By Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
February 21, 2003
They are called the largest ethnic group in the world that does not have its own nation. The United Nations Refugee Agency reported "continuous and silent ethnic cleansing" against them and other minorities in the region.
They are the 25 million Kurds,scattered mostly in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon. From 1980-1992 Saddam Hussein expelled or killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds and confiscated their lands. As Hitler did with the Jews, Saddam has attempted to create a “purified” race in Iraq by driving out or killing Iranians, Kurds and Shiite Muslims. According to a Revolution Command Council, Decree #474 signed by Saddam Hussein on April 27, 1981, “An Iraqi husband whose wife is of Iranian origin, is offered four thousands ID (if military) and two thousands five hundred (if civil) in case of divorce and deportation of his wife.”
And, as was the fate of the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, the media and heads of state largely ignore the plight of today’s Kurds.
Documented CIA reports, between 1983 and 1988, indicate that during Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign and war with Iran, he killed an estimated 18,000 Iranians and Kurds with mustard gas, tabun and other nerve agents.
Because of their personal experience with Saddam Hussein’s terrorism, the Kurds claim they were the first to rise up to fight terrorism after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States. “September 11 was another Anfal campaign. We the Kurds understand the pain America is suffering because we have also suffered. Our hearts were deeply hurt by the images on TV. Few other nations can feel the pain of America as we do. We are the ones who went through Anfal campaigns twice. Though unpublicized, on September 24 Kurds rose against Jund al-Islam. (A terrorist group founded and supported by Bin Laden in Iraqi Kurdistan.) We proved to be the first nation fighting terrorists after September 11. The losses on the Kurdish side were heavy, but the terrorists were defeated. Jund Al-Islam Killed 40 Kurdish fighters in the first day and mutilated their bodies. While the population of many Muslim states demonstrate against the US, the Kurds support the war on terrorism.”
To this day few Americans realize that there is such a large group of people involved in our current confrontation in the Middle Ease who should be our natural allies in case of war – the Kurds. Even fewer Americans know enough history to know that after World War I Woodrow Wilson addressed the Kurd situation in his Paragraph 12 of his 14 Peace Points in 1918. The Turkish Ottoman Empire had been defeated along with its ally, German and Wilson urged “other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”
Unfortunately, that did not happen either after World War I or World War II. The Kurds were promised their own country under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres only to find the offer rescinded under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. They have never given up their hope for freedom, but today their once pristine mountain home in the Zagros mountains on the borders of Turkey, Iran and Iraq has been bombed with chemicals, their villages destroyed, their lands confiscated.
Our NATO ally Turkey, however, has also repressed the Kurds, who make up about 20% of the nearly 66 million population of Turkey. For more than 60 years, until 1991, the Kurds were denied the right to speak their native language or organize in any way. This of course led to organized opposition. As recently as the 1990s Turkey deployed 300,000 troops in the southeast at an annual cost of $8 billion in which Turkish armed forces instituted a system of "village guards," paying and arming Kurds to keep the PKK guerillas out of their villages. Villages that refuse to participate in the guard system face demolition by the Turkish military, while those that go along suffer under harsh reprisals by the PKK. Between 1991 and 1995 the Turkish military killed 20,000 Kurds, destroyed 3000 villages and created more than 2 million refugees.
The billions of dollars Turkey spent in oppressing the Kurds after Desert Storm is the reason why Turkey is trying to extort billions of dollars out of the United States to allow American to use bases in Turkey. In the past 20 years Turkey has received more than $6.5 billion in grants and loans for military purposes. Since the Gulf War Turkey also has been GIVEN, not sold, billions of dollars worth of “surplus” airplanes, ships, tanks, guns, helicopters and ammunition by the United States. Not only does Turkey want to force the US to give them billions more dollars, they have also demanded that Turkish troops, not American troops, seize control of the Kurdish areas of Iraq to make sure that the restive Kurds are not allowed to organize.
Like the Afghans, millions of Kurds have been driven and scattered in countries all over the world. So far, more than two million Afghans have returned home to rebuild their country and there are still four million scattered around the world, many waiting to return.
The elephant in room that repressive regimes in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon try to ignore is the fear the freedom loving Americans might allow the Kurds the same opportunity to build their own nation as they have offered the Afghans. Bear in mind that in the Middle East, as well as in Afghanistan, battles are almost all Muslims against Muslims. The Americans somehow sorted it out and have allowed a new government to be formed in Afghanistan that is both Muslim oriented and not oppressive.
As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday in a press briefing, “These are tough issues. These are not easy issues. They are complicated.” And they are tough issues, especially for nations and street protestors not used to an American leader with courage and vision to see the broad picture.
If that “broad picture” includes a better life for the Kurds, the Shiites, and other oppressed minorities in the area, as it has for the persecuted Afghans, it would, as they fear, upset the status quo of the oppressive governments and their friends in Germany and France.
Somehow, I don’t think that would necessarily be a bad thing.
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com
Links:
United Nations - Displaced Kurds seen as victims of "ethnic cleansing" by Baghdad
The Kurds-No Friends but the Mountains
(Click "Selected", then "Imp. Documents)-Reward for Killing Families
CIA – Documented Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons
U.S. Army Biological and Chemical Command
Genocide Watch – A Kurdish View for Peace
BYU - Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points for Peace after World War I
Federation of American Scientists - U.S. Military Aid and Arms Sales to Turkey - Fiscal Years 1980-1999
The Kurds of Iraq: Recent history, future prospects