The Kurds: Forgotten victims of Iraq's venom

By PATRICK COCKBURN

ARBIL - As hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Arbil, the largest Kurdish city, yesterday one street in the shuttered bazaar was doing a roaring business.

It was the street where you can buy the thick plastic sheeting that Kurds remaining in the city are placing over their doors and windows in the hope of keeping out poison gas.

The panicked flight is a reminder that the three million Iraqi Kurds were the people who suffered worst at the hands of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

He slaughtered more than 100,000 of them in 1988 in revenge for their support of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.

He destroyed all their 4500 villages, turning them into mounds of rubble, and deported their inhabitants to grim resettlement towns where they were at the mercy of the Iraqi secret police.

Much of the moral case for the overthrow of Saddam has been, even when not directly stated, about his treatment of the Kurds.

It is therefore reasonable to see the way the United States and Britain treat the Kurds as a test of their true motives in invading Iraq and to the likely outcome of a prolonged occupation.

It will also help tell us if we are seeing a war of liberation or an old-style colonial smash-and-grab.

So far the omens have not been good. If the US and Britain truly believe Saddam has an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them one might think that they would offer some protection to the Iraqi Kurds, the one group of Iraqis against whom these terrible weapons have been used.

They have done no such thing.

Karim Sinjari, the Interior Minister of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party, last month asked the US and Britain for help in obtaining gas masks and antidotes, but received no reply.

As a result, Kurds in Arbil, traumatised by what happened at Halabja, have to rely on their bundles of plastic sheeting to protect themselves and their families.

The Iraqi Kurds are terrified that they are going to be gassed. But in the preceding weeks the only topic of conversation in shops and tea-houses was the impending Turkish invasion.

In February, the Kurdish leaders were abruptly informed that the Turkish Army would cross Turkey's 350km-long border with Iraq, ostensibly to stop Kurdish refugees entering Turkey.

To the embarrassment of US officials, Turkey openly declared the real reasons for the invasion - to stop the Kurds seizing the oil city of Kirkuk, prevent an independent Kurdistan and protect the Turkoman minority in northern Iraq.

Kurdish leaders denounced this as a repeat of past betrayals by the US when it withdrew support from Kurdish rebellions against Baghdad in 1975 and 1991.

The deal was that the US could use Turkish bases for a land invasion of northern Iraq from Turkey in return for allowing a separate Turkish invasion.

Only the rejection of the agreement on bases by the Turkish Parliament torpedoed this quid pro quo.

The negotiating position of the Kurdish leaders is not as bad as it was a month ago. The US now needs the Kurds for its invasion plans since it has no troops in Turkey.

For the Kurds, the key issue is Kirkuk. Over the past 30 years, 300,000 Kurds have been ethnically cleansed from Kirkuk and Mosul provinces. For Kurds, Kirkuk is the capital and heart of Kurdistan.

Massoud Barzani, the leader of the KDP, says that whatever happened the Kurdish refugees will go home. He said: "Our sacred aim is to bring people back to the areas that have been forcibly Arabised."

The Kurds

* Between 20 million and 25 million Kurds live in Kurdistan, a mountainous area covering parts of Armenia, Iran, northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey. A majority live in Turkey.

* About 85 per cent of the Kurds are Sunni Muslims

* The Kurds are a non-Arabic people who speak a language related to Persian.

* Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurds with chemical weapons during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war for supporting Iran.

* After the Gulf War, Iraqi troops crushed a Kurdish uprising, causing two million Kurds to flee to Iran.

* In August 1992, the US made northern Iraq's Kurdish area a "no fly zone" in a bid to create a haven.

* The Kurds have tried unsuccessfully to set up independent states in Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq