish was to be the language of instruction in Kurdish areas and would be taught as a second language in the rest of Iraq. A single administrative unit was to be established for the Kurdish region of Iraq, senior government posts there were to be held by Kurds, and steps were taken to "ensure that the Kurdish people enjoy a growing degree of self-government and hence internal autonomy." And a portion of the revenues from the Kirkuk oil fields was to be devoted to development in the Kurdish region.
A census was to be taken to establish the boundaries of the Kurdish region, but the Baghdad government never got around to it. Instead, it began expelling Kurds form Kirkuk and from towns and villages on the fringe of the Kurdish heartland, whittling away at the area to be accorded to the Kurds. In 1971, the Iraqi security services tried to assassinate Barzani by planting a bomb on an unsuspecting Moslem cleric sent to meet with the Kurdish leader (it blew up prematurely, killing the cleric but only lightly wounding Barzani); they tried again in 1972 but failed the second time too.
Enter the shah
In 1972 Baghdad and Moscow signed their friendship treaty, and Soviet arms began to flow into Iraq at an accelerated rate. This alarmed the shah of Iran, who decided it was time to play the Kurdish card. The shah offered Barzani arms and money to fight the Ba'ath regime. Barzani, who, after two attempts on his life an other outrages, had lost confidence in Saddam Hussein, found the shah's offer attractive. Still, he did not trust the Iranian; he wanted U.S. backing as well. The shah, he knew, was an unreliable ally who might easily betray him, but he could not imagine that the Americans would do the same. At the shah's insistent request, Nixon and Kissinger secretly authorized $16 million in aid to Barzani's forces.
The wily old Kurdish leader was right to be wary of the shah, but his confidence in the United States turned out to be misplaced. The Iranian monarch had no intention of seeing the Kurds win; he wanted only to make trouble for the Iraqis, and he was ready to drop his Kurdish allies the moment he could reach agreement with Saddam Hussein. Even while urging the Kurds to revolt, the shah put out feelers to the Iraqi leaders. Saddam was not interested so long as he thought he could win with his new Soviet arms, but by early 1975, he realized he could not. In March of that year, he made a deal; he gave the shah the mid-channel line of the Shatt al Arab. The shah agreed to cut off all assistance to the Kurds, and the United States followed suit.
It was surely the most shamefully cynical U.S. covert operation ever to come to public light. According to the summary of the report by the House Select Committee on Intelligence that was leaked to the press in 1976, the operation was launched without committee approval. Nixon and Kissinger were fully aware of and in accord with the shah's intent that the Kurds should not prevail. The committee's report concluded that had it not been for the U.S. role, "the insurgents might have reached an accommodation with [the government of Iraq]." The committee also found that while the United States encouraged the Kurds to pursue hostilities, on one occasion American representatives intervened to restrain them from launching an all-out offensive at a moment when such a move might have been successful.
The March 1975 agreement between the shah and Saddam Hussein brought catastrophe upon the Kurds. An estimated 200,000-300,000 fled to Iran. Many who eventually returned under Iraqi government offers of amnesty found themselves facing execution, imprisonment, or internal exile. Large numbers of Kurds were relocated to camps controlled by the Iraqi army or sent to the south of Iraq.
Saddam's revenge
It was not, however, to be the end of Kurdish resistance to the Iraqi Ba'ath regime. Saddam Hussein coupled his repression in Kurdistan with the award of a largely fictitious autonomy for that region, but it won him few converts. After Iraq invaded Iran, the Kurds once again rose in revolt, this time without U.S. backing but with strong support from the Iranians. When Iran and Iraq reached agreement on a ceasefire in August 1988, the Kurds once again became the chief victims. Even before that--at Halabja in March 1988 and in earlier instances--the Iraqi army had used poison gas against Kurdish rebels and civilians. Then, in an act of sheer vengeance, Saddam Hussein's forces again turned on the Kurds with chemical weapons. Thousands were killed or maimed and tens of thousands fled in panic to Turkey and Iran.
Having thus put down the latest Kurdish rebellion, Saddam Hussein moved to do what he evidently thought would make another revolt impossible. The Iraqi army razed the villages of Iraqi Kurdistan, not just along the Turkish and Iranian borders, but throughout the area; only the major towns and cities were left standing. Half a million Kurds--some say as many as 1 million--were expelled from their ancestral homes and forced into "new towns"--virtually concentration camps--in the Kurdish lowlands. When public opinion in the United States and Western Europe stirred against these savage measures, Hussein called the criticism interference in his internal affairs. The Reagan and Bush administrations, keen to develop their relations with the Iraqi strongman, essentially bought onto this line. Not once did the United States publicly protest Iraq's mass forced relocation of the Kurds, though Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government and other Europeans did.
