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Iraq's
Kurds want full independence from Baghdad and all
the trappings of statehood, but as Charles Glass
reports from Irbil, their political leaders know
that civil war and tragedy would be the inevitable
consequence know the only way to avoid a civil war
is to embrace a a form of federalism
In a small government office on the edge of the
Iraqi Kurdish capital, three oil paintings show
better than words what is driving Iraq towards
separation. The first is a dark circle of old men in
traditional Kurdish costumes seated on the ground.
The others depict two stages in the last great
Kurdish tragedy. Refugees trudge a serpent's path
through the mountains in one, and the same refugees
sit forlornly beside open tents in the other.
Mohammed Ihsan, who is 38 and took his doctorate in
law from the University of London, tells visitors
what the pictures mean. "He is teaching them to be
Kurds," Ihsan says of a man smoking a cigarette in
the first portrait. "He" is Mullah Moustafa Barzani,
the father of modern Kurdish nationalism who died a
defeated warrior in Washington in 1979.
The next two in the triptych depict the escape and
arrival of 1991, when the Kurds having rallied to
the Americans who instigated and betrayed their
revolution fled over the border to Turkey and
Iran. Ihsan knows about the flight of 1991. He was
part of it. "It was a good thing," he says of a time
when thousands of Kurds died. "It united us." The
fourth and fifth panels the present and future
have yet to be painted.
Iraqi Kurdistan today might be represented by
peasants rebuilding the villages that Saddam Hussein
destroyed, towns governed by Kurds rather than Arab
appointees from Baghdad or Kurds picnicking under
their own flag. What would the artist see in the
future: an independent state, a province within a
federal Iraq or another flight to the mountains? The
Kurds fear chaos in the USbacked, interim-governed
Arab Iraq is spreading north. Some Kurds would
welcome this as the excuse to secede from Iraq and
declare the Kurdish independence most want. Others,
mainly in the leadership, believe secession would
lead to a permanent state of war with the Arab south
and, eventually, the loss of all their gains since
1991.
Dr Mohammed Ihsan is minister for human rights in
the two north-western Kurdish provinces governed by
the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by
Massoud Barzani, son of the legendary Mullah
Moustafa. The third Kurdish province, Suleimania, is
under the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose
leader is Jalal Talabani. Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani
have agreed to unite their Kurdish administrations
after the January elections, if there are elections.
Both Kurdish zones have human rights ministries,
whose officials have full access to jails and
prisons, promote women's and children's rights and
preach civil rights in schools. Human rights have
become paramount to a people whose basic right
that to life was abused for 30 years by Baghdad
with the complicity of the Kurds' American and
British allies. Ministries of human rights do not
figure in the Arab world or in the other two states
where Kurds live in large numbers, Turkey and Iran.
Whatever happens in the rest of Iraq, the Kurds are
determined never to return to horrors of the past,
even under fellow Kurds.
"Welcome to Kurdistan of Iraq" says the banner over
the bridge from Turkey. It would be easier for the
Kurds to erase "of Iraq" than to paint out
Kurdistan. "Iraq means nothing to me," Dr Ihsan
says. "I am not proud of Iraq." Kurds would fight
and die for Kurdistan; but they would desert the
army as many did in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war
rather than die for Iraq. Even in Mosul, where they
are fighting Arab insurgents, they say their goal is
to protect Kurdish neighbourhoods and Erbil, which
is less than an hour's drive away.
Hiro Talabani, the wife of the PUK leader Jalal,
says that people cannot forget what the Arab armies
of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors did to
the Kurds. "But, believe me," she adds, "we will go
through it again, if our future goes back to our
Arab brothers. There is a little Saddam in the mind
of every one of them."
Nowhere is the divergence between the Kurdish
leadership and the populace so evident as over the
issue of independence. Kurdish leaders have drawn
red lines, minimum demands to guarantee their
self-government within Iraq and to prove to their
electorate that autonomy is almost as good as full
independence.
No stable Arab government in Baghdad not that one
is emerging would accept the Kurds' conditions for
remaining part of Iraq. The first Kurdish demand is
for control of the oil city of Kirkuk, whose Kurdish
majority was reduced or eliminated. The Arabisation
programme, an Arab version of Zionist land
confiscation, dispossessed Kurds and replaced them
with Arab Shia settlers. All Kurds say Saddam's
ethnic cleansing must be reversed, the Shia
compensated and sent back to the south and Kirkuk
incorporated into the Kurdish administrative area.
Another red line means reversing Saddam's provincial
boundary changes that merged parts of Kurdish
provinces into Arab governorates. Restoring the
pre-Saddam boundaries would add as much as 25 per
cent to the existing Kurdish zone above the Green
Line that they have controlled since 1991. It would
also give the Kurds significant mineral wealth.
Another red line has been drawn around the Iraqi
armed forces: no Iraqi army may enter the Kurdish
zone without the approval of the Kurdish parliament.
A whole generation here and the young are a
majority has never seen an Arab soldier or
policeman. Those old enough to remember would be
more adamant in preventing their return.
Some of these demands were incorporated into the
Transitional Administrative Law the Kurds signed
with Baghdad on 8 March this year. Kurdish autonomy
is hovering perilously close to independence. The
Arabs, weaker than the Kurds at present, are
unlikely to accept Kurdish dictates forever.
The Arabs see the Kurds, whom they used to dismiss
as illiterate mountaineers, taking too much. The
Kurds themselves see their leaders giving away their
freedom. Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani must be
sensitive to their own people, who elected their
parties in 1992. "There is public opinion here,"
says the KDP minister of state Falah Moustafa Bakir
in Erbil. "It does not want Kurds to make
concessions."
Two million of the four million Kurds living in the
Kurdish regional government zone signed a petition
demanding a referendum on independence. A recent
opinion survey, in the independent weekly Hawaliti
(Citizen), showed 44 per cent would vote against the
two ruling parties, the KDP and PUK, in regional
parliamentary elections.
One reason is the perception that the parties are
conceding too much to Baghdad. Nowhere is this more
evident than in the Kurdish official acquiescence to
Baghdad's demand that nothing be done to return
Kirkuk's Kurdish former residents to their homes.
Thousands of these internally displaced people went
back to Kirkuk, to live in shanty towns. Some are in
hovels in the local football stadium, including the
confines of the men's lavatories. Most of them say
they cannot live much longer without running water,
electricity, clinics, jobs or schools.
Kurdish leaders may be leaving the status quo in
Kirkuk to make a success of federal Iraq, but it is
a federal state their followers do not want. Most
Kurds are uneasy about committing Kurdish peshmergas
(guerrilla fighters) to the federal army and the
Iraqi National Guard. The deputy commander of the
PUK's peshmergas, Moustafa Sayed Kadir, told me of
plans to transfer 32,000 peshmergas from the PUK and
KDP to the Baghdad government. "They will serve
inside and outside Kurdistan," he said.
When I suggested that large numbers of Kurdish
peshmergas fighting in Arab areas would provoke Arab
hostility, he agreed, "You're right. It's crazy to
send 10,000 peshmergas to Arab Iraq. I don't want
Arab soldiers here or peshmergas there. We have no
choice. This is the tax we pay as a result of our
Iraqi-ness."
The gravest danger of asking peshmergas to fight for
the US in Iraq is to the estimated two million Kurds
who live outside the Kurdish zone. "Arabs are
starting to see the Kurds as they see the Israelis,"
says the law professor Nouri Talabany, who heads the
Kurdish election commission. And the insurgents have
accused the Kurds who had Israeli help for their
rebellions in the late 1960s and early 1970s of
working with Israeli agents in Iraq.
Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani deny the charge, saying
they need no Israeli help. Extremist mullahs have
called on followers to kill Kurds because of the
Kurdish alliance with the Americans. Many Kurds have
been killed in Baghdad, Mosul and other cities
because they are Kurds. Hundreds of Kurdish and
Christian families have fled the Arab areas for
security within the Kurdish protectorate. This
trickle is a momentary function of insecurity under
the US and the Iraqi interim government, or it is
the start of a massive population transfer. "We are
a different nation," the KDP chief, Massoud Barzani,
says. "Kurds are not Arabs. We happen to live in a
place called Iraq. Federalism gives us the right to
control our areas. The time is past for the centre
to control Kurdistan. We are giving up many of our
rights to live in a united Iraq. They are not giving
up anything."
Iraq is in fact, if not in law, two countries. Kurds
refer to their area as Kurdistan and the rest as
"Iraq". If the insurgents win and the Americans
leave, the Arabs may try to punish the Kurds for
their "betrayal" of Iraq by having become America's
Gurkhas.
One day, while I was with a Kurdish government
minister, a call came from a minister in the Baghdad
government. The Kurdish minister became angry and
told him: "Your authority stops at Baquba." Baquba
is a town just south of the Green Line between
Kurdish and Arab Iraq.
If Baghdad tries to extend its authority north of
Baquba, there will be one more war to add to the
others that erupted when the US and Britain invaded.
Then, the artist can complete his series in harsh
shades of charcoal.
CENTURY OF CONFLICT
1918 British forces occupy the oil-rich Ottoman
vilayet of Mosul, bringing extensive Kurd population
areas under British rule
1943 Mullah Mustafa Barzani leads second uprising
1946 August British RAF bombing forces Kurdish
rebels over border into Iran after second uprising
1958 14 July Monarchy overthrown in a coup. Iraq is
declared a republic.Constitution recognises Kurdish
"national rights" and Mullah Mustafa Barzani returns
from exile
1961 KDP is dissolved by the Iraqi government after
Kurdish rebellion in north.
1979 President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr is succeeded by
Vice-President Saddam Hussein. Mullah Mustafa dies,
his son Massoud Barzani takes over at KDP
1980 Outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq. KDP
forces work closely with Iran
1988 Iran-Iraq war draws to a close, Iraqi forces
launch the "Anfal Campaign" against the Kurds. Tens
of thousands of Kurdish civilians and fighters are
killed. Thousands more die in a poison gas attack on
the town of Halabjah near the Iranian border.
1991 Iraqi forces expelled from Kuwait, Kurds rise
up against Saddam but the rebellion halted as US
refuses support; 1.5 millions Kurds flee but Turkey
closes the border forcing hundreds of thousands to
seek refuge in mountains.
1991 April Coalition forces announce a "safe haven"
on the Iraqi side of the border. Aid agencies launch
a massive aid operation to help the refugees
http://news.independent.co.uk
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