Iraqi Kurds struggle to build a ´liberated´ Kurdistan

Ten years after the Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds struggle to build a ´liberated´ Kurdistan

SULEIMANIYAH, Iraq -- The Kurds have a national flag of their own. The tricolor of red, green and white, with a sun at its center, is the emblem of a people who, numbering 40 million, are the Middle East's fourth-largest ethnic group.

Their mountainous heartlands describe a great arc through some of the richest and most strategic regions of the four states -- Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria -- among which they are divided. In 1920, the Treaty of Sevres recognized their right to statehood. But the rise of Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne put paid to their dreams. Since then, they have been rising in revolt after bloody, uncoordinated, unavailing revolt. In 1946, the flag flew in the small and short-lived Mahabad Republic before it was suppressed by the shah of Iran. But nowhere has it officially flown since -- not even here, in "liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan.

It is now 10 years since the Iraqi Kurds, or a large segment of them, acquired a sort of self-mastery. It was the fruit of a long struggle and great suffering whose climax came with the chemical weapons onslaught that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed on them in the 1980s. But, in the end, and typical of the Kurdish experience, it was great upheavals beyond their control that finally brought their self-ruling enclave into being: Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the great Kurdish and Shiite uprisings, the panic flight of an entire people, and the creation of the Western-protected "safe haven."

This juridical no man's land was to have been a strictly provisional affair, pending a final settlement of the whole Iraqi question. But, of all the still-unfinished business of the Persian Gulf War, "liberated" Kurdistan now looks like being its most important legacy: The longer it endures, the harder it is to undo. True, the Kurds dare not fly their flag, but, in this swath of territory the size of Switzerland, a community that, at 3.6 million, outnumbers many U.N. member states, is surreptitiously acquiring the attributes -- functional, political, cultural and economic -- of independence. It adds up to the greatest success in the annals of pan-Kurdish struggle. Yet it remains a deeply vulnerable one. Iraqi Kurds are a people-in-waiting, suspended as never before between ultimate triumph and renewed calamity. For they know that, just as their curious entity came into being by a geopolitical accident, another such volcanic eruption could just as easily extinguish it entirely.

The ultimate triumph would, of course, be formal, internationally recognized independence. "That," said Nerchivan Barzani, one of the Kurdistan Regional Government's two prime ministers, "goes with the self-determination which is the natural right of all peoples. Ask any Kurd if he wants a state."

They virtually all do. "It's time," said Saedi Barzingi, president of Irbil University, "to correct the injustices of the post-World War I settlement. We are not Arabs, Turks or Iranians. Why shouldn't we have the same rights as a string of Gulf tribes who declared themselves states?"

"Liberated" Iraq Kurdistan is self-consciously pan-Kurdish in its ultimate aspirations. "We could be a model for all other areas of Kurdistan,' said Barham Salih, the KRG's other premier, contrasting its moderate, gradualist, democratic approach to self-determination with the violence of Abdullah Ocalan and his PKK's failed attempt to achieve independence for Turkey's Kurds.

Yet independence is the official aim of no Kurdish party. "In spite of our right to our own state," said Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, "we only seek federation within a democratic Iraq."

What one official called "the lousy hand dealt us by history and geography" dictates this caution. For the Kurds have no access to the sea, nor to any neighboring state without a potentially secessionist Kurdish minority of its own.

Hussein's Iraq remains an ever-present menace. Having lost his northern provinces, he does not hide his ambition to re-establish his gruesome tyranny over them. Their now "stagnant waters," he said last month, will one day rejoin "the pure sea of Iraq."

Every day, new families trickle into Kani Sheitan refugee camp, victims of a campaign to Arabize oil-rich Kurdish regions still under Hussein's territory. Ba'athist officials had mocked them with the choice: "Become Arabs, and join the fight for Palestine -- or get out."

"They represent the possible fate of all of us," said Salih. "A regiment of tanks is only half an hour away; they could sweep into Kurdistan at any time."

Nor will any regional powers, however much at odds with Hussein and each other, connive at the emergence of an independent Kurdistan in another's territory. The most they will tolerate is the perpetuation of the status quo -- until the day of reckoning, likely to be triggered by Hussein's removal, which opens the way for a new Iraqi order. All the Kurds can do in the meantime is to profit from the self-mastery they do now enjoy, so as to be as strongly placed as possible when it does.

They are steadily forging a distinct Kurdish polity, even if it still lacks the international recognition, passports and airports that would make it whole. Irbil, the "capital," has become Hawler, and everywhere Kurdish signs have eliminated Arabic ones. They are "Kurdicizing" school curricula, and their version of geography and history has replaced the Ba'athist-Arab one.

