"Anyone who believes that American
policy is prevailing in Iraq is in denial, including the
administration. The situation is very bad," photojournalist Kevin
McKiernan says.
McKiernan, who grew up in St. Paul, has covered conflicts from
Wounded Knee and Nicaragua to West Africa and Iraq. His work has
been published by Time and Newsweek magazines and in major
newspapers, and his reports have been broadcast on ABC, CBS, NBC and
public television.
Much of McKiernan's reporting has focused on the Kurdish people of
Kurdistan (northern Iraq), whom he has been visiting since 1991. He
made an award-winning documentary, "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds," and now
he's getting critical praise for his new and timely book, "The
Kurds."
In "The Kurds," McKiernan weaves together reporting, personal
narrative and the history of this ethnic group whose lineage some
trace to 728 B.C. Since the time of the Crusades, he points out,
"the Kurds have been used by allies and enemies alike to provide a
balance of power" in the Middle East.
Kurds suffered horribly under Saddam Hussein, and McKiernan's book
offers important background about Saddam's 1988 Anfal campaign, for
which the former dictator was charged with genocide earlier this
month. During that campaign, Hussein's military killed at least
50,000 Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons and destroyed 2,000
villages.
With a population of 25 million, McKiernan writes, the Kurds are the
largest ethnic group in the world without their own homeland. He
describes them as "a loose confederation of tribes with many
different dialects."
Although the Kurds are now spread across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and
Syria, the glue that holds them together, McKiernan says, is that
they lived on the land for centuries before these modern states came
into being.
NO IMPROVEMENT
Now, Iraqi Kurds are trying to figure out how to share power with
Sunnis and Shiites. Despite assurances from the Bush administration
about how well things are going, McKiernan doesn't see improvement.
"To say formation of a new Iraqi government is going well is like
talking about the emperor's new clothes," he says. "If our objective
was to make Iraq a new island of democracy in the Middle East, that
objective has been lost."
One major sticking point in forming a
government, he says, is what happens to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk,
which the Kurds want to bring under their authority.
"This is their sacred place. They will go to war over this,"
McKiernan says of the area that was the focus of Saddam's
Arabization program, which drove out thousands of Kurds and Turkmen
to make way for Arab settlers.
Still, McKiernan thinks the war has been good for the Kurds. While
violence plays out elsewhere in Iraq, the Kurdish area is tranquil,
and the people retain their identity.
"No American solider has been wounded in Kurdistan (northern Iraq),
and there is just a token (U.S. military) force there. Our troops
see going there as rest and recreation," he says. "The Kurds are
asked to pretend they are Iraqis first and Kurds second. The leaders
pay lip service to this, but in Iraqi Kurdistan, people on the
street do not talk about being Iraqis. Arabic is not taught in the
schools."
McKiernan often put himself into dangerous situations to get stories
that make up "The Kurds." He sought out Kurdish refuges in the
mountains of Iraq and Iran, visited guerrilla safe houses in Syria
and Lebanon and faced hostile soldiers. He interviewed Jalal
Talabani, first Kurdish president of Iraq, and visited the camp of
militants linked to al-Qaeda.
ST. PAUL ROOTS
Those places are a long way from McKiernan's childhood home in "an
old, rambling Victorian" on St. Paul's Osceola Avenue, where he
lived with his parents, Eoin and Jeannette, and eight siblings.
Kevin's father, who died in 2004, was chairman of the University of
St. Thomas English department and internationally known for his
promotion of Irish culture and language. Eoin McKiernan founded the
Irish American Cultural Institute and established Irish Books and
Media in Minneapolis, run now by Kevin's sister, Ethna.
McKiernan graduated from the University of St. Thomas and holds a
law degree from Northeastern University Law School in Boston. He
lives now in Santa Barbara, Calif., with his wife, Catalina.
After traveling in and out of Iraq for more than a decade and
serving as an embedded reporter last year with the U.S. Army's 4th
Armored Division in Karbala, McKiernan is not optimistic about that
country's future.
He believes that civil war is already under way there and that mixed
Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods won't last much longer because there is
ethnic cleansing going on.
"When the civil war starts in earnest, the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds
will be loyal to their groups," McKiernan says. "There's also no
question in my mind that if this civil war reaches a higher pitch,
other countries will get involved. Saudi Arabia will be on the side
of the Sunnis. The 800-pound gorilla is Iran coming in on the side
of the Shiia."
There are not a lot of good options for the United States in Iraq
now, he believes, except to put together a multinational
peacekeeping force "in great numbers."
"If I were running the show, I would have done things differently at
the beginning of the war. The whole thing has been defined in a way
which has been defective," he says.
"We should have had more troops there. The reason we put in so few
was for political reasons, so we wouldn't annoy the voting base
here. Now, we hear from the Pentagon that if there is a civil war,
American troops will get out of the way. To me, that is cowardly, to
leave millions of individuals horribly exposed. Our responsibility,
under international law, is to take care of civilians. We cannot
hide."
www.twincities.com Top |
® 