The Washington Post The Kurds' Best Hope By Jim Hoagland Wednesday, January 28, 2004
"Iraq is our fate," a visiting Kurdish political leader said the other day, as unhappily as a lifer describing a prison term that stretches before and beyond him. But in this resigned acceptance of Iraq's territorial integrity stands a chance for the country's political reconstruction. Iraq needs the Kurds, who have, over a dozen years, built and managed a viable if imperfect regional administration based in part on elections and constituency politics. The Kurds' ideas about -- and need for -- a loose federal structure that protects racial and religious minorities should help shape a new Iraq. And the Kurds need Iraq. They need to belong to a modern state that can wear away the remaining feudal and tribal practices of their homeland in the Zagros mountains of northern Iraq. They need internationally recognized frontiers to shelter them from the predatory instincts of neighbors who covet their oil or want to destabilize Iraq. The Kurds in essence need to transform Iraq from being their fate into being their destiny. Fate is what happens to them. Destiny is what they can accomplish. They must pull together with their Arab co-religionists and neighbors to create a state that is not authoritarian and intolerant, as most governments in the region are. The periodic genocidal campaigns that Saddam Hussein conducted against the 4 million Iraqi Kurds, in which he used chemical weapons on civilians and burned Kurdish villages to the ground, convinced me in the 1980s that regime change was necessary in Iraq. The murderous intentions of Hussein's Baathist regime toward the Kurds were unchanging over the years. The Arab chauvinism and racial hatred that Hussein stirred -- and that, to their eternal disgrace, his fellow Arab rulers condoned or actively supported -- was as flagrant and destructive as apartheid in South Africa. As long as his regime was in power, territorial integrity was simply an excuse for mass murder. The Kurds were justified in opting out to run their own affairs under U.S. overflight protection after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Now the Kurds, who joined the U.S.-led invasion that toppled the Baathists in April, have both the opportunity and the duty to help organize a new political system that will make Iraq worth keeping together. If they fail, so will those of us who have for years argued for them to be given this chance. Moreover, if the Kurds and Arabs in Iraq do not succeed in transforming fate into a common destiny, President Bush's "forward strategy of democracy" for the Middle East will not get off the ground. Turkey's promising moves to entrench a moderate Islamic democracy and eventually become a European Union member will be put at grave risk. Iran will use the north of Iraq as a springboard for subversion. To placate Turkey and disarm Iran politically, the Bush administration has insisted that Iraq's territorial integrity cannot be called into question. But Iraqis know better. They know that the Kurds have great interest in prolonging the status quo of isolation from Baghdad and waiting for things to fall apart in the south. That explains why a high-level delegation from Iraq's Governing Council traveled to the Kurdish city of Salahuddin on Jan. 8 to say this to Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the principal Kurdish leaders: "You have earned the right to self-determination and you can declare independence if you want. We will not fight you over that. We will recognize you. What we do not want is a quarrelsome secessionist state inside the belly of Iraq. Decide, and put your heart into your decision." Kurdish and Governing Council officials say the historic "get in or get out" message was stated bluntly by Ahmed Chalabi and echoed by aides to Abdul Aziz Hakim and Adnan Pachachi. The Governing Council officials consulted the Kurds in advance of their high-level meetings with U.N. and U.S. officials last week. The Kurdish leaders immediately pledged in Salahuddin to support Iraq's unity and territorial integrity -- but neither agreed to go along to the United States to discuss Iraq's future directly with Kofi Annan or George W. Bush. The past dozen years have been a golden age for Iraq's Kurds, crowned by the overthrow of a Baghdad regime that systematically murdered them in the name of Arab nationalism. Their hesitations on giving up full autonomy now are understandable. But the Kurds should not miss this opportunity to choose destiny over fate. Their active participation in a new, democratic Iraq will show that territorial integrity in the multiethnic Arab state does not have to be achieved or maintained by organized terror. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
