|
A Chance
Encounter with a Turk
Kani Xulam
June 7, 2003
For online version of this article,
http://kurdistan.org/Current-Updates/hatred060703.html
Last Sunday, I walked into a local restaurant to pick up my dinner. A
waiter smiled at me and then noticed my t-shirt with a picture of a
woman’s face and caption that read, “Free Leyla Zana”. The grin
disappeared. He came within the hearing distance of me and asked, “why
should Leyla Zana be free?”
I have a few of those “Free Leyla Zana” t-shirts. I wear them often and
usually on the weekends, the days that I let go of my rituals and catch
up with what I was unable to do during the grueling weekdays. It is the
women who invariably notice my politically loud and correct t-shirt, and
frequently come to me and ask me, who is she, or sometimes, where is she
in jail? I do, what some of the most vocal Washingtonians often do for
a living, engage them in sound bites, make the best of my few minutes
with them, and leave them with our website address, to get to know her
better, and perhaps get involved with the Amnesty International’s effort
to free her. More than a couple of times, I have had people write me
and thank me for guiding them in the right direction.
Now this fellow’s question, uttered in Turkish, was hostile in tone and
different in nature. At first, I thought I misheard him and urged him
to repeat what he had just said. No, he had not misspoken, and I had
heard him right, and now I had to call on my education to aid me in
responding to this what amounted to an insult that political Kurds
should not be in view of the one of the most important pillars of
politics, the freedom of speech.
I said, mustering enough strength not to lose my temper, “she should be
free to enjoy her political rights.”
Thinking that this would provide him with some political food for
thought, and enable me to pick up my own food for dinner, I handed the
cashier a $ 20.00 bill and waited for my change. The person who stood
right in my face, and spoke in suave and smooth Turkish, reached out to
his own bag of scum and shot back, “do you think she would know how to
enjoy her political rights?”
The restaurant was full and noisy. I heard the hostess tell one patron
that the wait would take at least 30 minutes. The cashier was helping
some of the other waiters who were anxious to fill their tables with new
patrons. This neophyte somewhat oblivious to his obligations was
obviously having fun badgering me about the Kurds who knew not,
according to him, how to use their political rights.
For a split second, I thought I was dreaming. His smirk bordering on
ugliness jolted me back into reality, quickly I hasten to add, and my
eyes glared on his new grin and I realized that he was wallowing in his,
what he thought, victory over me who had dared to wear a t-shirt that
had brought an aspersion on his country.
I went closer to his ear, prayed that he would hear me well, and said,
“do you know what the words, political rights, mean?”
Yes, he snapped back, without thinking, giving me the impression that he
was a pro in this and must have had a lot of practice on the hapless
Kurds, probably in Turkey proper, or in the Turkish occupied Kurdistan,
and now he wanted to rehearse the same on me thinking that my reaction
would be a silent nod of an enslaved Kurd, or perhaps even, “I am very
sorry.” And he went on, I have a master’s degree from a university, I
missed the name, but it sounded like an American institution -- Turkey
does not have that many universities, and I know them all, but it has
more jails, and more of my generation of Kurds have graduated from the
latter’s torture chambers than the other’s faculties -- in
International Relations.
Wow, I said to myself. This is the specimen of an educated Turk. What
is the ignorant one like? Imagine the sampling of its dregs? Turkey
often brags about sending it’s best and brightest to the west to learn,
or should I say copy, so that it could color its oriental despotism,
with a superficial brush of the occident, if you will. The man equated
going to school with knowing one’s political rights. That was akin to
saying I know how to swim because I have been to a pool, or I know how
to think because I have a master’s degree from an American college.
True, the chances of someone learning how to swim in a pool or how to
think at a school are higher, but as statistics after statistics have
proven, the results are not waterproof. Also, a modestly intelligent
person would not dangle his credentials from his or her alma mater when
one is confronted with a simple question like, do you know what the
words, political rights, mean?
I was in an ugly fight and there was no going back. I did not ask for
the challenge; and I felt, I could not walk away from it. I had made
the mistake of letting him know that I spoke his language, I should have
pretended that I did not, his contempt for the Kurds would not have
found refuge and expression in the English language -- bigots, often,
are not good students -- subjecting me harassment in the middle of a
restaurant in the heart of Washington, DC. But since I had exposed
myself to his foul language, I felt like I had no choice but to defend
myself, and the people I was representing in the nation’s capital.
“If you and your leaders knew what the words political rights meant,
foreigners would be coming to Turkey to wait on tables instead of you
doing it here,” I said.
His mouth foaming with saliva, his foot stomping the floor, he
responded, “the Kurds are waiting on tables in Europe.”
So this was it. His balloon punctured, he was finally, inadvertently,
conceding defeat, that there was no difference between him and the
Kurds. He was waiting on tables here; the Kurds were doing so,
according to him, in Europe. The Kurds did not know how to make use of
their political rights, he had said; the Turks were in the same boat,
they too were clueless, this is what his admission was amounting to, but
his hatred of the Kurds was preventing him to see his sorry state. He
did not want the light of political science to shine on the Kurds,
because he did not know what it was himself.
That science does not yield itself to those who have perfected the art
of copying the west into an art but not its substance in terms of
accepting the realities of life and working with them. That science
will never have true adherents in Turkey when some of the highest
ranking American officials read bedtime lullabies to the Turks, as
Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did, on Turkish national
television, on July 14, 2002, “I think a real test of whether is a
democracy is how it treats its minorities. And actually it’s one of the
things that impress me about Turkish history -- the way Turkey treats
its own minorities.” That science cannot be gifted to a people; a
people has to make a choice to live by its dictates, practice its tenets
and unleash the energies of its children away from the family of hatred
and its offspring towards the family of truth and its kin.
I motioned the Turk to keep quite, picked up my food, left a tip on the
counter, and walked out. Honestly, I felt sorry for him as well as for
myself. The match was uneven. There was no glory in beating down a
petty disciple of intolerance.
HOME
_____________________________
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail:
akin@kurdistan.org
Between Iraq and A Hard Place
Kurdish Rights Advocate Wary Over War’s Outcome
By Nick Welsh
The Santa Barbara Independent
May 1-8, 2003
Vol 17, No 858
As one of the nation’s most active champions of Kurdish rights, one
might think Kani Xulam would be celebrating the fall of Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein. Far from it. Although an outspoken critic of the Hussein
regine—which gassed and killed no less than 182,000 Iraqi Kurds—Xulam
remains suspicious that the Kurds—the largest ethnic minority in the
world without a nation of their own—will be sold out by the United
States and the international community.
Again.
A slightly built man with gentle manner and disarming smile, Xulam
started the American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) 10 years ago,
not long after graduating from UCSB with a degree in history. Then as
now, his chief focus was the wholesale abuse of Kurds living in Turkey
by the Turkish government, at that time one of this country’s most
reliable and strategic military allies for the past 50 years.
Initially, Xulam—born in Turkey--constituted a one-man propaganda
machine. He lobbied members of Congress to block multi-million dollar
arms sales to the Turkish military, arguing that American guns and
helicopters should not be used to attack and destroy Kurdish villages.
And he sought to embarrass the Turkish government, then seeking
membership into the European Union, into improving its human rights
record.
Xulam’s activities did not go unnoticed. In 1996 a team of heavily armed
police stormed AKIN’s Washington D.C. offices and hauled Xulam away. He
was whisked across the nation in an armed train and held without bail
for 40 days. The stated offense? Acquiring a United States passport
under an assumed name and failure to pay off his UCSB student loans.
Xulam has admitted both offenses and since paid off his loans. But the
real reason, according to the Department of Justice, was that Xulam has
been linked to Kurdish terrorist groups working within Turkey.
Coming to Xulam’s defense were not just the usual assemblage of human
rights advocates, but prominent newspaper columnists and a few members
of Congress, too. One judge was so unimpressed with the government’s
case that he ordered Xulam to perform his community service sentence by
working at AKIN. Today, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is
seeking to send Xulam back to Turkey. “People who’ve done far less than
I have been disappeared,” said Xulam, explaining his appeal for
political amnesty. In fact, Xulam said Turkish authorities mistakenly
seized his brother—thinking it was him—and tortured him. A final verdict
in that case remains many months, if not years, away.
Out on bail since 1996, Xulam has continued to be a thorn in the side of
the Turkish government. He got 153 members of Congress to sign a letter
in support of human rights for the Kurds. For nine months, he
maintained a vigil—in a mock Turkish prison cell—right across the street
from the Turkish Ambassador’s residence in Washington D.C. After the
September 11 tragedy, he claims the Turkish government asked Vice
President Dick Cheney to have him extradited. One month afterwards, he
ended that protest.
Since the United States made clear its intent to attack Iraq, Xulam has
been much in demand as the quasi-official spokesperson for the Kurds, a
group of 40 million people occupying rugged and mountainous territory
about the size of Texas. The problem, says Xulam, is that they’re spread
out over the borders of five separate Middle Eastern nations. Given that
5 million Kurds are living in Iraq—and concentrated in some of that
country’s most oil rich regions—the Kurdish question has taken on a
renewed strategic urgency.
Xulam was in town this week visiting relatives when Independent reporter
Nick Welsh managed to get an interview with him. The following is an
edited version of that conversation.
Although you have long opposed Saddam Hussein, you also opposed the
United States’ war against him. I understand this position has gotten
you accused of treason by some of your fellow Kurds living in this
country.
It was difficult to hear these accusations, but I still stand by what I
said.
It’s a complicated war. I opposed it. I oppose wars. I regard war as
organized crime let loose. Not that I wanted Saddam to stay. I knew him.
I know him. I have studied him. But I wanted the United Nations and
international institutions to be strengthened rather than be set aside.
And even though I was a fellow traveler with the peace activists, I
wished they had come out stronger against Hussein. I guess I wanted both
no war and I also wanted down with Saddam Hussein.
Some in the anti-war camp have suggested that Saddam Hussein has been
unfairly accused of gassing the Kurds as part of a Bush administration
propaganda effort to justify the war, when in fact it was the Iranian
military who gassed the Kurds. What do you say?
I reject this. Ambassador Peter Galbraith went visited the Kurdish
refugees in 1988 when he worked with Senator Claiborne Pell. He talked
to people from various regions of Kurdistan and he concluded that you
couldn’t bring so many people from so many areas and have them say the
same thing: that helicopters came and dropped a substance that smelled
of rotten garlic and rotten apples and the moment it came into contact
with the people they immediately dropped dead. And it happened not just
in one day, but during a campaign that lasted 18 months. Close to
182,000 Kurds were murdered in that campaign. In 281 settlements—towns,
villages, hamlets-- gas was used. It wasn’t just Halabja. Even if
Halabja may have happened by Iranians, but what do you say about 280
other places.
I’ve heard it said that the Kurds have been screwed over so many times
that it’s become something of a cultural tradition. But now, it seems
the Kurds have certain real opportunities: They fought along side the
Americans in the North of Iraq. And Turkey—the Kurds’ longtime
enemy--has alienated their American allies by refusing to cooperate in
the war against Iraq. Is it possible that the Kurds are going to come
out on top for once?
It just shows you how slippery the grounds are. It is true that we were
sold out in 1974 and 1975 by Henry Kissinger [then advising President
Richard Nixon]. It is also true that we were sold out in 1991 by senior
Bush who urged that we rise up against the Butcher of Baghdad. Both
times, we rebelled. In the second rebellion, for 18 days, we were
totally free. For 18 days we felt like we were the kings of the world.
But on the 19th day, Saddam was given the green light to crush us again.
He didn’t use chemical and biological weapons this time, but brought in
his helicopter gun ships and dropped powdered sugar and sometimes flour
on us, thinking that we would think, he was using chemical and
biological weapons. It was like a cat playing with a mouse. That’s when
3 million Kurds took to the mountains.
After that, France and Britain pressured the United States and the U.N.
to establish no-fly zones over northern Iraq, and in the intervening
time, what kind of self rule did the Kurds living there develop?
For the past 12 years we have been truly blessed by the Pentagon’s
protection. We have enjoyed the fruits of freedom and the fruits of
liberty. Peace has for a change has visited our lands and justice for a
change has been our lot. If you compare Iraqi Kurdistan today with the
rest of Iraq, it shines.
How so?
There are no political prisoners. There are hundreds of publications.
For a change people are not censored. There were free elections in 1991,
close to 100 deputies were elected. There are two factions—two parties.
One is rural based and the other is more urban.
But until recently, these two parties were battling one another with
guns and grenades?
From 1994 to 1997, they fought violently. I don’t want to white wash
their shortcomings. But I will tell you that our adversaries have
invested far more in our disunity and our misery than we’ve been able to
invest in our own unity. But since 1997, the fighting has come to a
halt. And things are looking good.
So now what?
Now they are talking about in the emerging central government in
Baghdad, the Kurds will have a say tantamount to their numbers. That
remains to be seen. I remain skeptical.
Why?
The US government has co-opted the Kurdish leaders not to step into the
realm of freedom, not to step into the realm of independence. So we are
on a leash. Another reason I remain skeptical is that I have talked to a
number of Iraqi national Congress (INC) members. Unfortunately in the
Middle East there is a culture of contempt and intolerance towards the
Kurds. The idea is that the Kurd in unruly, he is good to haul your wood
or your water. That’s the image. Iraq is viewed as an Arab state and the
Kurds are not even considered per se. If they want to get a good job
they need to Arabize themselves.
The neo-conservatives who pushed George Bush to adopt our new policy
that we can unilaterally and preemptively strike other nations if we
deem it in our national interest cite what Hussein did top the Kurds
after the Gulf War as one of their moral inspirations. How does that
make you feel?
I have to be honest. The Kurds feel secure that Saddam’s long, long
shadow is gone. His gigantic sized statues do not hover over them.
Having said that, I resented the use of our dead to drum up support for
the war effort. In 1988, the Reagan Administration, [then in power,]
didn’t even stoop to acknowledge our dead or to condemn our slaughter.
No statements were issued by the state department. Then when senior Bush
won the election, his transition team said as bad as Saddam was, he
should be cultivated. That the Kurds were under his control, and we
should not be bothered by it. The United States dealt with Hussein. It
gave him chemical and biological weapons. And then, when he took to
killing Iranians, we said `Good.’ In that administration, [Dick] Cheney
was in power, [Paul] Wolfowitz was in power. And now 12 years after the
Gulf War, conveniently, all of a sudden our dead were discovered. The
dust was blown off them and then they were beautified, if you will.
There’s that expression the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But could it be that the opposite might be happening now in Iraq?
Maybe. But this is what should have been done: Reagan should have
condemned Saddam Hussein. He should have been declared a war criminal.
After his gassing of the the Kurds in 281 places, there was no way he
could have been exonerated in a court of law. These Kurds were civilian
Kurds; they were his subjects. If you had applied the basics of the
United Nations, you would have had him behind bars for the rest of his
life. Kuwait would not have happened. 146 American soldiers who fought
in the first Gulf War would not have died. 158,000 Iraqis that died
there would have not have died. And the second war would not have
happened either.
In the Middle East that I know, maybe three to 10 percent of the people
enjoy the fruits of liberty, are equal before the law. There are, for
example, 50 families in Saudi Arabia that have $650 billion in American
banks. When you cuddle somebody like Osama Bin Laden, it could come back
and hit you too, the way it did on 9-11. The world is less safe. The
world has more fear. This world is yours. This world is mine. If we
want, really truly, peace and order in our lives, then I think it
behooves us to cultivate democratic forces in the Middle East—people who
are hungry for freedom. Like the Kurds.
But isn’t that happening now?
