Nothing Happens Twice Kurdish

[Athenasby Regalado]

Ithas been nearly three years since the chemical bombardment of Halabja, a small town on Iraq's northeastern border with Iran in which up to 5,000 civilians, mostly women and children, died a painful and well publicized death.

Despite the international outcry over this one infamous event, little was heard in the United States about Saddam Hussein's brutal treatment of his own people until his invasion of Kuwait last August 2. Even now, virtually no mention is made of the many other times the Iraqi government has gassed its large Kurdish minority.

Halabja was not the first time Iraq had turned its chemical arsenal on the Kurds. Thousands -- and most likely tens of thousands -- of civilians were killed during chemical and conventional bombardments stretching from the spring of 1987 through the fall of 1988. The attacks were part of a long-standing campaign that destroyed almost every Kurdish village in Iraq -- along with a centuries-old way of life -- and displaced at least a million of the country's estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population.

Since the outset of the Kuwait crisis, however, Halabja has become a leitmotif for Saddam Hussein's disregard of human rights, and a major rationale for the war. Although chemical weapons were not seen in action in the latest Persian Gulf war, no one is disputing that Iraq has them and is willing to use them. Yet, over the past three years the international community has done practically nothing to help the Halabja survivors, or the other tens of thousands of Kurds driven out of their country by Iraq's chemical warfare. Around 140,000 people fled the country in 1988 alone.

About 100,000 of those exiles are now spending their third winter in crowded, closely-guarded Iranian refugee camps, where food, heating, sanitation, schooling and work are all in short supply. Another 27,000 are living under similar conditions in Turkey. At least 1,500 have moved on to Pakistan, where conditions are not much better. A few thousand -- at considerable personal expense -- have succeeded in reaching the European Community, entering Greece from neighboring Turkey. Many have been jailed there for illegal entry, as have some of those seeking haven in Pakistan.

Faced with the meagerness of their life in exile, more than 10,0001 Kurds have returned to Iraq, where they have been forced to live in government-planned -- and policed -- "new settlements" bearing a striking similarity to the refugee camps they left behind. Estimates of how many Kurds are compelled to live in these newly built communities, distant from their original homes, range from a conservative million to more than 1.5 million. Even though they usually returned in response to repeated declarations of amnesty from Saddam Hussein, some of the returnees are known to have subsequently been arrested, executed or "disappeared."2

Iran and Turkey, though relatively poor themselves, have shown with other refugee groups -- such as the Bulgarian Turks and the Afghans -- that they can absorb large influxes of immigrants into their economy and society. Neither have done so for the Iraqi Kurds, even though (perhaps because) both countries have significant Kurdish populations of their own. All four of the principal countries of refuge for the Iraqi Kurds -- Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Greece -- have tried to unload the problem onto others.

Only two Western countries, the United States and France, have agreed to make a new home for appreciable numbers, and then only for a small fraction of those in limbo at Turkish and Iranian camps. A few dozen more have individually managed to find asylum in the West, either because of close family ties to those countries or by using smugglers and forged papers. Other than these, few of Saddam Hussein's Kurdish victims -- inside or outside Iraq -- are leading normal lives.

The largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own country, the Kurds now total between 20 and 25 million: a number equivalent to more than the entire population of Iraq, twice that of Syria and several times the number of Palestinians.

The Kurdish diaspora includes several hundred thousand people in the Soviet Union3, 100,000 in Lebanon, and large communities in Germany, Sweden and France. Fewer than 10,000 live in the United States. If the area in which they predominate and have lived for millennia were a separate country, Kurdistan might encompass as much as a third of Turkey, large parts of Iran and Iraq and a sliver of Syria.

That Kurdistan is not a separate nation is due, in part, to its abundant natural resources: two of Iraq's major oil fields, rich agricultural land, minerals and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The 1920 Treaty of Svres -- one of a series of post World War I agreements which dismembered the Ottoman empire and created the modern states of Iraq, Syria, and Kuwait, among others -- offered hope for a Kurdish state around the vilayet of Mosul. Britain later incorporated oil-rich Mosul into its mandate of Iraq.

