PART 2
ALL ACROSS IRAQ KURDISTAN you can drive for miles, map in
hand, and mark off each succeeding heap of stones as the place
where a village once stood. One by one the Iraqis dynamited or
bombed or poisoned these communities in the name of repressing
Kurdish insurgency and shifted their inhabitants into relocation
centers. You can still see those too, bleak and menacing
blockhouses, hemmed in with wire, where people who had know no
master were confined and supervised. The Kurds have been hardened
by the digging up of mass grave; estimates of missing and dead
range from 100,000 to 300,000. A Untied Nations report concluded
that the atrocities committed by Saddam' regime were "so
grave and
of such a massive nature that since the Second
World War few parallels can be found.
" Yet in this landscape of blasted and deserted hamlets
there are tow sites that all the Kurds insist you must see: Qalat
Dizah Halabjah. Qalat Dizah's turn came in June
1989. As a large market town near the Iranian border, it may have
shown a independence of spirit that annoyed Iraqi military
planners. They made an example of the place by bringing in the
bulldozers and the dynamite. After the expulsion of the
population-perhaps 70,00 individuals-the city was leveled house
by house. Only the trees were left standing.
By the time I arrived, many of the former inhabitants, finding
life insupportable in the refugee camps over the border, had
returned to squat in the ruins of Qalat Dizah. A single they
dispensary, run by a depressed doctor named Osman Salim, tried to
hold the line against malaria, typhoid, and malnutrition. They
were Osman's daily enemies, and he was combating them with almost
zero resources. "Exactly nothing has been done for the
people of Qalat Dizah," he told me, complaining that the
storied Western relief effort-which would eventually deploy
millions of dollars in hugely successful operation-had not yet
trickled down here. The survivors faced another harsh winter,
with unclean water and poor food and not nearly enough of either.
Not even this was enough to prepare me for the town of Halabjah,
a community that has the same resonance for the Kurds as does the
Warsaw Ghetto for Jews or Guernica for the Basques. The town
became suddenly and horribly famous on March 16, 1988, when it
was almost obliterated by Iraqi bombs and its people were savaged
by nerve gas and other poison agents. " I saw the planes
come," Amina Mohammed Amin told me through an interpreter.
"I saw the bombs fall and explode. I tried to get out of
town, but then I felt a sharp, burning sensation on my skin and
in my eyes." Mrs. Amin then did something that astounded me.
Without warning, she drew up her voluminous dress and exposed her
naked flank. Her whole left side, from mid-calf to armpit, was
seared with lurid burns. And they were still burning.
"The Red Crescent took me to a hospital in Iran," she
said, "and then I had five months in a London hospital. But
the burns need to be treated every day." Even as we spoke,
her daughters began applying salves to the exposed area. It was
hard to took, and hard not to took. Mrs. Amin said that 25
members of her family had been killed that day, which was a
terrible figure even if you allowed mentally for the way Kurds
talk of extended families. Nizar Hassan, the chief physician at
the hospital, told me later that the town lost 5,000 people in
the attack, out of a total population swollen by refugees t
70,000. (Later estimates pushed the doctor's body count above
6,000.) I found one of the causes of the horror in a blitzed
building. Here, lodged in a basement corner where it fell from an
Iraqi Air Force bomber, was a wicked-looking piece of hardware
with stencil markings on its side. Worried about fallout from the
Halabjah escapade, the soldiers of Saddam had entered the town
and carried off all the evidence. Or almost all of it. There was
the bomb, and there were the survivors. Halabjah would, after
all, be remembered.
YOU CAN'T TAKE MUCH from people who have nothing to lose, yet I
was impressed at how the Kurds make the best of hopeless
situations. They are tough and adaptable, which is perhaps the
key to their longevity in his war-ravaged region. their
resilience may face its latest test sometime this summer. Iraqi
troops have been massing just outside Free Kurdistan, held at bay
by fighter planes of the post-Desert Storm coalition. When that
air cover is withdrawn, it is likely that the Kurds will again be
under direct attack. I was resting near the town of As
Sulaymaniyah, then held by Iraqi troops. We were roasting a lamb
for dinner. In every direction the land looked naked and lunar,
stripped of life. It was hot. I wondered, out loud, if there was
any beer in this wilderness.
"Beer," said one of my Kurdish bodyguards." The
Englishman wants beer!" One of the fighting men dropped what
he was doing and walked up to me. "How many Saddams you
have?" he asked. "many Saddams," I replied. We
were talking money. Some of the bills in Iraqi currency are
printed with the portrait of Saddam Hussein, leading the Kurds to
joke incessantly about " dirty money."
"For 50 Saddam ," the guerrilla said gravely, " I
can bring quite a lot of beer." I peeled off 60-it seemed no
time for penny-pinching-and my man vanished into the dark. He was
back in an hour, lugging an old sack containing cans of frosted
Western ale. "Ali, how on earth?" Ali smiled, revealing
nothing, but I suspected that he had struck a deal with a bored
Iraqi guard in town. A few days later, passing the war-scarred
settlement of Rwanduz on our way back to the Turkish border, I
was other evidence of Kurdish enterprise.
The owner of a roadside caf� had scrounged canned goods from
somewhere and kept them chilled in a mountain stream, ready for
sale. Small boys sold Western cigarettes still in their
cellophane-wrapped packages. (How had they gotten them?) families
sat eating, half out of cannibalized cars and trucks that were
kept going on God know what. The caf� proprietor and his wife
were singing away, dishing up kabobs in exchange for fistfuls of
Saddams.These people had been bombed and routed, but they had
come back and were evidently enjoying their moment of
independence. Kurds, once regarded as suspicious of strangers,
now took every Westerner as s friend. "You will tell of
us?" The Kurds usually make their appearance in other
peoples' narratives by virtue of a readiness to quite their
mountain fastness and engage in battle. But their tendency is to
go back to the mountains as soon as war is over.
Unfortunately, the Kurds live in an area that is strategically
important to three great modern nationalism's, Turkish, Arabic
and Persian, and that is enormously rich in the two great natural
resources of oil and water. The tendency of nationalism is to try
to assimilate minorities and to invent a new "nation"
such as Iraq (which is actually three communities, the Suni
Muslim ruling group, the southern Shitte Muslim majority, and the
northern Kurds, mostly Sunni, rolled into one uneasy state). And
the tendency of Middle Eastern politics is to establish control
over oil fields and headwaters, not just for their own sake but
before anyone else does. The Kurds themselves have certain
fundamental similarities. All are survivors. All are well
acquainted with dispersal and persecution. But I began to discern
variations in their status throughout the region.
In Jerusalem, for instance, there is a small but prosperous
middle class of Jewish Kurds who live in peace. In Beirut,
however, Kurds are the lowest of the low. A large Kurdish
community has been in Lebanon since the beginning of this
century, but on the identity card that Kurdish immigrants must
carry, the words "domicile under review" appear in the
apace for citizenship. This puts the Kurds is almost always a
menial, depicted by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury as faceless
toiler and random victim.
Stateless in a state where statehood is itself a tenuous thing,
Lebaness Kurds have thrown their support to the Kurdistan Workers
Party, or PKK. This is a Marxist organization run by an enigmatic
figure named Abdullah �calan, with a camp in Lebanon's notorious
Bekaa Valley. Here the PPK operates under Syrian protection,
carrying on a guerrilla war against Turkey. Syria provides an
umbrella for the same reason that umbrellas are always
provided-water. In Turkish Kurdistan the huge new Atat�rk Dam
allows the Turks to control the flow of the Euphrates River
before it crosses the Syrian frontier. Anxious for leverage, the
Syrian regime uses the Kurds to remind the Turks not to exploit
this advantage.
THOSE THE RANK AND FILE of the PKK seem unaware that they are
foot soldiers in the game of nation. Jawan and Soubhi, two young
people who met me in Beirut, conducted me through a series of
safe houses (never as reassuring as the phrase suggests,
especially in Beirut). All my questions, they said, could be
answered when I met the man they call Apo-uncle: Abdullah
�calan. When I arrived at the camp know as the Mahsum Korkmaz
Academy, for a PKK member who died in a battle in Turkey, I found
hundreds of young people in well-cut, olive drab military
fatigues, much more disciplined and military in aspect than any
of the local militias, or indeed than either the Syrian or
Lebanese Armies. Men and women mixed freely, a change from the
monastic character of the peshmerga camps in Iraq.
