washington-report.org
The Kurds' Suffering is Rooted in Past Betrayals
By Rachelle Marshall
May/June 1991
The ordeal of nearly a million Kurds as they struggled to escape
from Iraq across freezing mountain passes last April aroused
sympathy and indignation around the world. Iraq's brutal
suppression of the March uprising by Kurds and Shi'i Arabs was
the immediate cause of their plight, but the Kurds' present agony
is the culmination of a long history of oppression, manipulation
and betrayal. At one time or another during the past 70 years, the
European powers, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the US, and at times
even the Kurds' own leaders have all used the Kurdish people to
further their own aims.
The modern Kurdish independence movement is itself the
product of a betrayal. In 1920, following World War I, the Allies
and the defeated Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sevres,
which provided for an independent Kurdistan in the adjacent
areas of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq where 18 million Kurds were
concentrated. Because of the opposition of Turkish nationalists
and the indifference of the Western powers, the treaty was not
enforced and the promise to the Kurdish people was never
fulfilled. Since then, the Kurds' attempt to preserve a separate
culture and obtain independence have been met with repression
and bloody reprisals by governments that regard the Kurds either
as threats to their own survival or as pawns to be used against
their neighbors.
Uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s by Kurdish nationalists led by
Sheikh Ahmad of Barzan and those in later years led by his
brother, Mustafa Barzani, were repeatedly crushed, often by the
cooperative efforts of Iran, Turkey and Iraq. After Iraq's revolution
of 195 8 that ousted the monarchy, Barzani made peace with the
new government and even took part in massacres of its Ba'athist
opponents. But during subsequent changes of government,
relations between Kurds and Iraqi leaders fluctuated between
fighting and attempts at reconciliation. What complicated these
relations was Iran's growing hostility to Iraq once it became a
republic. After the overthrow of Iraq's King Faisal, the shah of Iran
abandoned his former policy of cooperating with Baghdad
against the Kurds and instead began using the Kurds as a
means of weakening Iraq. During the 1960s, Iran joined with
Israel to give financial, technical and military support to the
Kurdish insurgents, with the aim of embroiling Iraq in domestic
turmoil that would sap its military capabilities. At the same time,
nobody wanted a Kurdish victory. According to a news report in
the Christian Science Monitor of Dec. 12, 1974, Iran's support
for the Kurds "was always just enough to prevent their defeat,
never quite enough to enable them to attain their political
objectives."
There is no evidence that the US provided direct assistance to
the Kurds during these years. In fact, Nikki R. Keddie and Mark
J. Gasiorowski emphasize in their book Neither East Nor West
(Yale 1990) that the CIA and State Department were strongly
opposed to any US intervention on behalf of the Kurds. Israel,
however, did play an important role in keeping the Kurdish
insurgency alive. In 1980, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin revealed that between 1965 and 1975 the Israeli
government had provided the Kurds with money, arms and
instructors. Together, Iran and Israel set up a Kurdish intelligence
service, Parastin, and Israeli intelligence units were active in
Kurdish territory during these years, gathering information on
Iraqi forces. In 1972, American newspaper columnist Jack
Anderson reported that Israel was paying Barzani personally
$50,000 a month. Israel also supplied the Kurds with Soviet
weapons it had captured from Egypt and Syria, hoping at one
point that Iraqi leaders would believe the weapons had been
supplied by the Soviets.
The reasons for Israel's cooperation with Iran to help the Kurds
were clear. The shah of Iran provided Israel with a continuous
supply of oil (in 1973 Iran refused to join the Arab oil embargo
against the West). By supporting the Kurds, Israel succeeded in
tying down units of the Iraqi army that in 1967 and 1973 might
otherwise have joined Egypt and Syria in fighting against Israel.
By 1969, the Kurdish rebellion had become so costly to Iraq that
the newly installed Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussain
offered the Kurds what seemed to be an acceptable deal. The
March Manifesto of 1970 granted the Kurds local autonomy in
northern Iraq, assigned them a proportional number of seats in
the national legislature, and authorized Kurdish as the official
language where Kurds were the majority.
At first Kurds welcomed the plan, but after signing a four-year
agreement with the government they began to complain about
boundaries, budgets, and their role in determining foreign policy.
Iraq, in turn, demanded that the Kurds give up their claims to the
Kirkuk oil fields and end their ties with Iran.
Iranian, US and Israeli "Friends"
In the Oct. 4, 1976 issue of New York magazine, Aaron Lathan
quoted Barzani as saying that two years after he had agreed to
the peace plan with Iraq, "our Iranian friends, our American
friends, and our Israeli friends" had told him not to make any
compromises. Barzani agreed, hoping to gain more
concessions from Iraq, and consequently tensions resumed
between the Kurds and Iraq just as the controversy was heating
up between Iraq and Iran over their competing claims to the Shatt
Al-Arab waterway that ran between the two states.
In 1972, after Iraq signed a treaty of cooperation and an arms
agreement with the Soviet Union, an apprehensive Iran
increased its military aid to the Iraqi Kurds (who reciprocated by
handing over to the shah's government Iranian Kurds who had
sought refuge in Iraq). The Kurds also asked the US for help, with
Barzani offering to grant concessions in Kurdistan's rich oil and
mineral deposits to Western companies.
Washington had refused earlier pleas, but in May 1972 the shah
made a personal appeal to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
during their visit to Tehran. The two men overruled the objections
of the CIA and the State Department and secretly agreed to
provide the Kurds with $16 million worth of arms.
This agreement was only revealed in 1976, when a report of the
House Subcommittee on Intelligence, headed by Rep. Otis Pike,
was leaked first to Daniel Schorr and then to the Village Voice.
According to the committee, the aid was not to help the Kurds
achieve independence but simply "to continue a level of
hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally's neighboring
country [Iraq]."
Like Israel, the US had its own motives for intervening on behalf
of the Kurds. Kissinger and Nixon were especially anxious to
accommodate the shah because they were in the process of
concluding a $22 billion arms deal with him. As Kissinger wrote
later, the Nixon administration regarded Iran as "the eastern
anchor of our Mideast policy. " The US was also responding to
the fact that in the spring of 1972, Iraq had nationalized a
consortium of European and American firms known as the Iraq
Petroleum Company, an act which displeased Washington.
Three years later, after Iran and Iraq settled their dispute over the
Shatt Al-Arab waterway in March 1975, Iran, Israel, and the US
abandoned the Kurds by abruptly stopping all aid to them. Under
the terms of the Algiers Agreement, Iraq agreed to share
sovereignty over the river with Iran and the shah, in turn, pledged
to end support for the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq. Barzani later told
Latham, "We were broken down not by our enemies but by our
friends."
During the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq launched in 1980 in order to
take back the Shatt Al-Arab, each side armed the other's Kurds.
After the cease-fire, according to Jill Hamburg in The Nation
(Aug. 21-28, 1989), Iran executed thousands of Kurds and Iraq
destroyed some 3,000 Kurdish villages.
The Same Rationale
The Kurds were again used as pawns by outside powers during
the Persian Gulf war and consequently became many of that
war's most tragic victims. In 1976, a US diplomat explained to
Aaron Latham the rationale behind Washington's decision to aid
the Kurds in 1972: "What we wanted, " he said, I 'was to
destabilize the Iraqi government and topple Saddam Hussain. "
The same rationale still operates today. In January 1991,
President Bush reportedly gave secret orders authorizing the
CIA to aid rebel factions inside Iraq. Later he urged Iraqi
dissidents to "take matters into their own hands."
Once the war was over, however, the US and its allies refused all
help to the rebellion they had helped to foment. In explaining why,
Secretary of State James Baker said, "We are not prepared to
go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war. " In
fact, the US-led alliance never favored the overthrow of the Iraqi
government but wants instead a militarily weak Iraq, preferably
without Saddam Hussain but otherwise under much the same
leadership. An independent Kurdistan, or possibly even a
democratic Iraq in which Kurds or the Shi'i Muslim majority
assumed a leading role, is seen as potentially destabilizing to a
region where democracy is virtually unknown and the redrawing
of boundaries could open endless disputes. Even the Kurds'
long-time ally, Israel, has disavowed Kurdish nationalism. William
Safire, who should know, reported in The New York Times on
April I that "influential Israelis" are concerned that "Kurdish
independence might lead to Palestinian statehood. " And so the
Kurds will go on trying to survive under the harsh conditions in
which they find themselves, victims not only of past brutality and
deceit, but of the continuing game of power politics. |