That unfulfilled promise set the stage for the Kurds' current plight. As a sizable and frequently rebellious minority group in countries largely populated by Arabs, Turks or Persians, the Kurds -- an ancient, Aryan people with their own language akin to Persian -- have been perceived as a significant threat by every central government in the region. In modern times, Syria, Turkey and Iraq have all tried to dilute Kurdish claims to a homeland through massive relocation programs. Those countries and Iran all greatly restrict the Kurds' ability to teach, speak or write about their customs and history in their own or any other language.

With respect to cultural repression, Turkey may be the worst offender. Turkey bans Kurdish entirely,4 even though many of the country's Kurds only know their own language. Until recently, the government officially pretended that the Kurds -- approximately 20% of the population -- did not exist. All Kurds have to adopt Turkish names. The official explanation was that they were "Mountain Turks" who had forgotten their Turkish roots.

In early 1970, two years after the Arab Baath Socialist Party seized power in Iraq, Kurdish rebels won several concessions from the state, including the right to autonomy in some of the predominantly Kurdish northeastern provinces and Kurdish representation in the cabinet.

Despite the "March 11" agreement, however, the Baath government excluded the Kurds from real power and persisted with other practices aimed at minimizing the Kurds' role in national affairs.5 Fighting, which had begun in 1961, resumed in 1974; but this time with the secret backing of the United States, Israel and Iran. Tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians sought refuge in Iran during the course of heavy combat.

However, when the Shah of Iran and President Saddam Hussein signed a border agreement in Algiers in 1975, the United States abruptly withdrew its support for the Kurds and the rebellion collapsed. Many thousands of Kurdish fighters and their families were forced to flee to Iran to escape the pursuing Iraqi army.

Baghdad responded vengefully to the end of the uprising, deporting some 250,000 Kurds -- not just the peshmerga6 families -- to southern Iraq.7 Because of outrage both within Iraq and in the West, the government later relocated most of the deported Kurds to resettlement camps in the north, closer to the Kurdish cities. In 1983, 8000 men and young boys from the Barzani clan, which had led the fighting, were taken from these camps by soldiers. What happened next remains one of the great unsolved mysteries. All are presumed to have been massacred.

Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, stepped up his campaign to obliterate the ethnic character of Iraqi Kurdistan. Between 1975 and 1989, the government razed more than 3,000 villages and several large towns including Halabja and Qala Diza.8 By the close of this systematic campaign, Iraq had probably uprooted over a million people.

The operation reached a crescendo in 1987 and 1988, after Kurdish rebels took advantage of the long-running war between Iraq and Iran to reclaim 23,000 square miles of their mountain homeland. It was then that Saddam Hussein first began using chemicals weapons on his own people.

According to scores of Kurdish eyewitnesses, the bombings of Halabja on March 16 and 17, 1988, were not Iraq's first use of chemical weapons on Kurdish targets. One commander with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) saw Iraqi warplanes drop poison gas "five or six months" earlier.

It was in the Bargloo area, 20-30 kilometers from the Iranian border, where the PUK had its headquarters at the time. Two or three commanders died five minutes later without injury. I was only about 20 yards away. I had a mask and protective clothing on.9

There are other, unconfirmed reports of chemical bombings as early as April, 1987. Credence that they took place is lent by the fact that the PUK commander in Bargloo says he was already wearing protective clothing -- and therefore knew to expect a chemical attack -- when his headquarters was hit. In another example, a Kurdish medic treated dozens of chemical weapons victims from Saosenan, a Kurdish village near the Iranian border, shortly before the attack on Halabja:

In this village, 300 or the 400 inhabitants died. They brought the injured to us. They had blisters and burns on their bodies and some had lost their eyesight. Our medical supplies were hopelessly inadequate.10

In some quarters, there remains a dispute over whether Iraq -- or both Iran and Iraq -- were responsible for the chemical bombings. Most of those pointing the finger at Iran as being the guilty party, despite the enormous propaganda advantage it made of the incident at the time, cite a recent study by the U.S. Army War College, an army-funded military research institute. The study states that:

Iraq was blamed for the Halabja attack, even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran, too, had used chemicals in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that actually killed the Kurds.11

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