Hearing English spoken, I soon found myself talking with Milan,
an olive-skinned teenager who had come from Australia, where her
Kurdish parents had gone for work. Now she was a soldier in the
war against Turkey. "I'm trying to forget I ever know
English," she said. "All I care about now is
Kurdistan." Unlike rival Kurdish parties in Iraq that seek
autonomy within that nation, the PPK calls for a separate Kurdish
state spanning the existing border of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and
Iran. As if to prove her dedication, Milan had just been to a
Maoist-style "self-criticism session," held under an
awning just off the hot square at the camp's center. Face alight
with belief, she invited me to watch rehearsals for the
forthcoming PKK fiesta. In a few days tens of thousands of Kurds
would converge on the camp for dances and speeches, with Serouk
Apo-Apo the leader- the guest of honor.
Apo himself, whom I met later that day, is a stern critic of the
Kurdish people and their attachment to tradition. "We are a
feudal society," he told me, "and our Leaders have been
chieftains who betray us. Our cultural and political level is
low." He pointed dark moments in the Kurdish past, such as
the role played by Kurdish mercenaries in the Turkish slaughter
of the Christian Armenians in 1915. He said that the Kurds were
victims of the divide-and-rule mentality and could always be
counted on to fight among themselves. There was some truth to all
this, but Apo's own chieftain-like appearance and the tame eagle
tethered rather eccentrically to his desk didn't inspire the
absolute confidence he demanded.
AN EXPERIENCED KURD can tell his grandchildren of betrayal by
colonial Britain and France, of promises made by Iran. Iraq,
Syria, and Turkey to support the Kurds for long as they were
fighting only on the rival's territory, of interventions in
Kurdistan by Israel to weaken Arab nationalist regimes, and of
promises made by both Cold War superpowers that turned out to be
false. Ever since President Woodrow Wilson incorporated promises
for Kurdish autonomy into his Fourteen Points following World War
I, the Kurds have traditionally looked to the United States as
their deliverer from old injustices. George Bush appeared to
sympathize with their cause during Desert Storm, yet his
subsequent lack of support has left them baffled. Western
politicians seem unable to appreciate the depth of the Kurdish
yearning for a homeland. I sat with Jalal Talabani, leader of the
Patriotic Union Kurdistan, at his guerrilla headquarters in
northern Iraq.
He was telling me about the city he was most fiercely contesting
with Saddam Hussein. "Kirkuk," he declared, "is
our Jerusalem." Lacking an alternative homeland of any kind,
Kurds can emigrate, but they can't escape. In the grim factory
belt that stretches between the Spandau and Charlottenburg areas
of Berlin, Kurds work to produce the brand name goods of Osram,
Siemens, and Volkswagen. The German government doesn't recognize
them as Kurds but only as the Turkish passport holders that they
are. They tend to cluster in rundown areas like Kreuzberg. My
guide to his world was a young man named Bayram Sherif Kaya, born
in Germany of Kurdish parents who emigrated from south eastern
Turkey.
He divided his day between a Kurdish-language radio station, a
kindergarten for Kurdish children, and various Kurdish relief
organizations, all of which he helped run.
"Fortunately" I speak perfect German and I look
European, so I don't have the problems that most of our people
have," Bayram doubts that he can go home again. "We are
Watched by Turkish Embassy, which hates Kurdish nationalism. We
are watched by Turkish extremists, who believe all Kurds ar dogs.
We are attacked by German fascists who shout 'Ausl�nderraus
-foreigners out!' and paint it on our walls." All over
Kreuzberg, with its squatters and rent-controlled communes, were
the slogans of different Turkish and Kurdish political faction. I
paid a visit to H�nb�n, a women's center in Spandau that was
originally founded to teach literacy but now serves as a sort of
community center in hard times. "Most of the Kurds here come
from on single town called Mus, in the Lake Van region of eastern
Turkey," I was told by Aso Agace, a Kurdish women who works
at the center. "Often they can speak German but not write
it, so they need help with form filling, and they need help with
the schools, which don't recognize Kurdish as a language."
H�nb�n is a counterpart to the male dominated side of Kurdisch
life, in that it is for women only and acts as a support group.
It tries to make Kurdish housewives and women workers feel more
secure. "People are afraid," Aso Agace told me.
"We have also seen pressure from the Turkish Consulate on
the municipal government to Berlin, which used to help us
distribute our literature." Here, too, one found a sort of
transplanted ghetto solidarity. The problem, as ever, was that of
trying to survive as Kurds, while not seeming alien to a larger
society.
Write by Ed kashi