Iraqi Kurdistan right now is, of course, a positive development. If it
holds and the emerging government in Baghdad recognizes it, then that’s
a gigantic step forward for the Kurds and the Middle East. We live in an
age of nation states, not state nations. If you look at the map of
Europe the boundaries are very crooked. That’s because that is how
humans live. Humans don’t live along straight lines. If you look at the
maps of the Middle East and Africa, they have straight lines. That’s
because, they were put together by delirious French and British
colonialists. And now, the Bush Administration thinks these borders are
sacred. They are not. They are a house of cards. They are prisons for
our people. Those borders are like the Berlin Wall in our land. They
have brought about a system of government like South Africa’s Apartheid.
You’re suggesting this is the time to redraw the maps?
I am saying the Kurdish reality must be accepted and respected. I am
saying, in the times that we live in, there is no such recognition. But
we will have our day in the sun. It will come. I have no doubts about
it.
Is there a Kurdish nation or is it a fragmentation of tribal fiefdoms
that have less in common that they do differences?
When you say the word fragmentation, you have to say it was fragmented.
It’s not like the Kurds would love to be fragmented. They want to be
free, if you live them alone, they will unite and they will opt for the
mastery of their own homeland.
Is there a time the Kurds were united?
The Kurds have been living on their mountains since the dawn of recorded
history. They are the original people of the land. There are references
to the Kurds being there in the Old Testament. Empires have come and
gone. Let’s just look at the past 1000 years. During the Ottoman Empire
everyone was viewed as the children of God. Kurds-- most of them
Sunnis--were tolerated and accepted. Kurdish language was not banned.
Kurdish culture was not prohibited. We had a province of our own. It was
Kurdistan and we Kurds knew that it was ours. In 1920s, Kurdistan was
carved up by the British and the French, entrusted to Turkey, Syria,
Iraq, and the portion that was under Iranian rule ratified as theirs,
and some of the former Soviet republics. Because the Kurds are deprived
of a say in their affairs, the region has been condemned with a source
of instability.
What role are the Kurds trying to play in the formation of a new
government in Iraq?
What the Kurds want is like a California style federal state. They want
a Kurdish area totally under the Kurdish rule, they want to have Kurdish
drivers licenses, they want Kurdish tax collectors, they want to have
Kurdish police officers. They don’t want what Saddam had before, a
centrally appointed Arab mayor, with Arab teachers, and Arab tax
collectors.
How’s that going over?
When the opposition was in the opposition, they said fine, sometimes
with reservations. But then they also said they were all Iraqis, which
to us Kurds meant, forget about your Kurdishness. To me that’s a cover
up. It can only mean forget about your rights.
One of the scary scenarios we heard about before the war started as that
the Turks would invade Iraq to keep the Kurds in their own country from
rebelling and after that, all hell would break loose. But that hasn’t
happened.
They haven’t given up though. Members of the Turkish Special Forces did
go into Iraq dressed as aid workers. American Government officials got
the intelligence that they were going in, to aid, abet and foment the
cause of Turkmen people and intercepted them. That could still happen by
the way, even though the US government has told them not to do it. The
Turks are itching to move in, not just to help their Turkmen brothers,
but to take over the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul which have 40 percent of
the Iraqi oil wealth. But even if that doesn’t happen, there’s another
possible problem. The Iraqi central government in Baghdad could still
collude with the Turkish government and the Iranian government, because
their common desire—their happiness almost—could be said to lie in the
misery of the Kurds.
One of the great coincidences here is that you went to UCSB, and so did
Mark Grossman, now third in command at the State Department and very
influential relative to Turkey. Did you two go the same time and have
you spoken since?
No. He was at UCSB before me. And I doubt he’ll want to see me. He
speaks Turkish and he’s viewed as a friend of Turkey. He has in power
now. I met him once at a Greek gathering. I spoke to him in Turkish. He
acknowledged me. He knew who I was. I extended my hand, he took it, and
then he made it clear that he did not want to talk to me.
But I remain hopeful. In the short term, I have felt that 9-11 has put
all of the Middle East in a bad light for the children of this country.
But in the long run, I think the children of this country will pay more
attention to the Middle East and the plight of the Kurds will benefit
from the close scrutiny.
Listening to you, it’s easy to imagine that even though you’re Kurdish
nationalist if you ever went home to live in a Kurdish village, you
might not be very comfortable there.
For 23 years I haven’t been able to go back, literally. I’d like to go
back. I may find it constraining, but I think I could also help lift my
people up with the experiences I’ve had here. The problem we face is a
very dangerous one. For example, my mom and dad don’t speak a word of
Turkish. I speak both Turkish and Kurdish. None of my nephews and nieces
speaks a word of Kurdish. In one generation, the Turkish government has
managed to separate in an indigenous population—not a migrant
population—the grandfather from the grandson, the grandmother from the
granddaughter. That is a heinous crime. It’s my duty and responsibility
to remind you that on our watch, in our times, something terribly wrong
is going on.
_______________________
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
HOME
By PATRICK E. TYLER
WASHINGTON,
Aug. 14 — The most powerful Kurdish chieftain in northern Iraq, Massoud Barzani,
refused the Bush administration's invitation to attend the meeting of Iraqi
opposition figures at the White House last week, Kurdish and administration
officials said today.
The absence of Mr. Barzani, whose father, Mustafa Barzani, led the largest
Kurdish rebellion of the last century and died in exile in the United States,
was a blow to Bush administration officials who had orchestrated the meeting in
part to demonstrate that Iraqi opposition forces were unified behind a new
campaign to oust Saddam Hussein.
In a feverish effort to entice Mr. Barzani to leave northern Iraq and travel
to Washington, the administration offered to send a private airplane to
southeastern Turkey to pick him up, according to Kurdish and American officials.
In an additional inducement, American officials said that if Mr. Barzani
would travel with his longtime rival, Jalal Talabani, on an American aircraft,
it was likely the two Kurdish leaders would be treated to a meeting with
President Bush. In the end, Mr. Talabani came by himself and the conference was
hosted by Vice President Dick Cheney on video link from Wyoming. The explanation
given for Mr. Barzani's refusal to attend involved both logistical problems and
a response to broken American promises.
An administration official said, "Barzani really more so than anyone is the
elder statesman of the Iraqi opposition and we did try to arrange for him to be
here, and obviously we did not succeed."
Mr. Barzani's decision to stay in Iraq indicates that a crisis may be looming
with Turkey, administration officials said. Turkish officials have warned that
they are prepared to go to war to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from declaring a kind
of mini-Kurdish state within Iraq.
The Turkish government fears that such a state with control over key oil
resources around Kirkuk might incite Turkey's repressed Kurdish population to
rebel.
"We are by no means finished discussing things with the Turks," one official
said. Kurdish officials said the American dialogue with Ankara about the
prospect for an American-led military campaign against Iraq had been far more
contentious than the Bush administration had conveyed publicly.
In Mr. Barzani's absence, Mr. Talabani has been more receptive to joining
with the United States in a war against Baghdad. He caused a stir Monday when he
offered in one television interview to turn the Kurdish region of northern Iraq
into an American military base against Baghdad, and then retracted his statement
saying his remarks had been misinterpreted.
Pentagon planners have identified the Kurdish fighters as a credible force to
work with American Special Forces, much as the Northern Alliance did in
Afghanistan, to attack Iraqi troops, identify targets for American aircraft and
conduct other guerrilla operations. Last month, a Pentagon team secretly visited
northern Iraq to inspect the Kurdish militia, one official said.
Washington's effort to assemble the anti-Hussein coalition was devised to
demonstrate to reluctant European and Middle Eastern allies that the United
States had recruited Iraqi opposition leaders who not only command military
forces on the battlefield and who could participate in an American attack on
Baghdad, but who could also, along with other opposition groups, step in to
create a viable and democratic political structure to replace the current
government.
Mr. Barzani sent a representative to Washington to tell the Bush
administration that it had failed to follow up on promises made last April when
Mr. Barzani was spirited into the United States on a Central Intelligence Agency
flight for a meeting with top C.I.A., Pentagon and State Department officials.
The officials had been courting Mr. Barzani for months in hopes of recruiting
70,000 Kurdish fighters under his control and that of Mr. Talabani, for any
military assault on Iraq.
