-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0591/9105008.htm
>>>Often, we hear about how the Kurds have been mistreated by Hussein
or how the U.S. wants them to be THE Iraqi opposition or how the
Turks have abused them. What follows is a little insight into the
roles they've played for various "big shots" in the region. This
sheds some light on why (in addition to illegal emigration from Iraq
to "Israel") the Iraqis and the Israelis and the Kurds and Iranis
have bad blood all around them. This also provides some information
as to *why* there will never be peace in the region unless it is made
up entirely of Arabs (note: the Iranis are "Persians"). A<>E<>R<<<
}}}>Begin
Special Report
The Kurds' Suffering is Rooted in Past Betrayals
By Rachelle Marshall
May/June 1991, Page 8
The ordeal of nearly a million Kurds as they struggled to escape from
Iraq across freezing mountain passes last April aroused sympathy and
indignation around the world. Iraq's brutal suppression of the March
uprising by Kurds and Shi'i Arabs was the immediate cause of their
plight, but the Kurds' present agony is the culmination of a long
history of oppression, manipulation and betrayal. At one time or
another during the past 70 years, the European powers, Turkey, Iran,
Iraq, Israel, the US, and at times even the Kurds' own leaders have
all used the Kurdish people to further their own aims.
The modern Kurdish independence movement is itself the product of a
betrayal. In 1920, following World War I, the Allies and the defeated
Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sevres, which provided for an
independent Kurdi
stan in the adjacent areas of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq where 18 million Kurds were
concentrated. Because of the opposition of Turkish nationalists and the indifference
of the Western powers, the treaty was not enforce
d and the promise to the Kurdish people was never fulfilled. Since then, the Kurds'
attempt to preserve a separate culture and obtain independence have been met with
repression and bloody reprisals by governments that reg
ard the Kurds either as threats to their own survival or as pawns to be used against
their neighbors.
Uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s by Kurdish nationalists led by Sheikh Ahmad of Barzan
and those in later years led by his brother, Mustafa Barzani, were repeatedly crushed,
often by the cooperative efforts of Iran, Turke
y and Iraq. After Iraq's revolution of 195 8 that ousted the monarchy, Barzani made
peace with the new government and even took part in massacres of its Ba'athist
opponents. But during subsequent changes of government, re
lations between Kurds and Iraqi leaders fluctuated between fighting and attempts at
reconciliation. What complicated these relations was Iran's growing hostility to Iraq
once it became a republic. After the overthrow of I
raq's King Faisal, the shah of Iran abandoned his former policy of cooperating with
Baghdad against the Kurds and instead began using the Kurds as a means of weakening
Iraq. During the 1960s, Iran joined with Israel to gi
ve financial, technical and military support to the Kurdish insurgents, with the aim
of embroiling Iraq in domestic turmoil that would sap its military capabilities. At
the same time, nobody wanted a Kurdish victory. Acco
rding to a news report in the Christian Science Monitor of Dec. 12, 1974, Iran's
support for the Kurds "was always just enough to prevent their defeat, never quite
enough to enable them to attain their political objective
s."
There is no evidence that the US provided direct assistance to the
Kurds during these years. In fact, Nikki R. Keddie and Mark J.
Gasiorowski emphasize in their book Neither East Nor West (Yale 1990)
that the CIA and State Department were strongly opposed to any US
intervention on behalf of the Kurds. Israel, however, did play an
important role in keeping the Kurdish insurgency alive. In 1980,
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin revealed that between 1965 and
1975 the Israeli government had provided the Kurds with money, arms
and instructors. Together, Iran and Israel set up a Kurdish
intelligence service, Parastin, and Israeli intelligence units were
active in Kurdish territory during these years, gathering information
on Iraqi forces. In 1972, American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson
reported that Israel was paying Barzani personally $50,000 a month.
Israel also supplied the Kurds with Soviet weapons it had captured
from Egypt and Syria, hoping at one point that Iraqi leaders would
believe the weapons had been supplied by the Soviets.
The reasons for Israel's cooperation with Iran to help the Kurds were
clear. The shah of Iran provided Israel with a continuous supply of
oil (in 1973 Iran refused to join the Arab oil embargo against the
West). By supporting the Kurds, Israel succeeded in tying down units
of the Iraqi army that in 1967 and 1973 might otherwise have joined
Egypt and Syria in fighting against Israel.
By 1969, the Kurdish rebellion had become so costly to Iraq that the
newly installed Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussain offered the
Kurds what seemed to be an acceptable deal. The March Manifesto of
1970 granted the Kurds local autonomy in northern Iraq, assigned them
a proportional number of seats in the national legislature, and
authorized Kurdish as the official language where Kurds were the
majority.