So what was it that made 2 million Kurds abandon their homes and flee in March 1991? Kurdish sources attribute it to two main causes. One was the United States' failure to make good on what the Kurds saw as a public U.S. commitment to keep the skies clear of Iraqi combat aircraft of any kind; once again, as in 1975, they felt betrayed and abandoned. The other was sheer terror of Saddam's revenge and, in particular, memory of the Iraqi army's resort to poison gas after the 1988 ceasefire. According to foreign observers who were on the scene, the Kurds were persuaded that this time, Hussein was going to annihilate them.
The Kurds' gamble
Within days after Saddam Hussein crushed their rebellion, Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani went to Baghdad to pay him a visit. It seemed almost a hallucination. Stories of Iraqi atrocities were still fresh off the presses, and hundreds of thousands of terrified Kurds huddled miserably in makeshift camps in the mountains. Yet the two Kurdish leaders smiled for the TV cameras and embraced the Iraqi dictator.
Was it just another twist in the old Middle Eastern game of fight and reconcile? Hardly. Before Barzani would go to Baghdad, Saddam had to send one of his sons to the Kurdish rebel-held area in the north as a guarantee of Barzani's safety. So why did the Kurds, distrustful of Saddam Hussein, rush into negotiations with him?
The answer is simple: it is a matter of national survival. In the camps in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, in Turkey and in Iran, Iraqi Kurdish children were dying in alarming numbers, from polluted water and bad food or from no food. It is estimated that one out of every two children of families who fled have died or will die--an entire generation reduced by half. Beyond that, Kurdish leaders do not want to see their people become perpetual refugees, embittered, debilitated, and dependent upon the uncertain good will of others. They want them to be able to return to their homes and live normal lives.
The Kurds say they hoped to exploit Saddam's weakness to extract an agreement giving them broad authority to run their part of the country as they see fit. But even if a deal is struck, neither side expects it to last. The negotiations are a play for time: an opportunity to regroup and rebuild for Hussein, and, for the Kurds, a time to consolidate their hold over most of Iraqi Kurdistan outside the major cities, bringing people back to the thousands of villages and towns the Iraqi regime methodically laid to waste in the late 1980s.
The Kurds are betting that the United States and Western Europe won't allow Saddam to crush them once again. But it is a very big gamble, and they know it.
Tattered realpolitik
Why did the Bush Administration miscalculate so badly? To blame it all on an intelligence failure hardly seems plausible. Months before the war began, the intelligence community forecast massive humanitarian problems, and in early February 1991, the CIA predicted that the war might generate as many as 1.5 million refugees.
What led the administration astray in this instance was its seemingly irrepressible urge to apply the rules of 19th century diplomacy to nearly every foreign policy problem in sight. Balance-of-power politics required that Iraq be preserved as a bulwark against Iran. Not only Iraq had to be preserved, but its government as well; as a National Security Commission staffer reportedly said on March 1, "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam Hussein but not his regime" ("Civil War in Iraq," Peter Galbraith, 1991, page 28). This meant that the Kurds and the Shi'ites had to be left to their grisly fate; that was sad, but it was just realpolitik, the sort of thing nations do from time to time when broader interest are believed to be at stake.
But do Metternich and Bismarck and their doctrines of balance of power and realpolitik really fit comfortably into the landscape of the late 20th century? Even refurbished by Henry Kissinger, clearly they don't, particularly now that U.S. Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union is suspended. In a world in which everything our government does eventually becomes subject to public scrutiny, the public demands that its leaders do what is right, not just what is expedient, and nothing is harder to justify than expediency. Balance of power and power politics are not likely to disappear from the international scene anytime soon, but those who manage American diplomacy need to give a little more attention to humanitarian and human rights considerations. Even Jeane Kirkpatrick, who made her fame as the advocate of forgiveness for dictators (so long as they were our dictators) and as an outspoken critic of an earlier administration's human rights policy, now proclaims that American diplomacy must take serious account of the exigencies of human rights.
A review of the doctrine of non-interference in internal affairs would be a good place to start. In earlier times it may have had its usefulness. In the 20th century it has become the last refuge of a tyrant intent upon persecuting his people. Hitler invoked it to legitimize his laws against the Jews before World War II, and at that time it was held in such solemn awe that no government ever thought of challenging him. Today, largely because of the experience of the 1930s and World War II, it is no longer sacrosanct. Over the past half century, an extensive body of law has emerged that makes it illegal for a government to abuse its population and entirely legitimate for the international community to intervene to prevent its doing so.
The true lesson of the post-Persian Gulf War crisis is that the sacrifice of human life and humanitarian values for coldly calculated concepts of national interest simply goes against the grain of our times. In an era in which television can bring the suffering of even the most remote victims into everyone's living room, diplomacy--and diplomats--that fail to recognize this will inevitably come to grief.