Chief among the broken promises, he said, was Washington's failure to address
the possibility that Mr. Hussein might launch a pre-emptive strike on the Kurds
before the administration had built up its forces in the region.
On Saturday, Mr. Cheney reiterated that if Iraq attacked the Kurds, the
United States would respond at a time and place of its choosing, according to
administration officials and opposition leaders. The Kurds want a more immediate
response to protect the three million civilians in their towns and villages.
Mr. Talabani says he is equally concerned about the seriousness with which
the Bush administration is proceeding. "They promised us training, equipment and
money and they didn't do anything up to now," Mr. Talabani said. The Kurdish
officials also requested tens of thousands of gas masks and mobile clinics to
treat chemical weapons victims in case Mr. Hussein should lash out at the
Kurdish population with poison gases, according to Mr. Barzani's representative,
Hoshyar Zebari. Iraq used chemical weapons on Iran at the end of the Iran-Iraq
war, waged from 1981 to 1988.
Mr. Barzani's reticence about openly declaring hostility toward Baghdad stems
in part from his extensive business dealings with members of Mr. Hussein's
family, where the illicit trade in oil, smuggled cigarettes and other goods is
creating great wealth in the Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and among the
Iraqi elites still holding power in Baghdad. But Mr. Zebari said that this trade
had come to an end as Mr. Hussein had routed much of the traffic in illicit
goods through Syria.
Mr. Barzani's aides said that an increasingly bitter dispute with Turkey was
one of the reasons that caused him to stay home.
"We are experiencing serious difficulties with Turkey; they are playing
divide and conquer," Mr. Zebari said. Turkey this month suddenly canceled Mr.
Barzani's diplomatic passport and made it difficult for American military
officials at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to provide air transport to Mr.
Barzani. Mr. Zebari said today that Mr. Barzani could have traveled by way of
Syria. "But he has his calculations and he has a number of questions about why
the American officials promised so many things and yet nothing was met," Mr.
Zebari said.
HOME
Unfinished Business
By: Ralph Peters
Ralph Peters is a retired military officer and the author of "Beyond
Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
New York post
May 28, 2003 -- PERHAPS the greatest error U.S. authorities in Iraq
could make would be to underestimate the importance of the recent
attacks on our soldiers. Those low-level ambushes against American
patrols are key elements in a strategy to drive out the U.S. military.
Those who profited from Saddam Hussein's tyranny - primarily Sunni
Muslim Arabs from Iraq's mid-section - know they don't have much of a
future in Iraq if Americans design the new government. They also know
that the U.S. military cannot be defeated on the battlefield. But they
take inspiration from previous terrorist successes against our troops.
Make no mistake: The diehard Iraqis are not going to win. We are. But
the desperate hope of Saddam's disciples is to continue to kill American
soldiers in ones and twos, or perhaps a few dozen in a major bombing,
until the "soft" citizens and leaders in the United States decide the
game isn't worth the cost of playing.
These Iraqis base their strategy on our withdrawal from Somalia, after
we suffered only a handful of casualties, and on our pullback from
Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. They have
convinced themselves that Americans cannot tolerate a long bloodletting.
They do not have the measure of our president or our people - especially
after 9/11. But killing Americans, one after another, is the last chance
they have. Instead of letting them set the price of our presence, we
need to set the price of their continued resistance.
The new head of the U.S. occupation, L. Paul Bremer III, seems to have
the right stuff, but he must beware any voices that tell him we
shouldn't be too strict with the Iraqis.
We are still at war. When we are attacked, we need to behave
accordingly.
There must be penalties, not only for enemy assassins, but also for
population centers that harbor them. We do not need to deter or even
capture enemy gunmen. We need to kill them.
When a town nourishes regime thugs in its midst and refuses to surrender
them, the population must be deprived of privileges and even basic
comfort. At a time when we are still trying to keep the electricity on
in sections of Baghdad, we must not be afraid to turn it off elsewhere.
We are not obligated to comfort murderous enemies.
Of course, the same "experts" who claimed we would suffer massive
casualties in the war will warn against alienating the Iraqi population.
But part of the Iraqi population - a minority - is irredeemably
alienated from us. We need to stop talking about "Iraqis" and think in
terms of Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds and other minorities.
Of the three major groups, we are least likely to make progress with the
Sunni Arabs, who long dominated Iraq with guns and torture. Yet our
continued insistence that Iraq must remain one unified country is a
reward for the Sunnis who supported Saddam and who now are killing
Americans, hoping to re-establish their dominance.
On the other hand, Iraq's Shi'ite majority excites too much worry. We
hear only the loudest voices, those of extremist clerics, but do not
have a sense of what the average Shi'ite wants from a future government.
Elections will tell. And if Iraq's Shi'ites vote for a religious party,
well, that's democracy, folks.
Fundamentalism in the Islamic world is a disease akin to alcoholism. You
cannot simply talk people out of it. They have to hit bottom before they
can begin to recover. Iran has hit bottom: The majority of Iranians want
no further part of theocratic rule. An Iraqi Shi'ite experiment with
theocracy would have a much shorter life expectancy than the failing
regime next door.
The Kurds, on the other hand, are the wronged party. Long oppressed by
Iraq's Arabs, they have been slaughtered, gassed, tortured and driven
from their homes. Yet, over the past decade, they proved that they could
do what not a single Arab state has done: Establish a popular government
and a market-based economy.
Our nonsense about being even-handed in Iraq is a liberal prejudice, not
a practical policy. Fairness to butchers makes little sense. Instead of
droning on about the integrity of the Iraqi state, we should make it
very clear to the spoiled Sunnis that, if they will not adjust
themselves to the rule of law and democracy, we will hold plebiscites to
decide whether or not Iraq's various ethnic and religious groups wish to
remain together.
This is a powerful threat, because neither the Kurds nor the Shi'ites
would hesitate to split with their Sunni Arab oppressors. And the Kurds
and the Shi'ites would have the oil. The Sunnis would have dust. It is
the Sunni Arabs, among whom our enemies thrive, who need Iraq kept
whole.
Yes, an integral Iraq would have practical advantages over smaller
states. The same might have been said of the former Yugoslavia, or even
of the Soviet Union. We live in an age of the breakdown of old empires
and phony states, of the emergence of the popular will. The harder you
try to arrest the process, the higher the price in blood.
In Iraq, our fallback plan should be a free and independent Kurdistan,
guaranteed by U.S. military strength. Yes, such a Kurdish state would be
landlocked - at least for now - but so is Switzerland. The Kurds have
earned their freedom, not least by fighting beside us, and we should not
hesitate to favor them.
We need to knock off the nonsense about fairness in Kirkuk and Mosul.
Such "fairness" is unjust. Saddam drove out the Kurds. Historically,
those oil-rich cities were Kurdish. We should allow them to become
Kurdish again.
The Kurds desperately want to succeed and to be our allies. The Sunnis
are killing our soldiers. The jury's still out on the Shi'ites. But we
would do all Iraq a favor by making it very clear to the Sunni Arab
center that there will be a severe price to pay for murdering Americans.
HOME
Zazaki at MIT, Boston, Massachusetts
May 31, 2003
Diane Edgecomb
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
Z Magazine Online
June 2003
Volume 16 Number 6
------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Politics
Kurds at the Nexus of
Global Politics
How the U.S. uses one genocide to justify another
by Jesse Benjamin
for online version of this article:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Jun2003/benjamin0603.html
Kurds once again have made a brief, if fleeting, appearance in the news.
For Kurds, however, and those who follow Kurdish issues with concern,
this revived attention is shallow in both its commitment and in its
analytic depth. Colorful pictures of Kurds fleeing in panic from the
threat of renewed chemical weapons attacks at the onset of the war
showed Kurds as victims, while colorful photos of peshmergah fighters
alongside U.S. Marines confirm other aspects of the typical orientalist
stereotypes.
The truth is that the story of the Kurds is far too damning of U.S. and
Western complicity in one of the 20th century’s worst cases of ethnic
cleansing and genocide to ever be a part of mainstream media. The truth
of Kurdish history would get in the way of the current U.S. regime’s
narrative of justifications for its war against Iraq and its
neo-colonial pretensions throughout the Middle East. The Kurds are
particularly troublesome now in the post-war articulation of power in
the region, especially to the extent that this most deserving of people
will again be left out of the super-power politics that determine the
region’s fate.
Kurds appear in Western discourse, when they do at all, as seemingly
inert pre-historic (or non-historic) objects amidst the world of states
and geo-power. The Kurds are the racialized victim of much of the
“Middle East,” which is itself the racialized victim of U.S. and Western
imperialism. As such, this twice marginalized people, doubly erased and
oppressed, remain one of the most enigmatic and obscure communities in
the world.
The recent U.S. stand-off with Turkey, and the splitting of NATO and the
UN from which this occasioned, are of historic import. The first round
of U.S.-Turkish negotiations was revealing. The U.S. promised first $5,
then $15, and finally $30 billion in “aid” and military assistance to
Turkey, in exchange for using Turkey as a staging ground from which to
launch troops into Iraq as a northern front. U.S. military planners saw
this as crucial because this is the closest border to the main Iraqi oil
fields, which are, after all, the real strategic objective. Also
negotiated, but far less discussed, was the issue of Turkish military
presence in Iraq, not just in policing border refugee camps, but also
their explicitly stated desire to enter deep into Iraqi territory to
seize the oil fields.
While it seemed at first that the U.S. wanted to use Turkish forces as
shock troops during the campaign and as an administrative buffer
afterwards, they balked at Turkey’s greater ambitions. Turkey is caught
here between not only the U.S. and the EEC, but also between the West
and the Arab world. As Mohammad Noureddine, in Beirut’s Daily Star put
it, Turkey is “between an American rock and a European hard place.”
Yet, the driving force in their at times bizarre policy decisions
appears to be the stateless Kurds in the southeast of their nation. We
repeatedly heard the media mantra, ostensibly true, that Turkey’s
primary concern was that if Saddam Hussein fell and Iraqi Kurds achieved
an independent Kurdish state, Turkish Kurds might be inspired to attain
fuller rights, or even to join such a state. Noureddine was correct when
he stated on the eve of war, “It sometimes seems that the keys to war
and peace are in Ankara’s hands rather than in those of Washington and
Baghdad.” Ankara’s decisions seem to be based on their calculations
about the Kurds. Most Western observers thought that the massive
protests in Turkey wouldn't alter its support of the U.S. plan,
especially with all the money involved. Thus, when the Turkish
Parliament failed to give the outright majority needed to authorize the
U.S. invasion plans, many were stunned. The Bush administration went
into frantic spin control and floated various Plan B scenarios and
withdrew its cash offers almost entirely, while an armada of personnel
and military equipment languished and was finally transferred out of
Turkey’s Mediterranean ports. The planned second vote of Parliament
never materialized and as the war began in earnest, Turkey gave,
retracted, and then gave again permission only to use its airspace for
U.S. military fly-overs. This time around, the U.S. would not even be
allowed to use Incirlik airforce base, which was central to its first
Gulf War campaign. Last year, the Bush administration tried
unsuccessfully to broker a deal to purchase Incirlik for its own private
use so that they could avoid just such a problem in the future.
The U.S. has invested billions of dollars over five decades cultivating
Turkey as a key strategic ally in the region, so it is curious that
Turkey should diverge so momentously from its senior partner at this
particular moment. Along with U.S. military “aid” came strong Israeli
support and ties that helped Turkey in its ethnic cleansing campaigns
and probably the capture of Ocalan in Kenya. With the capture of
Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the main guerilla opposition (the PKK) to
Turkish domination, perhaps Turkey felt it could do without the U.S. aid
package it garnered throughout the 1990s. This theory aside, why was
Turkey willing to forsake the U.S.-Israel nexus, with its “valuable”
lessons in repressing Palestinians? Perhaps it was throwing in its lot
with Europe, now that the latter’s standoff with the U.S. has gone so
public, and its EEC membership is in the balance. Or perhaps its single-
minded obsession with repressing Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere is
driving Turkey to jeopardize both its alliance with the U.S. and Israel
and its campaign to enter the European Union. Some flatly suggest that
Turkey is no longer vital in the post-Cold War world and is being
discarded.
Turkey’s close U.S. ties explain why few media pundits here took note
when Turkey openly demanded a military role in northern (i.e., Kurdish)
Iraq. Turkey made plain its intention to “disarm Iraqi Kurds,” seize
control of the oil fields, and occupy or rule northern Iraq, if not
annex it entirely. Recently, Turkey’s leadership could be heard invoking
a greatly exaggerated Turkmen presence and imperilment in northern Iraq
as a pretext for an impending intervention. Crazy as all this is, it
should have caused a strenuous reaction from the U.S. Wasn’t the breach
of the supposedly inviolable laws of sovereignty the thin U.S. pretext
for the first Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait? How could sovereignty
be a sacred principle at one moment and, at the next, simply a pawn to
be traded for greater U.S. interests? Yet, it was reported that part of
the final fly-over agreement between Turkey and the U.S. included vague
provisions for a Turkish invasion of Iraq in the event that Iraqi
Kurdish forces seized control of the oil fields around Mosul and Kirkuk.
So, while President Bush states publicly that he warned Turkey to stay
clear of this conflict, his Administration has already agreed to plans
to the contrary, should Kurds finally achieve a resources base from
which to become a viable entity on the world stage of nations.
Denied a country in the post-World War I division of the Ottoman Empire,
Kurds were briefly promised a country by President Woodrow Wilson, but
then were left out in the cold as the former colonial powers (France and
Britain) drew up artificial lines of control for their future
neo-colonial predation of the region’s resources and labor. The Kurds
remained stateless “minorities” in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and
Armenia. As such, they have been subjected to horrible repression,
countless human rights abuses, and genocide not only in Iraq, Iran, and
Syria, but also in Turkey—and the world community has been largely
unable to intervene because this was seen as “the sovereign affairs of
other nations.” This at least, has been the case when those nations were
U.S. allies, such as Iraq in the 1980s, and Turkey all along. So much
so, that the U.S. has gone to the extent of denying atrocities and
genocide in both countries until, in the case of Iraq, Hussein made the
transition from ally to enemy, at which point it not only became
possible, but necessary to invoke Kurdish suffering there.
The Oil Fields of Kirkuk and Mosul
Iraq’s main oil fields, around the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, are not
only among the world’s largest, but are also the world’s most
productive. While the biggest fields elsewhere (Saudi Arabia, for
example) passed their peak extraction capacity years ago and are
currently declining, Iraq’s major oil fields have decades of ascendant
productive potential. This, along with the fact that there are still
compliant regimes in Saudi Arabia and many other major oil producing
nations, explains why Iraq was the target of the moment. The question
for more than a year has been: will other Middle East governments be
targeted for “regime change” after Iraq and what will be the nature of
post-invasion U.S. power and presence?
The key here is the hidden ethnic history of this vital oil producing
region. Recently, one could see Peter Jennings or some other anchor
nightly discussing an ethnic map of Iraq: Sunni Muslims in the middle,
Shi’a Muslims to the south, and Kurds in the far north and northeast.
According to these maps, the oil fields are in the Sunni regions in
which Hussein’s party is anchored. These maps, however, represent the
engineered results of 20th century ethnic cleansing campaigns, begun by
the British and continued and intensified under Hussein’s Iraq. The
carefully kept secret is that the major oil fields are located in
historically Kurdish regions. This, at least, is the case, if the oil
fields are to be allocated along linear, majority-rules ethnic lines.
Before the 20th century colonial and post-colonial ethnic cleansing of
this area, eradicating or relocating its Kurdish majority, the region
was one of largely harmonious multi-ethnic coexistence between Kurds,
Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Turkmen, Jews, and others. Here, as in most of
the world, ethnic or national conflicts in their modern sense were
occasioned by Western invention and intervention.
