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War
correspondent Mike Tucker has been to Iraq and
experienced the euphoria of being welcomed as a
liberating American by Iraq's Kurds, a people who
suffered hideously under the rule of Saddam Hussein.
In Hell Is Over: Voices of the Kurds After Saddam
(Lyons, $22.95), Tucker deplores the U.S. military's
post-invasion decision to freeze the Kurds out of
the struggle to secure northern Iraq against the
insurgency, a move he traces to American
unwillingness to offend neighboring Turkey, which
has a dismal history of mistreating its own Kurdish
minority. The body of the book consists of
interviews with Iraqi Kurds, including several
artists and art students at the Dahuk Institute of
Fine Arts. One of them, Nasim, speaks of his passion
for van Gogh: "In the face of ignorance and
ridicule, he dared to listen to his heart and follow
his solitary road. . . . In van Gogh's art, I feel a
yearning fire. The fire never dies, no matter how
often I see his work. The lonely fire."
Nasim acknowledges the difficulty faced by artists
in his part of the world: "Some Muslims, especially
radical fundamentalists, say, 'Whoever paints a man
or woman goes to hell!' This is garbage talk, of
course. But it hurts our society, and damages all
the Muslim world. This may lessen, of course, with
the great victory of April 9" -- that is, the
successful conclusion of the military campaign
against Saddam's dictatorship in northern Iraq, and
the start of a more hopeful era in Kurdish history.
Dennis Drabelle
www.washingtonpost.com
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