MOUNTAIN VIEWS: KURDS MAY HAVE SHOT AT HOMELAND
By John Hanchette
Niagara Falls Reporter
July 11, 2006
OLEAN — This space has been used in the past for commentary on the
Middle Eastern anomaly of the Kurds, the largest ethnic group on the
planet without their own official state. When President Dubya invaded
Iraq in 2003, only a tiny fraction of Americans had ever heard of them.
Now, almost daily, it becomes more and more evident the success of
the United States effort in Iraq is wedded to the future of the Kurds.
"Kurdistan" — the mountainous area they’ve called home for centuries
— is about the size of France. It has no official borders. It
encompasses southeast Turkey, southwest Armenia, northwestern Iran,
northeastern Syria — and northern Iraq.
It is this last particle upon which the future of the troubled region
seems to hinge.
It may be their time. For most of modern history, the Kurds have been
screwed over in royal fashion by neighboring peoples — subjugated,
oppressed, partitioned, displaced, manipulated, misled, murdered and
crushed every time they got a whiff of independence or a hankering
for better circumstances.
Even archaeologists argue about from whence they came. Many believe
their ethnic wellspring to be the Caucasus Mountains between the
Black and Caspian seas. Lots of Kurds have blue eyes. They are
non-Arabic people. Their language is closer to Aryan or Persian
than Arabic roots. Most Kurds, but not all, are Sunni Muslims. Their
outlook, however, seems much more western than the mind set of their
neighbors. This has not gone unnoticed by American intelligence
officials.
For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, at least, the Kurds led
a nomadic existence, herding sheep and goats through the highlands
of the above regions. Today, there are about 25 million of them —
almost 9 million in southern Turkey. There are about 5 million Kurds
currently in Iraq. Many have fled to Europe.
After the Ottoman Empire was shattered in World War I, the French
and British rushed in to fill the geopolitical vacuum in the
oil-rich Middle East, and redrew most of the boundaries to set up
new nation-states and get a piece of the oil action. France mapped
out Syria. The Brits drew the boundaries of Iraq.
A 1920 treaty promised the Kurds their independence and own nation
in the north of Iraq, and they came within a whisker of achieving it.
But the new leaders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq feared so large a separate
ethnic group on their borders and would have none of it. The Kurds
argued among themselves, and the westerners shrugged off the idea. The
treaty went unratified.
A fellow named Winston Churchill, the young British Cabinet secretary
charged with making sure the oil from Iraq kept flowing, was rather
stern in promoting the British Empire in those days. He even suggested
dropping mustard gas from airplanes on Iraqis if they got out of
line. But he did realize merely poking the Kurds away in some corner
of Iraq would lead to future unrest. He urged British supervisors on
the ground in Iraq to make sure Kurds "not be put under Arabs if they
do not wish to be."
Like most Cabinet members in London and Washington through the years,
he was ignored, of course. In recent decades, the Kurds have further
struggled against oppression. They supported Iran in the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq War.
In the last year of that conflict, Saddam Hussein ordered chemical
gas attacks against Iraqi Kurds for such insolence and razed several
villages, besides killing more than 5,000 Kurds with such weaponry in
the town of Halabja — a murderous snit for which he now is in the
dock, among other homicides and imaginative atrocities. In Turkey,
the government refuses to recognize the Kurds as an ethnic minority
group, referring to them officially as "Mountain Turks" and banning
use of their native tongue.
In our current unpleasantness in Iraq, we rely greatly upon the Kurds,
not that we’ve treated them properly, even in recent years. In 1991,
in the closing days of the first Gulf War, Bush the Elder followed
his triumphal ousting of Saddam from Kuwait with a rousing public
speech in which he exhorted all Iraqis to rebellion against the evil
Saddam. Conservative defenders of the Bush pere-et-fils have tried
to depict it since as just a wish that would be nice if it came
true. It was no such thing. I know. I covered it. Bush the Elder
implied forthcoming American military support for such a venture. The
Kurds, among others, took him at his word. So did the Shiites in
southern Iraq.
Mindlessly, our negotiators had left Saddam with his attack helicopters
as part of the 1991 cease-fire terms. He used them. Tens of thousands
of rebellious Iraqis were slaughtered, many of them Kurds. About 1.5
million Kurds were forced to flee to the mountains of neighboring Iran
and Turkey. The TV images pained the hearts of watching Americans. The
Bush administration stood silent.
Perhaps feeling guilty, the White House and Pentagon quickly
established a "no-fly zone" north of the 36th parallel — a boundary
verboten for Saddam’s attack choppers and fighter planes to cross. It
was efficiently enforced all through the 1990s by the Clinton
administration and in the early years of Dubya’s first term.
Under this protection, the Kurds prospered. Hospitals and universities
went up. Income from black market oil smuggled into Turkey flowed
through Kurdistan, as American officers and diplomats looked the other
way. American troops stationed in Kurdistan say prayers of thanks they
are there and not in Baghdad. The well-trained Kurdish peshmerga —
literally, "those who face death" — serves as local militia and
relatively successful peacekeepers.