As the current war arrived, we saw elements of this cultural coexistence
in the fact that Kurdish political parties in northern Iraq were
collecting names of defectors from the Iraqi army who wanted to be
protected when they surrendered. Many of the surrender plans involved
deals cut with rural Kurds, so that Iraqi soldiers and intelligence
officers could obtain civilian clothes and shelter by slipping into
Kurdish homes until official surrender could be arranged. As much as
media pundits love to speak of “primordial tribal hatred,” these
actions, as in Gulf War I, speak to the existence of inter-ethnic and
inter-denominational alliances that are still the historic norm in the
region. Kurds have great reason to hate their tormenters, but they can
see the difference between the regime and its elite commanders, on the
one hand, and the rank and file soldiers and civilians swept up in the
ethnic maelstrom of Iraqi politics and survival, on the other. However,
while one might hear brief discussion of potential Kurdish involvement
in a post-Hussein Iraqi government, it is close to impossible to hear of
Kurdish entitlement to the oil wells of central and northern Iraq.
The Politics of Post-Modern Genocide
There is a constant fear that the justified resistance of Kurds there
will lead to the creation of a state not only for Iraqi Kurds, but also
for Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere. This is why Turkey lobbies the U.S.
so persistently. This is why the Kurds are only brought out for
discussion when it is the case of their victimization at the hands of
then U.S. protégé, Saddam Hussein; only then, when it fits the needs of
U.S. war-making, in this case the need to make a case for its first
strike against Iraq. Ironically, whereas the nation-state status of
Kuwait allowed for a thin U.S. pretext in the Gulf War I, it is the lack
of Kurdish statehood that makes them a less viable legitimation for U.S.
imperial intervention. That, and the fact of U.S. shared responsibility
for Kurdish suffering.
Turkey’s history of ethnic cleansing and genocide is rooted in its
particular brand of virulent and racially supremacist nationalism. When
Mustafa Kemal Attaturk founded the modern nation of Turkey, he did so on
the foundation of genocide against Armenians—a genocide that is yet to
be recognized by much of global public opinion or the U.S. Congress. In
addition to Armenians, almost a millions Kurds were deported or
massacred at that time, and more than a million Greeks were also forced
from Anatolia, in a broad attempt to create a racially “pure” Turkish
society. Nevertheless, Kurdish leaders and fighters were instrumental in
securing Turkey’s borders from various would-be usurpers. Their reward
for this help was the mass execution of its leadership, reneged
promises, and ongoing repression. After the Armenians, Kurds became the
primary targets of nationalist terror, as their “stubbornly” held
separate identity posed a threat to Turkey’s vision of a monocultural
secular society.
The ensuing decades saw dozens of uprisings, all of which were
ruthlessly crushed, until guerillas asserted themselves in the mountains
and engaged with the Turkish army in the 1980s. This cycle reached its
apex in the 1980s and 1990s, when Turkey’s scorched earth policy
destroyed more than 3,000 villages, forcing more than 2 million Kurds
into internal exile or permanent refugee status. The penalty for
returning to villages remains torture or death, as recent killings by
Turkish military and paramilitary forces have shown. Kurds are prevented
from using their language, naming their children Kurdish names, wearing
Kurdish colors— even the traffic lights have been changed to red,
yellow, and blue because red, yellow, and green are the Kurdish national
colors.
Turkey’s efforts to annihilate Kurdish culture—it refers to Kurds only
as “mountain Turks”—has been repudiated by all of the world’s respected
human rights organizations, notably Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and even the U.S. State Department Reports on Human Rights, as
well as by numerous European Union representatives and bodies. Turkey’s
efforts, including the mass transfer of Kurdish children to boarding
schools where they are “decultured” and raised as Turks, constitute in
the language of the Geneva Conventions Against Genocide acts of cultural
genocide aimed at reduction or elimination of a distinct group of
people. The U.S. provided more than 80 percent of Turkey’s arms during
the height of this repression, and so is directly complicit in this
under-reported, but brutal policy of ethnic cleansing.
In 1977, Mehdi Zana, a courageous Kurdish leader who emerged from the
grassroots was elected Mayor of Diyarbakir, the largest city and capital
of Turkish Kurdistan. He was soon arrested and imprisoned for more than
a decade and suffered unspeakable torture and humiliation that will
affect him for the rest of his life, now spent in exile from his native
land. This is recounted in his testimonial Prison No. 5: Eleven Years in
Turkish Jails, with a preface by Elie Wiesel. The main charge was
“separatism,” as evidenced according to his “trial” by the fact that he
spoke to his aids in the Kurdish tongue, their only language. Even with
the support of European presidents and countless influential people, his
plight was not alleviated for more than ten years. Even now he is
separated from his family, as well as his people and his homeland.
Similarly, Leyla Zani (Mehdi is her husband) became increasingly
radicalized and she and five other Kurds were elected to Parliament in
1991, but soon after were stripped of parliamentary immunity and
arrested. Their “crimes,” also under the label of “separatism,”
consisted of wearing Kurdish colors in their hair, speaking the Kurdish
language, and testifying before Europe and the U.S. Congress about human
rights abuses in Kurdish areas. They were given 15-year sentences and
remain in jail. Leyla Zana has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize
and received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, as well as
numerous other awards and honors. Her story is chronicled in her
Writings From Prison.
At the back of Mehdi Zana’s blood curdling account of some of the
tortures he endured is a powerful essay by Kendal Nezan, a Kurdish
activist living in exile in France. This Kurdish history is the single
best short scholarly account of Kurdish politics and history and is
invaluable for all activists wishing to understand the Kurdish place in
world politics. Even more indispensable for U.S.-based activists is the
office of AKIN, the American Kurdish Information Network, founded and
operated almost single-handedly by Kurdish exile and Gandhian pacifist,
Kani Xulam. AKIN is based in Washington, DC and is the only significant
Kurdish organization in the U.S. responsible for lobbying on Capital
Hill. Xulam organizes protests and rallies—disseminating information,
working with Kurdish refugees throughout the country, and traveling
widely to give talks on college campuses and at conferences and events.
Whatever happens to the Kurds at this most hopeful and most perilous
moment, the history of suffering must eventually be addressed. Kurds
often discuss their position in relation to that of the Palestinians,
saying things like: “When the Palestinian question is answered, then it
will be the Kurdish turn.”
Yet, if the startling Turkish fall from U.S. graces proves in the end
not to be a mirage, some are now asking if an emergent Kurdistan might
function more like Israel, as a U.S. ally and base in the region. Such
comparisons are too loaded and complex to make lightly, but the paradigm
questions remain real. Kurds and Palestinians, like other oppressed and
stateless people, desire some of the national privileges accorded Jews
via Israel in the wake of World War II—a nation-state, a safe haven from
persecution, the chance for an economy.
After 80 years of persecution, the present conjuncture does not offer
particularly clear paths toward liberation for Kurds, but nevertheless
Kurds will undoubtedly engage what opportunities there are to the best
of their advantage. Will the people of the world, especially
progressives, support them?
Anti-war activists sickened by the war and the genocidal sanctions
against the Iraqi people should be horror-struck by the contemptuous use
of Kurdish suffering to justify Iraqi torment. We must not accept a
world order that justifies one genocide by the use of another—genocides
which it alternately covers up, supports, and/or deplores for its own
ends. Though it will undoubtedly make our organizing efforts more
complex, activists must directly address the Kurdish issue, now more
than ever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse Benjamin is an assistant professor in the Department of Human
Relations and Multicultural Education at St. Cloud State University,
Minnesota.
HOME
____________________
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
How friendship helped heal
a victim of war
By Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff, 7/4/2003
ROOKLINE -- The first nine machine gun bullets ripped through his right
arm, turning it into a bloody stump. The next blast cut into his left
leg and lower back. By the time Karzan Mahmoud crawled under an SUV
bleeding from 23 bullet wounds to his slender body, he was preparing to
die. Mahmoud was a driver for Barham Salih, a Kurdish leader in
Northeast Iraq. The assassin, who had pulled the trigger from 20 feet
away, was attempting to kill Salih. He failed, but the April 2002 attack
took the lives of seven men -- two assassins and five of the prime
minister's aides. When he arrived at a hospital fading in and out of
consciousness, the doctors agreed: Mahmoud wouldn't last six hours.