Their leaders are regularly received by foreign states. They have developed a reasonably efficient administration, with an elected Parliament and municipal councils. They have internal freedoms unimaginable in Baghdad, with 50-odd newspapers, and unlimited access to satellite television.

They have NGOs and human rights organizations and, whatever their political differences, their discourse is infused with a real concern for those ideals -- democracy, pluralism, tolerance -- from whose absence they suffered so grievously in the past.

Two of the regions' three universities were established after 1991; starved of books and periodicals by Iraq and the U.N. sanctions, students now pore over the Internet, denied their Iraqi counterparts, through computers whose import the KRG has made a top priority.

They are resettling the 4,500 villages destroyed by Hussein, rebuilding a decimated livestock, and recultivating a fertile, well-watered soil that remains the backbone of their economy.

In Suleimaniyah, a new oil refinery stands testimony to the self-reliance of Kurdish technicians. With no foreign help, they constructed it entirely from the cannibalized parts of a soft-drinks, a sugar, and a cement factory, and from pipes left behind by the Iranian Army. From Iraqi mines they contrived explosive devices to open up a well in the proven, but hitherto unexploited, Taktak oil field: They have turned Kurdistan into the world's newest oil producer.

There are two great threats to all this. One is the deep-seated rivalry between the two main parties, Massoud Barzani's KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The KRG is composed of two geographically separate administrations: the KDP in Irbil and the PUK in Suleimaniyah. They share the same general orientation, and collaborate in many ways. There has been no fighting between them for four years; and a "peace process" is making steady headway as both sides realize a divided Kurdistan could be a fatally weakened one.

The other threat is the machinations of regional powers, Turkey above all. Its goodwill is vital, because of its intrinsic weight and its pro-Western credentials. But it is also the most hostile to the very notion of a Kurdish identity, more so than even Hussein himself.

"For the Turks," confided a top KDP executive who regularly negotiates with them, "we are more dangerous than Hussein. They have a paranoid suspicion that our self-government is a conspiracy to which the West is a party; they hate anything that smacks of Kurdish progress, that we have such things as traffic lights, or wear suits and ties. The more progress we make the more they must sabotage it. And they will use any means to do so, such as the exploitation of our Turkoman minority. In effect they are saying that if we Kurds are to have an entity of our own, this community of 10,000 people should have an equivalent one. They sponsor the Turcoman Front, a puppet body with no following; Turkish officers control it and train its militia.

"We have given the Turcomans their own schools, radio and language teaching. We offered them seats in Parliament, but the Turks told them to refuse." On his last visit to Ankara Massoud Barzani told them: "Why don't you give your Kurds what we give our Turcomans?"

But what, at the moment, really alarms the Kurds is the so-called second passage. Under this scheme, already agreed in principle between Iraq and Turkey, the two countries would jointly establish a new crossing point in the northwestern tip of "liberated" Kurdistan where Iraq, Syria and Turkey meet, bypassing the lucrative business that comes their way from the internationally tolerated "smuggling" of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi Army would reoccupy a narrow strip of territory. It could only do so with Turkish connivance.

"It would be a strategic blow, a noose around our neck," said a KDP leader, "and we would fight it by any means. Fortunately, the United States has made known its disapproval to the Turks."

Which goes to show that, 10 years on, Western protection, and the no-fly zone that embodies it, remain the linchpin of the Kurds' security and well-being. So long as that holds, they see themselves in a potentially win-win situation: building their quasi-independent polity on the one hand, and, on the other, taking comfort from the knowledge that the longer they have to build, the better off they will be when the reckoning comes.

It creates a contradiction in the Kurdish soul: They fear no one like Hussein, yet they are in no particular hurry to expedite the reckoning, or turn Kurdistan into the indispensable platform for any U.S.-backed insurrection to unseat him. Ever mindful of past U.S. betrayals, they would demand cast-iron guarantees about the outcome, and their own place in the post-Hussein order.

Though the official aim is federation, it is, said Barzani, the "content" of federation that counts. "We shall never give up our Kurdish ways, or allow the return of a totalitarian system. A generation is growing up that knows nothing of it."

In fact, the longer self-rule persists the harder it will be to imagine a return of Arab rule at all. So at the back of every mind is the hope that not just federation, but independence, internationally endorsed, might really come to pass -- though no one knows quite how.

"After all," said Falih Bakr, a Barzani confidant, "who really foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism before it actually happened?"

David Hirst is the Middle East correspondent of the London Guardian. Based in Beirut, he has been covering the region for 30 years.