Even with insurgency raging in the south, the Kurdish area in the
north of Iraq seems — as former ABC News producer Kevin McKiernan
calls it in The Washington Spectator, an excellent capital newsletter
— an "island of peace."
McKiernan — whom intelligence officials respect as very knowledgeable
about the region — has written an informative new book on the
Kurdish situation. It is called "The Kurds: A People in Search of
Their Homeland." Writing on the subject in the above newsletter,
McKiernan writes:
"Outside of Kurdistan, Iraq is awash in sectarian warfare. Government
officials in Baghdad report that across the lower two-thirds of
the country as many as 110,000 families have fled their homes, that
25,000 people have been kidnapped this year, and that the murder rate
has passed 1,000 a month. By contrast, the three provinces under
Kurdish control are largely peaceful, continuing the experiment in
self-government they began in 1991. Kurdish roads are protected by
24-hour checkpoints, manned by disciplined fighters. Not a single
American soldier has been killed in the region."
In Kurdistan, 200 miles north of Baghdad, "Kurdish society emulates
western ways and looks abroad for other models to follow. People on
the street readily admit they envy the alliances Israel and Kuwait
enjoy with the U.S."
McKiernan comes very, very close to predicting the Kurds will
make their own move soon for independence. McKiernan writes:
"Kurdish — not Iraqi — flags fly on public buildings and hints of
quasi-sovereignty are everywhere: visitors entering northern Iraq
now have their passports stamped ‘Iraqi Kurdistan,’ and a law has
been passed by the Kurdistan parliament forbidding Iraqi troops from
entering the region without a special vote of Kurdish lawmakers.
Arabic is no longer spoken in the three Kurdish provinces, and the
Kurds recently signed a contract with a Norwegian company — without
consulting Baghdad — to drill for oil near the Turkish border. …
There are now direct flights from Europe to Kurdistan, with no need
for risky connections in Baghdad; and luxury hotels are being built
to accommodate tourists."
Kurds hope the Americans see all this promise. Every administration
since Nixon has used the Kurds as uber-pawns in trying to prop up
Iran or Iraq or Turkey in playing one off against another. In 1983,
President Ronald Reagan — still cheesed off at Iran for holding U.S.
diplomats hostage in Tehran for more than a year — dispatched a much
younger Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to offer clandestine aid to Saddam
in his war with Iran. It resulted in billions of dollars in military
and domestic help, much of it used to suppress the Kurds. More than
100,000 Kurds ended up dead or missing, and 4,000 Kurdish villages
were razed. U.S. aid flowed to Saddam unabated until the day he
invaded Kuwait — Aug. 1, 1990.
Iraqi Kurds, writes McKiernan, now "worry they will be sacrificed in
the new American effort to better relations with Turkey, which was
given the cold shoulder after its March 2003 refusal to provide a
land corridor to attack Iraq."
Dubya — in his well-publicized drive to keep the mullahs in Tehran
from achieving nuclear arms power — needs Turkey to pressure Iran,
and Ankara has already moved 100,000 troops to the Iran-Turkey
border. Turkey’s 15 million Kurds — the largest single Kurdish
population in the world — are now "restive and eyeing the freedoms
of fellow Kurds in Iraq," according to McKiernan. Turkey is worried
about this, and about the presence of rebel units in Iraqi Kurdistan
close to the Turkish border. Since April, Turkey has massed another
250,000 troops near its border with Iraq.
Ankara, reports McKiernan, "wants the Bush administration to approve a
major cross-border operation against the (rebels) but Iraqi Kurds fear
U.S. approval would allow the Turks to occupy, at least temporarily,
a large swath of Iraqi Kurdistan. In April, Dubya dispatched Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice to Ankara to confer with Turkish leaders
about a joint agreement with Washington on both questions — Iran and
the Kurds. The confab turned out to be another embarrassment for Rice
and Foggybottom strategists."
Rice, writes McKiernan, "wanted action on Iran. Turkey wanted action
on the Kurds, and local Turkish newspapers heralded Rice’s visit
with leaked stories of U.S. satellites monitoring (Kurdish rebels)
for the Turkish army." Not only that, but the Turkish general staff
chose her 16-hour visit to mount a huge military crackdown on Kurdish
rebels back in Turkey, and — more significantly, but little covered
in the United States — to make a limited border-crossing into Iraq
while Rice was still in-country. In diplomatic circles, this is akin
to smacking an American dignitary across the face with a big, smelly,
wet fish.
"It was unlikely the timing was accidental," concludes McKiernan.
"There seems little doubt that the U.S. countenanced the incursions
into both Kurdish areas in advance." So, will we once again betray
the Kurds as we bumble through Iraq? McKiernan doesn’t pretend to
know. He quotes an old Kurdish proverb that says, "Someone who has
been bitten by a snake will always be afraid of a rope." Me? If I
were a Vegas odds-maker? It’s 5-2, on "Yes."