But sitting on porch in Brookline recently, with a black ''Boston''
sweatshirt covering the river of scars that runs over his body, Mahmoud
grinned impishly and -- through a translator -- said simply: ''It was
God's will that I lived.''
Mahmoud's survival launched an improbable odyssey that stretched across
two continents, 40 years of friendship, and into the offices of some of
the most powerful politicians and skilled surgeons in the world.
''This is an Easter story,'' said Mary Brabeck, a dean at Boston
College, one of Mahmoud's many benefactors in Brookline, and the
homeowner whose porch he was sitting on. ''This is a story about coming
back from the dead. It's a whole new life he's been given.''
Mahmoud's journey really began six months prior to the shooting, when
Kevin McKiernan, an ABC television producer reporting on the Kurds,
needed a driver. Salih, the pro-Western prime minster of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, offered him Mahmoud's services. Though he spoke no
English besides ''no problem,'' Mahmoud soon proved to be a master at
solving problems in a particularly complicated corner of the world.
Months later, after the shooting and several botched surgeries in a
Turkish military hospital, during which he refused to allow doctors to
amputate his arm and leg, Mahmoud limped into McKiernan's hotel and
asked him if he still needed a driver. At the time, his body was bent in
pain. He was fighting a massive bone infection and could only move two
fingers.
''He looked like hell,'' said McKiernan. ''And he asked me to help
him.''
McKiernan hired Mahmoud and then taped his friend's X-rays to his hotel
window and photographed them. Late in November, he e-mailed the images
to Michael Brabeck, a doctor at Brigham and Women's Hospital and
McKiernan's friend since the two attended high school in St. Paul.
Brabeck told McKiernan that he pitied the person whose body was depicted
in the X-rays, but he didn't think there was much he could do to help.
Still, with more then 40 years of friendship serving as leverage,
McKiernan asked Brabeck to try.
Brabeck, a soft-spoken man with kind, blue eyes, has a long history of
international pro bono work. But his strength, he admits, is as healer,
not as lobbyist. When describing the scale and prestige of the medical
establishment in Boston, he calls himself a ''minnow in an ocean.''
The winds of fortune, however, were blowing at Mahmoud's back. Days
after the e-mail arrived, the secretary to Dr. Gary Gottlieb, president
of Brigham and Women's, invited Brabeck and some of his colleagues to
breakfast to recognize them for their volunteer work late last year.
Brabeck seized the opportunity to lobby for Mahmoud. He wrote drafts of
proposals and for weeks fretted about what to say. Finally, in January,
Brabeck made his pitch with the understanding that cases like Mahmoud's
generally don't get a second look from hospital officials. Ill or
injured children from developing countries will sometimes receive free
treatment at top Boston-area hospitals. But soldiers from war-torn
regions of the world ususally do not. A spokesman for Brigham and
Women's said he doesn't remember the last case accepted from overseas.
Gottlieb said he would think about the proposal and and get back to
Brabeck in 48 hours. After private donations were lined up (the amount
of which hospital officials would not discuss) Mahmoud was accepted for
treatment.
Now all he had to do was show up in Boston for surgery. But since Kurds
don't have a country and Iraq almost never officially issues them
passports, getting Mahmoud out of northern Iraq would be difficult under
the best of circumstances. As the war between the United States and Iraq
approached, and the borders to Iran, Syria, and Turkey were sealed, it
became nearly impossible.
Fearing he'd never be able to get Mahmoud out, McKiernan lobbied Salih
for help. While he was in Washington, Salih asked State Department
officials to grant Mahmoud a temporary visa. They agreed. And a day
after the war started, and with the Turkish border closed, a passport of
dubious authenticity bearing Saddam Hussein's image in one pocket and a
letter from the State Department in another, Mahmoud was deposited
safely on the other side of the border.
''It was a home run moment,'' McKiernan said from his home in Santa
Barbara, Calif. ''I just couldn't believe it had happened.''
When she met the crippled, sickly man in Washington, Salih's wife began
to cry, McKiernan said. The price Mahmoud had paid to help save her
husband's life was etched in the lines of his face and reflected in his
hobbling gait. He was 25 years old. He looked 40.
Three months, two surgeries, and countless hours of rehabilitation
later, Mahmoud walked onto the Brabeck's patio without a limp and
gingerly held a pen in a hand some of the finest surgeons in the world
had labored to reconstruct.
In a few weeks he will be return to northern Iraq. He wants a wife, he
said, a country, and help for the thousands of others in his homeland
who are injured and maimed.
''We need doctors,'' he said again through his translator. ''And medical
books.''
Then, quietly, he added: ''Please tell all the people who did this for
me, `Thank you.' ''
This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 7/4/2003.
HOME
____________________
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
BREAK UP IRAQ NOW!
By RALPH PETERS
NewYorkPost
July 10, 2003
PRESIDENT Bush consistently has done the right thing by ignoring the
nay-sayers before, during and after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet he's in
danger of making the same mistake his father did at the end of Desert
Storm - doing only half the job.
Just as the failure to press on to Baghdad in 1991 left Iraq and the
entire region with cancerous problems, today's failure to recognize the
artificial, unjust nature of the Iraqi state promises enduring
discontent.
Will American troops need to return to Iraq a third time, in another
decade?
Speaking of Iraq as a single, integrated country is a form of lying. Its
borders were drawn by grasping European diplomats almost a century ago,
with no regard for the wishes - or rivalries - of the local populations.
Today, the Iraq we're trying to herd back together consists of three
distinct nations caged under a single, bloodstained flag. Our problems
are with only one of those nations, the Sunni Arab minority west and
north of Baghdad.
Favored by the British, the Sunni Arabs took power at Iraq's formation
and maintained it through massacre, torture and imprisonment. Saddam
Hussein was the ultimate expression of Sunni Arab tyranny over Iraq's
Kurds and Shi'ites.
By holding Iraq together with U.S. troops, we merely encourage the Sunni
Arabs - who remain hostile to our presence, whose extremists attack our
soldiers and who still intend to recapture control of the entire
country.
We are punishing our friends, rewarding our enemies and alienating the
neutral. President Bush needs to perform radical surgery on Iraq now,
while the world remains in a funk over our success. We still have a
window through which we can thrust major reforms. But the window is
closing. Defending the status quo is deadly folly.
The break-up of Iraq should proceed in two stages.
First, we should provisionally divide the country into a federation of
three states, giving the Sunni Arabs one last chance to embrace reform.
* One state would encompass the Shi'ite region in the south,
encompassing all of the southern oil fields.
* The second would be an expanded Kurdistan, including historically
Kurdish Kirkuk and Mosul, as well as Iraq's northern oil fields.
* The third would be a rump Sunni Arab state sandwiched between the
other two.
* Baghdad would become an autonomous district.
Stop worrying about Shi'ite extremism. If we mean what we say about
democracy, the Shi'ites should be free to choose whomever they want as
their leaders - even fundamentalists. Although the odds of theocratic
rule emerging or enduring in southern Iraq are lower than the media
imply, the Shi'ites, who long have been oppressed and persecuted, should
be free to determine their own future.
Democracy means letting people make their own mistakes. We've made a few
ourselves. The only thing upon which we should insist is strict
supervision to ensure an honest vote.
We must, however, make it clear to Iran that meddling will not be
tolerated.
As this column consistently points out, the Kurds deserve freedom and a
state of their own. After the Jews and Armenians, they have been the
most persecuted ethnic group of the last hundred years, always denied an
independent homeland, shot, gassed, driven from their homes - and even
victimized for the use of their native dialects. The world's willingness
to look away from the long tragedy of the Kurdish people is inexcusable.
And consider how strategically helpful a Kurdish state, reliant on U.S.
military guarantees, might be. If the Kurdish people agreed to host our
forces, we could abandon our bases in Turkey, the use of which has been
restricted almost to worthlessness. New airbases amid a welcoming
population would be quite a change in the region. Even the Saudis and
the Gulf Arabs would be on notice.
And what about Turkey? Our "long-time ally"?
I have no personal grudge against Turkey. On the contrary, I've visited
the country many times and even took my wife there on our honeymoon.
Istanbul remains one of my favorite cities. I've argued for years that
Turkey was a vital ally.
But times change. Turkish treachery on the eve of our recent war cannot
be overlooked.
Startled by the swiftness of our victory, the Turks immediately assured
us that it was all a minor misunderstanding, that Turkey wished to
remain the best of friends. Yet Turkey is again becoming the "sick man
of Europe," plagued by ineradicable corruption, growing Islamic
radicalism and a self-destructive military.
The result of our renewed friendship? Last week, U.S. forces had to
break up a secret Turkish military operation in northern Iraq, arresting
a dozen of Ankara's special operations troops. The Turkish mission? To
assassinate the senior Kurdish leader in Kirkuk. His crime? Cooperating
with the Americans.
The Turkish chief of staff, Gen. Ozkok, threw a public tantrum,
insisting that we had created a grave crisis by busting his assassins.
Sorry, pal. You created the crisis. And you just blew any chance you and
your government had of rebuilding bridges to Washington that will bear
any real weight.
The Turkish military's scheme to undercut our occupation underscores the
need for the Bush administration to stop thinking small when it comes to
nation-building. Instead of just changing the oil in the old jalopy,
it's time for a fleet of new cars. An independent Kurdistan should roll
off the assembly line first.
The second stage of the division of Iraq would kick in if the Sunni
Arabs still refuse to cooperate: We would declare the interim Iraqi
Federation dissolved, creating three fully independent states in its
place, with the Kurdish and Shi'ite states meeting along the Iranian
border to guarantee the Kurds a corridor to the sea for their oil, gas
and trade.
Then leave the Sunni Arabs to rot.
Oh, and there just might be a third step down the road, too. We should
not miss any opportunity to support the longing for freedom of the tens
of millions of Kurds held hostage behind European-imposed borders in
Turkey, Syria and Iran. For Americans serious about human rights and
freedom, Greater Kurdistan must be a long-range goal.
Military operations alone cannot change the Middle East. The European
legacy of phony borders must be demolished, starting in Iraq. Don't
betray our troops again by leaving the job unfinished to please our
enemies.
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Beyond Terror:
Strategy in a Changing World."
______________________ HOME___
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
Declaration of Conscience
July 24, 2003
Whereas a native population of thirty to forty million Kurds still lives
in their ancestral homeland known as Kurdistan, approximating the size
of Texas or France, situated in the heart of the Middle East, as
attested by impartial historians and geographers of the world;
Whereas the Kurds and Kurdistan, once partitioned and administered by
the comparatively benign rulers of the Ottoman and Persian Empires under
policies respecting Kurdish linguistic and cultural rights, became the
spoils of war in the course of the World War I and were partitioned
again by the British, French, and Russian colonialists, placing them at
the mercy of these powers and of the predatory modern nationalisms of
the Turks and the Persians;
Whereas the forces of predatory nationalism, imperial domination, and
racism plunged the world into two deadly world wars in the last century,
prompting former President Woodrow Wilson to declare his support, in the
course of the first one, in the Twelfth of his famous Fourteen Points
for the rights of subject peoples, including the Kurds, to ‘‘an
absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’’;
Whereas at the peace conference in Paris after World War I, the Kurds
and Kurdistan enjoyed, on paper at least, a brief acceptance and
recognition based on the principle of self-determination in the Treaty
of Sevres, but subsequently were partitioned again, this time in a
conference at Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 24, 1923, without
protection for their basic human and cultural rights, a partitioning
that has for the last 80 years exerted its poisonous influence as one of
the gravest political crimes haunting the history of modern Europe;
Whereas in the then created countries of the modern Middle East—Turkey,
Syria, Iraq, Iran, and also recently formed Soviet Union—the Kurds were
subjected to a policy of ethnic repression and ‘‘social engineering’’
schemes, sometimes inspired by European fascism, for their forced
assimilation or displacement, resulting in involuntary mass migrations
or ‘‘transfers’’ which would now be called humanitarian catastrophes,
and creating tyrant masters and rebel subjects throughout Kurdistan;
Whereas it continues to be unjust that the inter-national community
recognizes countries of the modern Middle East such as Turkey, Syria,
Iraq, and Iran, but not Kurdistan, divided between these others without
the consent of its sons and daughters, thus effecting the dismemberment
of a nation like the hacking of a human being limb from limb, and
bringing about under the ruthless sway of modern nationalisms the
withering of a Kurdish civilization as old as the dawning of history;
Whereas the present denial of national and cultural rights to the Kurds
has also been compared to the forced marriage or involuntary servitude
of a people to many different masters or regimes, a servitude often
imposed by handcuffs or even by an outright reign of terror which, in a
world guided by President Thomas Jefferson's principles of
representative democracy and freedom of expression, must outrage what he
might today call "a decent respect to the opinions of humankind";
Whereas the present predicament of the Kurds and Kurdistan has been
compared likewise to a people with one principle of vitality and
sensation divided not by one artificial border but by several, imposing
barriers of separation which stretch into hundreds of miles and resemble
the infamous Berlin Wall, with Kurds on different sides of these borders
subjected to alien systems of government and even to ethnic cleansing or
cultural genocide, the crime of ‘‘barbarity’’ decried by the renowned
jurist Raphael Lemkin and later made by him and others a basis for the
modern concept of genocide;
Whereas the Kurds are willing to accept their neighbors as equals and to
honor the lessons of their own oppression by respecting the full
minority and nationality rights of other peoples living within their
homeland of Kurdistan, but regard continued submission to this
oppression as destructive of the very fabric of mercy and justice which
knits diverse peoples together in peace;
Whereas the Kurds hope for the day when their loved ones will not be
tortured, their linguistic and cultural rights will not be brutally
suppressed, and the riches of their land will be enjoyed by all the
inhabitants and varied national groups of Kurdistan;
Whereas this generation of Americans vividly experienced the tyranny of
catastrophic and unpredictable mass violence on September 11, 2001, when
its advent assaulted and terrorized the citizens of these shores,
visiting indiscriminate death upon thousands of innocent civilians; and
Whereas for successive Kurdish generations, every day has seemed like
either a September 11, or the eve or after-math of such a catastrophe,
including a repeated reign of terror from the air inflicted by more than
one government to whose offices the Kurds have been en-trusted, and in
at least one notorious campaign in Iraq even the use, along with mass
disappearances and murders, of chemical weapons causing not only
immediate death and destruction, but also genetic mutations in the very
‘‘DNA’’ of survivors giving rise to the birth of babies with alarmingly
increased numbers of congenital mal-formations:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring),
That Congress urges the President to support the proposition that the
United States respects and accepts the right of the Kurdish people to
self-determination and urges the United States Government to conduct its
foreign policy so as to reflect and achieve this aim.
Dear Friend,
We hope you will consider signing our declaration. We would appreciate
it even more if you took the trouble of sending a copy of it to your
representative in the House of Representatives and another two to your
senators in the United States Senate. Please urge them to initiate
legislation in the United States Congress. Send us copies of your
correspondence with them. Together, we can bring light to eighty years
of darkness in the Middle East, welcome back a people to the sunshine of
freedom, and serve truth by calling a land with its proper name.
If you are a citizen of another country, feel free to duplicate our
effort. We would, of course, love to hear from you.
Please consider signing the online version of this declaration as
well:http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/390525870
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558
___________________________
The American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2600 Connecticut Avenue NW # 1
Washington, DC 20008-1558 / USA
Tel: 202.483.6444 / Fax: 202.483.6476
Web-site: http://www.kurdistan.org / E-mail: akin@kurdistan.org
The American Kurdish Information Network provides a public service
to foster Kurdish-American understanding and friendship
HOME
|