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Save the Kurds
10.7.2007
By Michael Evans
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July
10, 2007
While U.S. attention is focused on winning the
battle for democracy in Baghdad, another crucial
struggle is emerging in the northern Iraqi city of
Kirkuk, whose fate is to be decided in a plebiscite
later this year. If Kirkuk votes to join Kurdistan,
whose residents claim it as their capital, it could
trigger an invasion by Turkey and force a showdown
between two NATO allies, one of whom is in the midst
of a war to preserve, among other things, Kurdish
autonomy.
Ankara fears that if the oil-rich Kirkuk joins
Kurdistan, the Kurds will have the economic
foundation they need for an independent state, which
would spur Turkey's repressed Kurds to rebel in
effort to win autonomy or even independence.
This is no idle threat. Ankara's campaign against
the Iraq-based Kurdistan Workers Party since 1984
has killed some 35,000 Kurds, destroyed 3,000 of
their villages and forcibly relocated an estimated 2
million of them.
At the beginning of the war in 2003, Turkey warned
the U.S. it would invade the autonomous Kurdish
enclave in northern Iraq, the virtual Kurdistan, if
the independence of Iraq's Kurds spurred renewed
rebellion among Turkey's Kurds. The Kurds constitute
about 20 percent of the populations of Turkey and
Iraq and have a significant presence in both Syria
and Iran. At some 30 million, the Kurds are probably
the world's largest ethnic group without a country.
According to recent statements by Hoshyar Zebari,
Turkey's foreign minister, there are 140,000 Turkish
soldiers amassed on the northern Iraq border. If
Zebari's estimate is correct (and this has not been
substantiated by the Turkish military), soldiers on
the northern border would almost equal the number of
U.S. soldiers in all of Iraq. |
Michael Evans
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As cruel as the Turks could be, Saddam Hussein left
a legacy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Middle
East expert Nouri Talabany, writing in the Winter
2007 edition of Middle East Quarterly, described
Iraqi ethnic cleansing that began with the
ascendancy of the Baath Party in the 1960s and
continued under the late dictator: Between 1963 and
1988, the Baathist regime destroyed 779 Kurdish
villages in the Kirkuk region – razing 493 primary
schools, 598 mosques and 40 medical clinics.
"Chemical Ali" – Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam
Hussein's first cousin – was largely responsible for
carrying out Hussein's horrific attacks against the
Kurds. Al-Majid has been sentenced by an Iraqi court
to death at the end of a hangman's rope.
He was convicted for his role in the poisonous gas
attacks that claimed the lives of as many as 100,000
Kurds during the 1980s. Saddam Hussein's genocide
campaign was fought with chemical and cluster bombs
dropped on the orders of "Chemical Ali."
Al-Majid was the poster boy for weapons of mass
destruction, which liberals have used as the
rationale for why Americans should not be in Iraq.
Yet, when I asked the families of the Kurds who were
eyewitnesses to the attacks and who lost mothers and
fathers, sons, daughters and husbands as a result of
the WMDs, I was told, "We hear the American media
asking, 'Where are the weapons of mass destruction?'
Tell them to come here; we will show them. These
weapons of mass destruction are in our blood and in
our souls. We will take you to the mass graves."
To prevent the return of the Kurds, they burned
farms and orchards, confiscated cattle, blew up
wells and obliterated cemeteries. In all, this
ethnic cleansing campaign forced nearly 200,000
Kurds to flee their villages. In Kirkuk, however,
the government forced urban Kurds out by
transferring oil company employees, civil servants
and teachers to southern and central Iraq. The
Baathist government renamed Kirkuk's streets and
schools after Arabs and forced businesses to adopt
Arab names. Kurds were permitted to sell real estate
only to Arabs; non-Arabs could not purchase property
in the city.
In 1996, Saddam passed a law forcing Kurds and other
non-Arabs to register as Arabs and expelled from the
region anyone who refused to do so. His regime then
replaced them with heavily subsidized Arab colonists
from the South. In 1997, the government razed
Kirkuk's historic citadel with its ancient mosques
and church. Human Rights Watch estimated that,
between 1991 and 2003, Saddam's government expelled
up to 200,000 Kurds from the Kirkuk area.
One way to find meaning in the terrible cost in
human life that we are paying in Iraq would be to
reverse Saddam's horrific legacy of ethnic cleansing
and genocide. The Kurds themselves have achieved a
legal way to do so: the democratically ratified
Iraqi constitution. Accepted by 79 percent of Iraqis
in October 2005, the constitution mandates a
municipal census in Kirkuk, to be followed by a
regional referendum by the end of this year.
In today's battle for Iraq, the pro-American Kurds
are the only community united behind the U.S. They
serve in the elite units of the Iraqi Army, and two
Kurdish brigades were recently deployed to Baghdad
as part of the U.S.-led "surge." They are fighting
Saddam's persisting murderous legacy, the crimes
against humanity that were part of what justified
the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq. It is a liberation
that will never be complete unless the Kurds are
vindicated.
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