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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 23KB | 439 lines

<text> <title> Iraq's Kurds </title> <article> <hdr> Foreign Service Journal, July 1991 Iraq's Kurds: Why Two Million Fled </hdr> <body> 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 Leag