The Japan Times: Aug. 23, 2001

		Druckversion
	Japan Times - By David Hirst 23 August 2001 Ten years after the Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds struggle to build a ´liberated´ Kurdistan SULEIMANIYAH, Iraq -- The Kurds have a national flag of their own. The tricolor of red, green and white, with a sun at its center, is the emblem of a people who, numbering 40 million, are the Middle East's fourth-largest ethnic group. Their mountainous heartlands describe a great arc through some of the richest and most strategic regions of the four states -- Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria -- among which they are divided. In 1920, the Treaty of Sevres recognized their right to statehood. But the rise of Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne put paid to their dreams. Since then, they have been rising in revolt after bloody, uncoordinated, unavailing revolt. In 1946, the flag flew in the small and short-lived Mahabad Republic before it was suppressed by the shah of Iran. But nowhere has it officially flown since -- not even here, in "liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan. It is now 10 years since the Iraqi Kurds, or a large segment of them, acquired a sort of self-mastery. It was the fruit of a long struggle and great suffering whose climax came with the chemical weapons onslaught that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed on them in the 1980s. But, in the end, and typical of the Kurdish experience, it was great upheavals beyond their control that finally brought their self-ruling enclave into being: Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the great Kurdish and Shiite uprisings, the panic flight of an entire people, and the creation of the Western-protected "safe haven." This juridical no man's land was to have been a strictly provisional affair, pending a final settlement of the whole Iraqi question. But, of all the still-unfinished business of the Persian Gulf War, "liberated" Kurdistan now looks like being its most important legacy: The longer it endures, the harder it is to undo. True, the Kurds dare not fly their flag, but, in this swath of territory the size of Switzerland, a community that, at 3.6 million, outnumbers many U.N. member states, is surreptitiously acquiring the attributes -- functional, political, cultural and economic -- of independence. It adds up to the greatest success in the annals of pan-Kurdish struggle. Yet it remains a deeply vulnerable one. Iraqi Kurds are a people-in-waiting, suspended as never before between ultimate triumph and renewed calamity. For they know that, just as their curious entity came into being by a geopolitical accident, another such volcanic eruption could just as easily extinguish it entirely. The ultimate triumph would, of course, be formal, internationally recognized independence. "That," said Nerchivan Barzani, one of the Kurdistan Regional Government's two prime ministers, "goes with the self-determination which is the natural right of all peoples. Ask any Kurd if he wants a state." They virtually all do. "It's time," said Saedi Barzingi, president of Irbil University, "to correct the injustices of the post-World War I settlement. We are not Arabs, Turks or Iranians. Why shouldn't we have the same rights as a string of Gulf tribes who declared themselves states?" "Liberated" Iraq Kurdistan is self-consciously pan-Kurdish in its ultimate aspirations. "We could be a model for all other areas of Kurdistan,' said Barham Salih, the KRG's other premier, contrasting its moderate, gradualist, democratic approach to self-determination with the violence of Abdullah Ocalan and his PKK's failed attempt to achieve independence for Turkey's Kurds. Yet independence is the official aim of no Kurdish party. "In spite of our right to our own state," said Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, "we only seek federation within a democratic Iraq." What one official called "the lousy hand dealt us by history and geography" dictates this caution. For the Kurds have no access to the sea, nor to any neighboring state without a potentially secessionist Kurdish minority of its own. Hussein's Iraq remains an ever-present menace. Having lost his northern provinces, he does not hide his ambition to re-establish his gruesome tyranny over them. Their now "stagnant waters," he said last month, will one day rejoin "the pure sea of Iraq." Every day, new families trickle into Kani Sheitan refugee camp, victims of a campaign to Arabize oil-rich Kurdish regions still under Hussein's territory. Ba'athist officials had mocked them with the choice: "Become Arabs, and join the fight for Palestine -- or get out." "They represent the possible fate of all of us," said Salih. "A regiment of tanks is only half an hour away; they could sweep into Kurdistan at any time." Nor will any regional powers, however much at odds with Hussein and each other, connive at the emergence of an independent Kurdistan in another's territory. The most they will tolerate is the perpetuation of the status quo -- until the day of reckoning, likely to be triggered by Hussein's removal, which opens the way for a new Iraqi order. All the Kurds can do in the meantime is to profit from the self-mastery they do now enjoy, so as to be as strongly placed as possible when it does. They are steadily forging a distinct Kurdish polity, even if it still lacks the international recognition, passports and airports that would make it whole. Irbil, the "capital," has become Hawler, and everywhere Kurdish signs have eliminated Arabic ones. They are "Kurdicizing" school curricula, and their version of geography and history has replaced the Ba'athist-Arab one. Their leaders