November 99

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Reckless Disregard

Vera Saeedpour has been monitoring Kurdish issues for 25 years. She is editor of Kurdish Life and the International Journal of Kurdish Studies, and founder of the Kurdish Library and Museum. (345 Park Place, Brooklyn NY 11238).

Kurdish history records the sad saga of an ancient indigenous people divided by tribe, by miscalculations, by jealousies and rivalries, and by location. But Kurdish history reveals even more in exposing the proclivities of other peoples elsewhere. Most interesting, the contemporary Kurdish question is a fine case study of how Washington directs the world with the same arrogance and intrusiveness that have characterized powers throughout the ages. The Kurds are a people bedeviled by miscalculations, cursed to live in a region both strategic and rich in resources, most notably oil in an oil-hungry West and water in an arid--and therefore a thirsty--Middle East.

The Kurdish issue at its core is simply this: A people with a distinct ethnic heritage aspires to control its own ancestral domains, and to be recognized as a nation-state in the modern world. Kurds too ruled an empire some eight centuries ago, from the late 12th through the mid-13th century. It was founded by that romantic and renowned champion of Islam, Saladin, arch-foe of Richard the Lionhearted, King of England. Saladin regained Jerusalem for Islam and ruled an empire including both Syria and Egypt. The Kurdish Ayyubid Empire faded into oblivion largely because of internecine rivalries between Saladin's sons, his brother, and his nephews. Now, nearly eight centuries later, the Kurds look back with nostalgia and bitterness to blame Saladin for having valued Islam above ethnicity. Had he remembered he was a Kurd, they lament, Kurds would have been ruling the Middle East today. History tells a different story: Saladin did remember he was a Kurd; he bequeathed the empire to Kurds and Kurds lost it.

Yet it was a time when Kurds were kings and princes jealously guarding their domains against their own kin as well as covetous outsiders. Less than three hundred years later, Kurdish lands would become the battleground between other empires, those of the Ottomans and the Persians. The Kurdish poet Ahmed Khani would write of that history, "Look, from Arabia to Georgia it is but Kurdish land, but when the Persian Ocean and the Turkish Seas get rough, only the Kurdish country is covered with blood." Kurdish princes on both sides of an amorphous border were recruited by both sides, and they fought on both sides. The series of wars culminated in the first real division of Kurdish lands after the Battle of Chaldiran in the 16th century, a division that would exist into the 20th century and World War I, after which only the Ottoman portion would be divided by the victorious Allied Powers. The British and the French created the modern borders of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. Kurdish hopes for self-determination were acknowledged in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, only to die three years later when Sèvreswas superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which ignored Kurdish aspirations entirely. Kurds have been fighting well, but not wisely, to achieve that dream ever since.

A quarter of a century later, it would be Kurds in Iran who, taking advantage of the power vacuum created in the aftermath of World War II, and with the tenuous support of Russia, managed to establish a Kurdish state of sorts, the Republic of Mahabad. It died within a year, thanks to a natural gas deal between Moscow and Tehran. But Mahabad remains a symbol of Kurdish hegemony, however short-lived, and is well remembered for the integrity of its leader, Qazi Muhammed, who chose not to flee failure, but remained to be hanged for treason in the public square. There was a significant Kurdish uprising in Iran at the end of the 1970's led by Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou's Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, during the tumultuous change of regime that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. It too was short-lived. The aim of the DPKI was then, and continues to be, Kurdish control over Kurdish lands: autonomy within a democratic Iran. And the dream lives still.

The situation of the Kurds in Turkey is quite another matter. Turks, bereft of the Ottoman Empire and confined after World War I to only a small segment of what they once ruled, sought under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk to resurrect national pride in what was left. The Kurds incorporated within Turkey's new borders were given to expect a partnership between Kurd and Turk. It was not forthcoming. Following a Kurdish uprising, Ataturk and his parliament attempted to solve "the Kurdish problem" by legislating Kurds out of existence--ethnic cleansing by decree, as it were. (Ironically, the ideologue behind that policy was Zia Gokalp, himself a Kurd.) From 1925 on, one could be anything but Kurdish in Turkey. By the early 1930s Kurdish revolts had been so thoroughly crushed, Kurds could barely raise their heads, much less their arms.

Successive Ankara governments instituted a litany of proscriptions and punishments to forcibly assimilate the Kurds. They have been, and continue to be aided and abetted both by regional powers fearing that gains Kurds make in one country will spill over their borders, and by countries outside the region pursuing strategic and economic interests. Over the last half of this century, the United States has been foremost among nations ever ready to cover up and excuse Turkey's Kurdish policy, promoting instead the image of its NATO ally as a "secular democracy." In reality, Turkey is neither. One thing is certain, Turkey has for most of this century been the world's worst place to be Kurdish.

Baking bread. Photo: Ismet Cherif Vanly, courtesy of the Kurdish Library

The most recent rebellion of Kurds in that country was initiated in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan, whose Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) began armed struggle in earnest in 1984, seeking independence. Not surprisingly, the PKK was branded a "separatist, terrorist" movement by the Ankara government with the full support of the United States, Israel, and a host of European nations. Israel is Turkey's major Middle East ally. Therefore it came as no surprise when it was found that PKK chief Ocalan had been apprehended in Kenya last February with the aid of US and Israeli intelligence.

The situation of Kurds in Iraq resembles that of Kurds in Iran. Contrary to Administration claims in the throes of the Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds were not subjected to a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing nor threatened with cultural annihilation. In fact, many of the publications we hold here in the Kurdish Library were published in Baghdad. There was a Kurdish university in Sulaymania, Iraqi Kurdistan before the Gulf War. Smet Kitani, Iraq's UN representative for much of the 1980s, is a Kurd. Even today in Iraq there are Kurds who support the Baghdad regime. Like that of Iran's Kurds, the suffering of the Iraqi Kurds is a direct consequence of series of uprisings over a period of nearly 40 years to gain control over their ancestral lands in the north, an aspiration complicated by the fact that the Kirkuk oil fields, a mainstay of Iraq's oil economy, lie on Kurdish territory. Not surprisingly, successive Baghdad governments sought to retain control. Baghdad didn't take the north of the country by force. The predominantly Kurdish Mosul province was incorporated by the allies along with the provinces of Basra and Baghdad to create the country after the first world war. The conflict was as inevitable as our Civil War when the south attempted to secede. For decades Iraqi Kurds were demanding, not independence, but autonomy, and their share of Kirkuk's oil wealth. Whenever negotiations broke down, fighting resumed.

The United States steered clear of the Kurdish situation in Turkey, Iran and Iraq--until another US ally, the late Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, determined that he could use the fighting Iraqi Kurds to get Baghdad to the bargaining table in a dispute between the two counties over the strategic Shatt al Arab. In the early 1970s, embroiled in negotiations with Baghdad, the Shah sought US help to arm the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by Mullah Mustapha Barzani (whose son Masoud leads the KDP today). The rebels were supplied with aid and arms by the US and training from the Israelis. When Baghdad had suffered sufficiently from strengthened Kurdish armed opposition, the Iraqis came to the table with the Iranians. Aid to the KDP was abruptly severed. Having used them, like previous powers, Washington would now abandon them. Their revolt collapsed and they fled to Iran where the Shah gave them an expedient safe haven largely in return for their help against rebellious Iranian Kurds. (During the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi Kurds who fled to Iran would provide intelligence and guidance for the advance of the Iranian military into Iraq.) Some 700 KDP fighters were brought to the United States and dispersed under the auspices of church groups, as far apart as Virginia and North Dakota. One hundred were taken in by Canada. And a broken-hearted Mullah Mustapha, as the Kurds called him, ended up under virtual house arrest in Fairfax, VA, forbidden by the Nixon State Department to talk with members of the press.

But Washington was by no means finished with using Kurds. President Clinton learned from the Nixon-Kissinger administration. But Kurds failed to learn from that tragic episode. They again allowed themselves to be used to serve strangers, strangers who had betrayed them only 15 years earlier. Nonetheless, in the last decade of the 20th century, Washington would easily persuade them that it was in their interest to support Turkey's campaign against the Kurdish rebels in Turkey. Ironically, while Iraqi Kurdistan is the smallest of the three major Kurdish populations, numbering 3.5 to 4 million--compared with an estimated 6-7 million Kurds in Iran and 15 million in Turkey--Iraqi Kurdistan has the dubious advantage of location in the strategic center between Iran and Turkey. In "understandings" concluded in back rooms even prior to the Gulf war, the two major Iraqi Kurdish parties, the KDP led by Masoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)--a breakaway from KDP in the 1960s led by Jalal Talabani and bitter rivals since then--were recruited to help US ally Turkey and harass US enemy Iran, in return for which they were given to understand that Iraq would be divided from within, federated, and they would be rewarded with a federated Iraqi Kurdistan. Only Kirkuk would not be part of the bargain. Ankara fully intended to gain entrée to the oilfields Turkey has coveted since World War I, through the minuscule population of Turkmen in central Iraq. At the outset, the US -Turkey plan envisioned an Iraq, like Gaul, divided into three parts. Of course, as life goes, Prime Minister Ozal, the Bush Administration's partner in the plan, didn't plan on dying. Nor did President Bush plan on losing his office to Mr. Clinton. As for the Kurdish leaders, they had no plan but to follow Washington's lead once again.

The consequences were entirely predictable. Little more than a year after the Gulf War, following US -sponsored elections in Iraqi Kurdistan conflict broke out between the rival Kurdish parties. Initial elections to establish a government of sorts in Iraqi Kurdistan were held in May of 1992 with the KDP gaining a majority, but not a large enough majority to satisfy provisions established by the US and Britain. Despite assurances that a run-off between KDP and PUK would take place the following October 1992, it was never held, nor was this omission ever made into an issue by the human rights groups and international observers who had placed the stamp of legitimacy on the initial election. Thus were the two parties, bitter rivals long before the Gulf conflict, to set upon each other in a war that by conservative estimates has taken the lives of some 3000 fighters, not to mention the civilians caught between them.

The Iraqi Kurds, long accustomed to suffering in wars between guerrillas and governments, found themselves again beleaguered, this time not by Baghdad but by Kurds. Their new lament came to be, "Even Saddam Hussein didn't do this." But no one wants to hear, much less publicize, their plight. Only Amnesty International would produce a belated report in 1995 on human rights abuses of Kurds under Kurdish administration. Human Rights Watch has yet to bring out a word on the topic. In their zeal to provide documentation in support of the State Department's case against Saddam Hussein for his abuses of Kurds in the 1980's--for which they have received considerable funding--they deliberately ignored abuses of Kurds by Kurds in the 1990s. Moreover, the group was eager to maintain good relations with the Kurdish leaders to facilitate their research. To expose their activities would have incited their wrath. By failing to expose the dismal status quo, they have left Kurds at their mercy with no ombudsmen. This accounts for the thousands of Iraqi Kurds who have fled the US-protected "safe haven" over the past seven years. In the first six months of 1999, Norway alone has had to cope with asylum claims from more than 2,000 of these Kurds. Despite their misdeeds, the Iraqi Kurdish parties continue to be supported and rewarded by Washington because they have continued to serve US regional policy.

Given Washington's interest in remaining in strategic north Iraq and retaining the image of Iraqi Kurds simply as victims of Saddam Hussein, little has been made of the war between the Kurdish parties and nothing made of the plight of Kurds under Kurdish rule. Thus "Operation Provide Comfort" degenerated into "Operation Provide Cover" in a haven safe only for Washington's interests. Seduced by official rhetoric and a somnolent media, the American public has been led to believe that all evil emanates from Baghdad. Still they wonder why Saddam Hussein was not removed at the outset. But consider this: Had the Iraqi dictator been ousted, on what pretext would the US justify a continued presence in northern Iraq? From whom would we be protecting the Kurds? No single individual has done more to give Washington the pretext it needs to remain in the Kurdish north and to carry out plans vis-à-vis Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.

The capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in February 1999, and his statements both during and after his trial in June of this year, dealt a heavy blow to Kurdish aspirations and displayed once again the reluctance of Kurds to learn not only from the past but from the present. The rebel leader renounced all demands for Kurdish political control over Kurdish territory in Turkey. He repudiated the insurgency he had initiated as a "mistake"--a mistake that took the lives of 30,000 people, both Kurds and Turks. He pledged allegiance to Turkey. He would subsequently call on his rebels to leave the country. One Kurdish official characterized his statements as a "Gandhian" gesture, typically overlooking the fact that Gandhi's initiatives, peaceful from the outset, were directly aimed at the elimination of British control over India, his homeland. Ocalan's dreams are of a PKK transformed from a guerrilla force to a political force in Turkey. But his dream comes at the expense of Kurdish aspirations for self-determination. It is ironic that this first and only Kurdish leader in modern times to speak the truth of the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdistan at the outset, would be the first to repudiate all forms of political self-rule and call instead for what Reuters (10/25/99) termed "some vague form of cultural rights" within a "democratic" Turkish Republic.

Equally ironic, Iraqi Kurdish leaders who colluded in the defeat of the PKK have diminished their own chances for real hegemony over Iraqi Kurdistan. If 15 million Kurds in Turkey will be satisfied with a modicum of cultural rights, the message will not be lost elsewhere. Nor is the United States likely to sponsor a Kurdish entity in Iraq that could bolster Kurdish political aspirations in Turkey. Thus Kurds in Iraq can look forward only to a degree of separation from Baghdad sufficient to enable the US to maintain a strategic base in the Kurdish north and to keep Turkey happy.

The Kurds as they are, foibles and failures aside, have yet to realize that their demand for self-determination is a right enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights. They need not prove abuse to earn this right. Lacking self-confidence, they follow the advice of others who sit in comfort in their own countries advising them to want and to take less out of life. What we see, through the microcosm of Kurdish affairs, is a reflection of what we are. Under the banner of promoting democracy and freedom of choice, we fully expect the Kurds to choose what we choose for them. If any nation is obsessed with nationalism, it is the United States. Yet the last Kurds we are prepared to support are Kurdish nationalists. Vigilant in preserving our own territorial integrity, we breach that of others. Stamping out subversives at home, we subvert governments elsewhere. Championing the rule of law at home, we disdain international law, unless it serves us. And to make ourselves feel right while we do wrong, we cloak ourselves in the rhetoric of human rights. Nothing better evidences American arrogance than Secretary of State Madeline Albright's declaration that we are "the indispensable nation." Brush aside the veil of language and we are simply the most recent of empires--all of them dead by their own hand. Yet, based on some deformed notion of divine right or manifest destiny and fortified by military and economic power, we continue to manipulate and re-order the lands and lives of others in our own image without bothering to look in the mirror.