At first Kurds welcomed the plan, but after signing a four-year
agreement with the government they began to complain about
boundaries, budgets, and their role in determining foreign policy.
Iraq, in turn, demanded that the Kurds give up their claims to the
Kirkuk oil fields and end their ties with Iran.
Iranian, US and Israeli "Friends"
In the Oct. 4, 1976 issue of New York magazine, Aaron Lathan quoted
Barzani as saying that two years after he had agreed to the peace
plan with Iraq, "our Iranian friends, our American friends, and our
Israeli friends" had told him not to make any compromises. Barzani
agreed, hoping to gain more concessions from Iraq, and consequently
tensions resumed between the Kurds and Iraq just as the controversy
was heating up between Iraq and Iran over their competing claims to
the Shatt Al-Arab waterway that ran between the two states.
In 1972, after Iraq signed a treaty of cooperation and an arms
agreement with the Soviet Union, an apprehensive Iran increased its
military aid to the Iraqi Kurds (who reciprocated by handing over to
the shah's government Iranian Kurds who had sought refuge in Iraq).
The Kurds also asked the US for help, with Barzani offering to grant
concessions in Kurdistan's rich oil and mineral deposits to Western
companies.
Washington had refused earlier pleas, but in May 1972 the shah made a
personal appeal to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during their
visit to Tehran. The two men overruled the objections of the CIA and
the State Department and secretly agreed to provide the Kurds with
$16 million worth of arms.
This agreement was only revealed in 1976, when a report of the House
Subcommittee on Intelligence, headed by Rep. Otis Pike, was leaked
first to Daniel Schorr and then to the Village Voice. According to
the committee, the aid was not to help the Kurds achieve independence
but simply "to continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the
resources of our ally's neighboring country [Iraq]."
Like Israel, the US had its own motives for intervening on behalf of
the Kurds. Kissinger and Nixon were especially anxious to accommodate
the shah because they were in the process of concluding a $22 billion
arms deal with him. As Kissinger wrote later, the Nixon
administration regarded Iran as "the eastern anchor of our Mideast
policy. " The US was also responding to the fact that in the spring
of 1972, Iraq had nationalized a consortium of European and American
firms known as the Iraq Petroleum Company, an act which displeased
Washington.
Three years later, after Iran and Iraq settled their dispute over the
Shatt Al-Arab waterway in March 1975, Iran, Israel, and the US
abandoned the Kurds by abruptly stopping all aid to them. Under the
terms of the Algiers Agreement, Iraq agreed to share sovereignty over
the river with Iran and the shah, in turn, pledged to end support for
the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq. Barzani later told Latham, "We were
broken down not by our enemies but by our friends."
During the Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq launched in 1980 in order to
take back the Shatt Al-Arab, each side armed the other's Kurds.
After the cease-fire, according to Jill Hamburg in The Nation (Aug.
21-28, 1989), Iran executed thousands of Kurds and Iraq destroyed
some 3,000 Kurdish villages.
The Same Rationale
The Kurds were again used as pawns by outside powers during the
Persian Gulf war and consequently became many of that war's most
tragic victims. In 1976, a US diplomat explained to Aaron Latham the
rationale behind Washington's decision to aid the Kurds in 1972:
"What we wanted, " he said, I 'was to destabilize the Iraqi
government and topple Saddam Hussain. " The same rationale still
operates today. In January 1991, President Bush reportedly gave
secret orders authorizing the CIA to aid rebel factions inside Iraq.
Later he urged Iraqi dissidents to "take matters into their own
hands."
Once the war was over, however, the US and its allies refused all
help to the rebellion they had helped to foment. In explaining why,
Secretary of State James Baker said, "We are not prepared to go down
the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war. " In fact, the
US-led alliance never favored the overthrow of the Iraqi government
but wants instead a militarily weak Iraq, preferably without Saddam
Hussain but otherwise under much the same leadership. An independent
Kurdistan, or possibly even a democratic Iraq in which Kurds or the
Shi'i Muslim majority assumed a leading role, is seen as potentially
destabilizing to a region where democracy is virtually unknown and
the redrawing of boundaries could open endless disputes. Even the
Kurds' long-time ally, Israel, has disavowed Kurdish nationalism.
William Safire, who should know, reported in The New York Times on
April I that "influential Israelis" are concerned that "Kurdish
independence might lead to Palestinian statehood. " And so the Kurds
will go on trying
to survive under the harsh conditions in which they find themselves,
victims not only of past brutality and deceit, but of the continuing
game of power politics.
Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. She
is a member of New Jewish Agenda and writes frequently on theMiddle
East.
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