The Kurds' Suffering is Rooted in Past Betrayals

By Rachelle Marshall

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 Kurdistan 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 enforced 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 regard 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, Turkey 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, relations 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 Iraq'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 give 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. According 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 objectives."

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, "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 1 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 the Middle East.