|
Kurds may have shot at homeland
13.7.2006
By John Hanchette |
|
|
|
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."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St.
Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the
Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning
national correspondent. He was a founding editor of
USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one
of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years.
niagarafallsreporter com
More about
Kurdistan:
Kurdistan (
Kurdistan- "Turkey-Iraq-Syria-Iran" ) wikipedia
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 