Kurds get lucky, but not out of the woods yet
By Nick Cohen
LONDON: In a memo to the League of Nations in 1930, an astonished Foreign Office official said that the idea the great powers should be made to keep their promises was 'a conception which is almost fantastic'.
The Kurds appeared to have been promised their own state in the Treaty of Sevres after the First World War. But there was a catch. Buried in the small print was the requirement that the League must be convinced that they were 'capable' of independence.
Our men at the FO implied that the Kurds were Kipling's 'White Man's Burden' - 'fluttered folk and wild/Your new-caught sullen peoples/Half devil and half child'. It was preposterous to think that they might be capable of governing themselves.
"Although they admittedly possess many sterling qualities, the Kurds of Iraq are entirely lacking in those characteristics of political cohesion which are essential to self-government. Their organization and outlook are essentially tribal. They are without traditions of self-government or self-governing institutions. Their mode of life is primitive, and for the most part they are illiterate and untutored, resentful of authority and lacking in any sense of discipline or responsibility. In these circumstances it would be unkind to the Kurds themselves to do anything which would lend encouragement to the sterile idea of Kurdish independence."
Being cruel to be kind to Kurds has become a habit since. They are the largest people on earth without a state of their own. Spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey - and oppressed in all four countries - their fate in the twentieth century was to be played with and persecuted.
In the early 1970s, the Iraqi Baathist regime was getting too close to the Soviet Union for America's liking and threatening the Shah of Iran, a US client.
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to revolt. Saddam Hussein responded to the pressure and came to terms with Washington. American, Israeli and Iranian advisers pulled out of Iraqi Kurdistan. Saddam sealed the borders and slaughtered. The standards of the Cold War were lax, but America's betrayal of an ally was still shocking.
The Congressional select committee on intelligence said that "the President, Dr Kissinger and the Shah hoped that (the Kurds) would not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of (Iraq). The policy was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue to fight. Even in the context of covert operations, ours was a cynical exercise."
In 1988 Saddam killed somewhere around 100,000 Kurds in the 'Anzal' campaign to Arabize northern Iraq. The scale of the killing was such that no one knows the precise death toll, but for once, the overused word 'genocidal' was an accurate description of his policy.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurds along with the rest of Iraq took George Bush (senior) at his word and rose up when he called on the 'Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands'. They were massacred again. In 1996, they fought among themselves. Kurds being wiped out was a staple of international relations. The truth of the Kurdish proverb, 'we've no friends but the mountains', was indisputable.
The change in the Iraqi Kurds' fortunes since 1996 has been remarkable. It's foolish to make predictions in such fluid times, but it does look as if history is at last being kind to the Kurds. Consider their position. Despite the enmity of Turkey, Saddam, Iran and fundamentalists, they managed to build a reasonably decent autonomous government in the no-fly zone of northern Iraq.
At the start of the war, it looked as if the Turks would occupy their mini-state to stop its own Kurds getting the idea in their heads that they might govern themselves. But because Ankara refused to cut a deal with Washington, the threat has receded and American troops have become the Kurds' protectors. The clever Kurdish leadership has put its guerrillas under US control to emphasize that the Kurds at least are an ally America can rely on. Fear that they will be attacked with poison gas again is receding as the Iraqi regime weakens. Every day last week, there were small reports of the Kurds retaking villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Saddam.
It's as if the Palestinians were to wake up and find that the world's only superpower was on their side and land they thought they had lost forever was back in their possession. The comparison isn't meant frivolously. What Baathism has created in northern Iraq is a West Bank, and even friends of the Kurds are worried about what will happen when the regime falls and the ethnically cleansed go home.
Human Rights Watch and the Kurdish authorities estimate that 120,000 people have been driven from the Kirkuk area since 1991. The government confiscated documents proving the ownership of property. As far as the paperwork is concerned they never lived in Kirkuk and have no rights. It seems a matter of basic justice to allow the exiles to return, but their houses have been taken by Arab families, some of whom have been in Kirkuk for two or three generations and know no other home.
The 'untutored' Kurds are no different from anyone else. If you found someone else in your home, you would demand they left and become aggressive, possibly violent, if they refused because they had nowhere else to go. The Kurds may have got lucky for the first time since the First World War, but they're not out of the woods yet.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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