are regularly received by foreign states. They have developed a reasonably efficient administration, with an elected Parliament and municipal councils. They have internal freedoms unimaginable in Baghdad, with 50-odd newspapers, and unlimited access to satellite television. They have NGOs and human rights organizations and, whatever their political differences, their discourse is infused with a real concern for those ideals -- democracy, pluralism, tolerance -- from whose absence they suffered so grievously in the past. Two of the regions' three universities were established after 1991; starved of books and periodicals by Iraq and the U.N. sanctions, students now pore over the Internet, denied their Iraqi counterparts, through computers whose import the KRG has made a top priority. They are resettling the 4,500 villages destroyed by Hussein, rebuilding a decimated livestock, and recultivating a fertile, well-watered soil that remains the backbone of their economy. In Suleimaniyah, a new oil refinery stands testimony to the self-reliance of Kurdish technicians. With no foreign help, they constructed it entirely from the cannibalized parts of a soft-drinks, a sugar, and a cement factory, and from pipes left behind by the Iranian Army. From Iraqi mines they contrived explosive devices to open up a well in the proven, but hitherto unexploited, Taktak oil field: They have turned Kurdistan into the world's newest oil producer. There are two great threats to all this. One is the deep-seated rivalry between the two main parties, Massoud Barzani's KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The KRG is composed of two geographically separate administrations: the KDP in Irbil and the PUK in Suleimaniyah. They share the same general orientation, and collaborate in many ways. There has been no fighting between them for four years; and a "peace process" is making steady headway as both sides realize a divided Kurdistan could be a fatally weakened one. The other threat is the machinations of regional powers, Turkey above all. Its goodwill is vital, because of its intrinsic weight and its pro-Western credentials. But it is also the most hostile to the very notion of a Kurdish identity, more so than even Hussein himself. "For the Turks," confided a top KDP executive who regularly negotiates with them, "we are more dangerous than Hussein. They have a paranoid suspicion that our self-government is a conspiracy to which the West is a party; they hate anything that smacks of Kurdish progress, that we have such things as traffic lights, or wear suits and ties. The more progress we make the more they must sabotage it. And they will use any means to do so, such as the exploitation of our Turkoman minority. In effect they are saying that if we Kurds are to have an entity of our own, this community of 10,000 people should have an equivalent one. They sponsor the Turcoman Front, a puppet body with no following; Turkish officers control it and train its militia. "We have given the Turcomans their own schools, radio and language teaching. We offered them seats in Parliament, but the Turks told them to refuse." On his last visit to Ankara Massoud Barzani told them: "Why don't you give your Kurds what we give our Turcomans?" But what, at the moment, really alarms the Kurds is the so-called second passage. Under this scheme, already agreed in principle between Iraq and Turkey, the two countries would jointly establish a new crossing point in the northwestern tip of "liberated" Kurdistan where Iraq, Syria and Turkey meet, bypassing the lucrative business that comes their way from the internationally tolerated "smuggling" of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi Army would reoccupy a narrow strip of territory. It could only do so with Turkish connivance. "It would be a strategic blow, a noose around our neck," said a KDP leader, "and we would fight it by any means. Fortunately, the United States has made known its disapproval to the Turks." Which goes to show that, 10 years on, Western protection, and the no-fly zone that embodies it, remain the linchpin of the Kurds' security and well-being. So long as that holds, they see themselves in a potentially win-win situation: building their quasi-independent polity on the one hand, and, on the other, taking comfort from the knowledge that the longer they have to build, the better off they will be when the reckoning comes. It creates a contradiction in the Kurdish soul: They fear no one like Hussein, yet they are in no particular hurry to expedite the reckoning, or turn Kurdistan into the indispensable platform for any U.S.-backed insurrection to unseat him. Ever mindful of past U.S. betrayals, they would demand cast-iron guarantees about the outcome, and their own place in the post-Hussein order. Though the official aim is federation, it is, said Barzani, the "content" of federation that counts. "We shall never give up our Kurdish ways, or allow the return of a totalitarian system. A generation is growing up that knows nothing of it." In fact, the longer self-rule persists the harder it will be to imagine a return of Arab rule at all. So at the back of every mind is the hope that not just federation, but independence, internationally endorsed, might really come to pass -- though no one knows quite how. "After all," said Falih Bakr, a Barzani confidant, "who really foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism before it actually happened?" David Hirst is the Middle East correspondent of the London Guardian. Based in Beirut, he has been covering the region for 30 years. The Japan Times: Aug. 23, 2001 WADI e.V. \| tel.: (+49) 069-57002440 \| fax (+49) 069-57002444 http://www.wadinet.de \| e-mail: