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December
12, 2002, 8:45 a.m. By Julia Duin |
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nyone
looking for a reality check when it comes to Saddam Hussein would do well
to meet a few Kurds. Six thousand of them arrived in the United States
six years ago this month. There's a reason the Kurds have a saying: "The
Kurds have no friends." True, there are the American and British
fighter jets enforcing a no-fly zone north of the 36th parallel. But the
Kurds still have to wonder why, when Saddam gassed thousands of their
people to death in 1988, in the village of Halabja in northeastern Iraq,
no one complained.
Spread over portions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, this ancient race dates back to the Medes of the Persian Empire, founded in 539 B.C. It now faces a situation similar to that of pre-1948 Israel: a people without a nation and with precious few friends. Settled in mainly mountainous regions, they sit atop some valuable real estate, mainly oil and water reserves. Unlike Israel, they are landlocked.
Since September 11,
their stock has shot sky-high. The White House has invited Kurdish and
Iraqi opposition leaders in to chat. Deals are being struck in terms of
fighting men and whether northern Iraq's Kurds can mount a battle anything
like the Northern Alliance did in Afghanistan. Articles appear in the
pages of major newspapers quoting Kurdish leaders like Massoud Barzani
and Jalal Talabani.
What a difference six years has made.
The U.S. is currently doing everything it can to avoid offending Turkey — to the point of promising there will be no independent Kurdish state. Meanwhile, the world's 25 to 30 million Kurds are the largest ethnic group without a country.
It's a dog's life for the 13 million Kurds who live in eastern Turkey. Police used to arrest Kurds simply for speaking their language; today, it is still against the law to teach it. There is much bad blood between the two sides: Turks point to 30,000 dead after a 15-year rebellion in their southeastern quadrant. Kurds say the Turks never honored the Treaty of Sevres, negotiated by Allied forces in 1920, which gave Kurds an independent state. Instead, Kurds have been ruled by despots ever since.
My Kurdish "family" is from northern Iraq, known as Iraqi Kurdistan. They arrived here via "Operation Pacific Haven," conducted in December 1996 after the American intelligence got wind of an impending massacre by Saddam Hussein. Our military spirited out 6,000 Kurds who were known for their work with international organizations or for having ties to the CIA. My friends have tales of trying to sleep in soaking wet clothes in a miserable tent city in eastern Turkey for two nights until they could be shipped out on American charter flights.
Though they miss their mountainous land — and nearly cry whenever I drive them into semi-mountainous terrain in West Virginia — they are in no hurry to go back. Saddam, who lies in wait 250 miles to the south, murders and tortures Kurds with impunity: ordering daughters raped in front of their parents, starving babies and gouging out the eyes of children in front of their mothers are some of his specialties. "If American troops were in Baghdad tomorrow," the father of my Kurdish family says, "that is too slow." These people have no illusions about Saddam's depravity.
The Muslim hegemony that supposedly exists worldwide screeches to a halt when it comes to helping out the Kurds. Muslims I've talked to — Saudis, Kuwaitis, and others — are completely indifferent. The mother has had problems finding work that is at all related to the prestigious private-school headmistress position she enjoyed in northern Iraq. When I've approached other Muslims about helping her, nothing happens. The only people who have reached out to help her are Christians and Jews (much to the mother's amazement). After a Jewish-language mentor was especially kind to her, the mother asked if we could visit a synagogue.
When I drop by for one of their delicious rice-in-grape-leaves, roasted-chicken, and homemade-yogurt dinners, we banter about life in this country. The Kurds continually inform me the freedom here is excessive. "Why do you allow all these foreigners to stay in your country?" they ask of the Middle Eastern students studying here. "If you bombed a building in Iraq, all the Americans would be sent out the next day." We are way too lax with terrorists, they warn me. We don't understand human nature.
When they see debates over the timing of an attack published openly in American newspapers, they laugh in amazement. Is nothing secret? they ask me. Don't we understand he's a 21st-century Hitler and that the Kurds are the "Jews" he wants to exterminate?
I'm not sure Americans do, I tell them. I'm not sure they do.
— Julia Duin is assistant national editor at the Washington Times.