Freedom plays to a tough crowd.
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Kurds, Arabs Try to Keep Peace in Iraq
By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI 04/21/2003 13:59:55 EST
With the iron law-and-order of Saddam Hussein gone, the Kurds in the northern city of Irbil and Arab
tribes nearby reached an agreement: If Arab or Kurd trespassed in the other's village, he would be
killed.
The harsh accord came the same day Saddam's government collapsed in Baghdad. That night, it was
broken and blood was spilled.
Kurdish fighters entered this Arab village to take some Iraqi military cars, spurring a shootout that killed
two villagers and three Kurds.
Deep differences in these northern towns are a picture in miniature of Iraq and the rivalries between its
ethnic, religious and political groups. The power struggle in the north also could aggravate
long-standing animosity between the Kurds and Turkey.
After that first night's violence here, a Kurdish gesture of conciliation was welcomed by some Arabs.
Hope seemed to flicker to life.
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which governs the western sector of the
Kurdish autonomous region, condemned the Kurdish militiamen who went to Rummana and said they
would be prosecuted.
"Everyone was relieved after hearing Barzani," said Mazhar Khalifa Zaydan, a farmer in Haji Ali, a
village near Rummana some 50 miles southwest of Irbil.
But he was clear about the villagers' rights.
"We have the right to kill any Kurd who comes here to attack our village or people and women with our
personal weapons," Zaydan said. "We will kill him on the spot."
In Rummana, the large al-Jbour tribe, which was feared even by Saddam, says it is peaceful - but only
if left alone.
Since the shootout, Sheik Abdel-Rahman Tabour, the 55-year-old head of the Jbour tribe, and leaders
of nearby villages have forbidden male villagers from leaving the wider area to reduce tensions between
Arabs and Kurds.
Fearful of Kurdish acts of vengeance, Iraqi Arabs, especially tribesmen, say their lives are in danger.
"We are afraid of chaos," said Tabour.
Arab-Kurd animosities are nothing new.
In 1975, following the collapse of a Kurdish revolt led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani - the father of Massoud
Barzani - the Iraqi government embarked on an extensive "Arabization" program of the northern Kurdish
provinces, expelling tens of thousands of Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrian Christians and replacing them
with Arab families from southern Iraq.
Tabour insisted there was no outstanding conflict between his tribe and the Kurds. The agreement to
kill one another in case of trespassing is to stem looting and chaos, he said.
"Since the fall of the regime, thank God, we don't have any enemies and seek no revenge," he said.
"There is no blood that we demand from others nor do they demand of us."
Saddam was said to have feared the Jbour tribe because it was seen as a rival to his own Tikriti clan.
Tabour said al-Jbour tribesmen were not allowed to serve in Saddam's trusted Republican Guards.
Tabour's younger brother, Khairi, an officer in the Iraqi army, spent two years in prison after Saddam's
convoy, which he was guarding, came under attack in 1993. Eight of the officers who were executed for
the assassination attempt were from the al-Jbour tribe.
In Tabour's village of Rummana, barefoot children play in garbage-littered dirt streets while a pale green
river of sewage floats by. His tribe of Sunni Muslims, 6 million strong, stretches from Najaf and Karbala
in the south, to Baghdad and on to Mosul and Irbil in the north.
"We support any government that comes into place," said Mohammed Saleh, 30, from Haji Ali village.
"But if any of us gets killed, we will fight."
The Kurds, too, fear for their safety. Mahmoud Rashid Hussein, now 32, was 11 when his family was
forced from their home in another village. But the family cannot go back because it is one of 4,000 to
5,000 villages that Saddam destroyed.
Ethnic conflict is also a real danger in the two largest cities in the north, Mosul and Kirkuk. Mosul has
a largely Arab population; Kirkuk is traditionally Kurdish, but Saddam moved thousands of Kurds out
and replaced them with Arab families.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, which calls Kirkuk a "tinderbox," reported dozens of people
have been killed in Kirkuk since Baghdad's collapse. It urged U.S. forces to halt the violence, and
Kurdish leaders to stop expulsions.
Americans run the Kirkuk area with cooperation from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Barzani's
group, the two main factions governing the autonomous region.
Retired Gen. Bruce Moore, the top U.S. official in northern Iraq, said Sunday that reversing the
Arabization policy must be done legally - not by force.
"The United States government feels very strongly" that people should get "back what is legally theirs,"
Moore said.
Homes forcibly taken from Kurds and others must be returned to their owners, he said. "It's a difficult
issue. It's not our responsibility to do this but that of the Iraqi people." |
