|
Solutions, for the
zealots of the Bush administration, are not achieved
by negotiation: they are to be imposed. So the Kurds
will continue to suffer, like everyone else in Iraq.
Ten years ago, when I lived in Pakistan's capital,
Islamabad, my evening walk took me past the office
of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR),
which has since been relocated far from the
residential section of town. The move was made so
that the office could be more easily guarded from
would-be petitioners such as Kurdish refugees, some
of whom at that time had erected a neat and tidy
tent hamlet on the opposite side of the road. As I
walked briskly past of an evening, one of them, a
particularly villainous-seeming fellow, greeted me
with a charming smile. His flinty blue eyes softened
as he bade me Hello, and after a few days of mutual
greeting we began to chat.
The story of his group was of unrelieved persecution
and privation. Having fled the savage reprisals of
Saddam Hussein, following the encouragement by Bush
senior for Kurds and Shias to rise against their
oppressor (after which Bush did exactly nothing to
help either of them), they made their way from Iraq
across Iran to Pakistan's province of Balochistan,
and then north to Islamabad, a trek of about two
thousand miles. There, they hoped, the UNHCR would
look kindly upon them and relocate them to a land of
milk and honey, or at least to a country in which
they could live like human beings, which to them, as
to the countless millions of despairing displaced
persons round the world, would be Paradise enough.
The UNHCR is a particularly saintly, harassed and
unforgivably underfunded organisation. Its entire
2004 budget is USD 1.8 billion (almost the cost of a
B-2 bomber, at 2.2 bn), of which the US contribution
is 130 million. Little wonder its dedicated
officials are at their wits' end about what to do
with the millions of refugees who beg their
assistance.
Where on earth could they go, these Kurdish orphans
of Desert Storm? Who would take them? Answer came
there none, except from the benevolent
administration of the then prime minister of
Pakistan, a corrupt and oily knave called Nawaz
Sharif, whose solution was to gather up the Kurds in
dead of night and transport the lot of them back to
the deserts of Balochistan, hundreds of miles away.
In fact, not quite all of them ; for left behind in
one of the tents was a tiny baby, discovered at dawn
by the scavengers who quickly gathered to see what
the Kurds, the poorest of the poor, might have left
behind after they were once again hounded from one
hell to another. Horrified local Pakistanis and some
of us foreign do-gooding busybodies inquired about
the fate of the child. But in spite of our efforts
we came up against the usual brick wall of
bureaucratic nonchalance. "There is no problem" we
were told. No ; of course not. For the baby was only
one of millions of anonymous and helpless mites born
into a world grown only too accustomed to hideous
inhumanity.
It's Boring
It's all boring. So flick to Channel 101 : it's got
the Simpsons. Or look at NASCAR's Long Pond
Pennsylvania qualifying race for Sunday's 500. Or
what's happening to Kobe . . . Anything's better
than uncomfortable pictures of dirty raghead
refugees.
But what if they had been Jews?
This band of despairing, hopeless, helpless, hounded
Kurds was but a microcosm of the Kurdish problem as
a whole. There are over 20 million Kurds in the
Middle East, which is an enormous ethnic group to
lack a country. (Imagine what would have happened if
they had had the good fortune to be born as Jews.)
Kurdish Human Rights Watch, which tries to publicize
the Kurdish cause, states "The international
community has never effectively addressed the
Kurdish issue in Iran, Iraq and Turkey to account
for their crimes against the Kurds."
That is so. But I go further : the rich countries of
the world have done nothing atall to try to find a
solution to the appalling plight of the Kurds. They
are truly the world's forgotten people, and we
should be ashamed of our total lack of concern about
their plight. (Switch to the Simpsons, willya?)
Ironically, the 1970 Constitution of Iraq specified
that their region in the north should be officially
recognized as Iraqi Kurdistan, but Saddam Hussein's
evil ""resettlement program', which was a simple
Israeli-style ethnic purging of Kurds from their
ancestral lands, made nonsense of this. They were
persecuted, and their lands taken by Arabs who were
moved there by the Iraqi regime, just as Arabs in
Palestine have been booted-out and their land stolen
by Israelis. But the 1970 Constitution was
terminated by the Bush administration's foolish and
disastrous representative in Baghdad, and the Kurds
have no specific rights under the new Iraqi regime.
The treatment of Kurds has been horrific. As noted
by Reggie Rivers in the Denver Post of September 6,
2001:
"There's no doubt the Kurds lead a tough life.
They've basically been told to assimilate or die.
They don't have political rights, freedom of speech
or even the right to speak their own language.
Nearly 2,000 Kurdish villages have been destroyed,
forcing more than 2 million Kurds to flee into the
mountains. Even there they are not safe, because the
army pursues them for miles and miles and weeks at a
time. The Kurds have been shot, bombed, gassed,
raped, tortured, burned and dismembered, and tens of
thousands have been killed.
And that's just what Turkey has done during the past
decade."
* * *
The US/UK bilaterally and illegally imposed a
""No-fly Zone' in northern Iraq in 1991 which was
supposedly to protect Kurds, but this was at best a
secondary motive. The vast areas of north and south
Iraq (more than two thirds of the country) were
declared ""No-Fly' by Washington and London because
they intended to destroy Iraq's military
capabilities before invading the country. US and
British strike aircraft flew thousands of yippee
patrols over Iraq, during most of which they
indulged in rocket and bombing attacks that
increased in number and ferocity in the seven months
before the Bush/Blair war on Iraq in 2003. (There
was no threat of effective ground fire or aerial
interception. On occasions, Iraqi radars tracked the
incursions, many of which went well over the
US/UK-imposed boundaries of the ""No-Fly' zones. The
radar sites were promptly bombed and rocketed
without a single US/UK aircraft being in the
slightest danger throughout the best free-fire
training area in the world.)
It was coincidental that the psychotic and genocidal
Saddam Hussein was thus unable to get at the Kurds,
but the allegedly protected area in the north was
violated countless times by Turkish air and ground
strikes against Turkish (and Iraqi) Kurds within
Iraq. There was never a word of protest from
Washington or London to Ankara concerning these
atrocities, about which the American and British
governments were well aware from their own pilots'
reports.
During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s the United
States supported Iraq against Iran, which was was
obvious from Rumsfeld's cordial handshake with
Saddam Hussain in the course of that conflict, as
shown many times on Fox News. (It hasn't been? Well,
goodness me ; I am so surprised.) But in these years
various Kurdish factions misjudged the political and
military situation and made the error of helping
Iran against Iraq and also Iraq against Iran.
Consequently, all Kurds in both countries paid a
heavy price, with Iraq's 4 million being as foully
treated as their brethren across the eastern border.
In Iran there are said to be 5 million Kurds. (There
are probably many more, but Iranian census figures
are as credible as a Tom Ridge media briefing.)
Because they are Sunni Muslims, and relaxed Muslims
at that, with civilized ideas about women's rights
and education, just as espoused by the Prophet
Mohammad and recommended in the Qu'ran (Koran), they
are deeply distrusted by Iran's bigoted Shia bossmen
and persecuted accordingly. They are subject to
organised state oppression involving disgusting
brutality, including extra-judicial killings and
prison conditions even worse than those in US-run
hellholes in Iraq and elsewhere. (Although, to be
fair, there are no recorded incidents, even by the
most critical observers, of Iranian
cigarette-drooping, rubber-gloved, leash-wielding,
grinning female guards prodding the genitals of
helpless Kurdish captives ; that sort of thing is
left to the military representatives of Christian
Bush, the God-appointed super-Fuhrer of the world.)
Syria has some 1.5 million Kurds who are treated in
similar fashion to other unfortunate citizens of
that unpleasant land. The worst-off are in the
north: a community of about 200,000 Kurds who were
declared "alien infiltrators" over forty years ago.
They have no rights whatever, and cannot marry a
Syrian citizen; they cannot even be admitted to a
public hospital. The west has lifted not a finger to
help them.
Do you think there will be ""No-fly Zones' to
protect Kurds in Iran and Syria from their
dictatorial governments, just as there were imposed
by Washington and London on Iraq? Or might there be
US/UK-dictated No-fly Zones in Turkey's border
regions to protect Kurds from the atrocities of the
Ankara government's brutal military? In our dreams.
Turkey's 12 million Kurds have suffered as
grievously as those elsewhere, with their villages
being destroyed on the orders of Turkey's generals
who are determined to eradicate the Kurdish
""problem'. Language is a powerful determinant of
nationalism, so until 1991 the Kurdish language was
forbidden by Turkey in a failed attempt at what
might be called linguicide. This failed, so,
recently, permission was given for
government-controlled radio broadcasts to be made in
some dialects of Kurdish in order to gain favor with
the European Union which Turkey hopes to join.
(Unfortunately for Turkey its aspirations were dealt
the kiss of death a month ago when Bush arrogantly
told the countries of the European Union that they
should permit Turkey to join their number. If there
was one thing guaranteed to set back Turkey's
application for EU membership it was a demand by
Bush that it be favorably regarded. Bush cannot
understand that quiet discussion and courteous
negotiation work better than belligerent
confrontation when dealing with other nations. He
and his zealots imagine that solutions to the
world's complexities are achievable only through
their hubristic imposition of non-negotiable terms.)
In other efforts by Turkey to persuade the EU that
there is nobody in Ankara but human-rights-loving
pussy cats, there have been other gestures towards
the persecuted Kurdish minority that constitutes a
fifth of Turkey's population. It is doubtful these
are genuine, although, as the Kurdish writer
Abdullah Kiran noted, "The Turkish government is
putting on a show, but for us this marks the start
of a new process, a new return for the Kurdish
people to the Kurdish language, to Kurdish
traditions and to Kurdish culture. We will have to
make an effort to broaden the scope of this
process."
The Kurdish search for justice in Turkey was
frustrated by the European Union's ban on the
Kurdistan Workers' Party, the PKK, just at the time
when the EU was insisting that the Ankara government
enter into dialogue with Kurdish groups. One can
always count on the EU to move any complex problem
closer to impossibility of solution, but the most
vigorous blow against Kurdish aspirations was struck
by the Bush administration.
The US-sponsored UN Security Council resolution
passed in June that provided for post-war planning
in Iraq made not a mention of Kurdish rights in the
new ""democratic' Iraq. The matter was too difficult
for a decision to be made, so Bush ignored the whole
subject and thus gave a signal to religious thugs in
Iraq and elsewhere that the Kurds don't matter.
Nobody knows what the policy of the present
US-imposed Iraqi regime will be concerning the Kurds
; and if democratic elections are ever permitted in
Iraq the Shias will win and promptly continue
marginalization of Kurds on the lines of Turkey,
Syria and Iran. It might be just like Old Times for
Iraq's Kurds, and it would be strange were they not
to take up arms to counter persecution, just like
Palestinians.
There are many experts on the Kurdish question in
the US State Department, but their erudition and
sage advice was ignored and continues to be so by
those who are immensely less qualified to make
recommendations and decisions about the region. The
State Department had prepared a post-conflict set of
options that would have been at least a
starting-point of negotiation for all concerned,
following Bush's war on Iraq. But US foreign policy
is directed by Cheney and the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz
Pentagon, so the counsel of State Department
professionals was contemptuously ignored.
Solutions, for the zealots of the Bush
administration, cannot be achieved by negotiation :
they must be imposed. When they are too difficult to
decide upon, as dictated by domestic considerations
(switch to the Simpsons, I keep tellin' ya) , the
problem is ignored ; and in few cases is this
potentially more devastating than in the plight of
the Kurdish nation.
So : who would be a Kurd? Persecuted by all,
supported by none, their lot is vile. If Bush and
Blair of the US and Britain devoted some of their
energy and seemingly limitless war-making cash to
bringing pressure to bear on Turkey, Syria, Iraq and
Iran to create an autonomous ""Kurdistan' from areas
of these countries that actually belong to Kurds,
the world would be a better place.
But there's no chance of that. Neither glamour nor
domestic votes can be obtained by solving terrible
international humanitarian problems.
It's much more exciting to go to war.
Brian Cloughley writes on military and political
affairs. He can be reached through his website
www.briancloughley.com
Top |
® 