People's Democracy

The Northern Front: The Dog That Did Not Bark

  S M Menon

 IN the south of Iraq, the US-led war of aggression against the Arab people has suffered from the conspicuous absence of cheering crowds. This was simply not in the script. The legendary detective Sherlock Holmes once solved a mystery using the clue of the dog that did not bark. The Iraqi crowds that did not cheer may well be the most powerful clue yet of the direction in which the US’s imperialist hubris is propelling it. Six days into the war, an Associated Press report had an officer of the US Marine Corp in effect admitting that the invasion had failed. By resisting, rather than rolling over in abject surrender, the Iraqi people had told their putative liberators exactly what they thought of them.

 If that is the situation in the south, then in the north of Iraq the most striking feature of the war of aggression so far is the front that has failed to open. The northern front was an integral part of US war plans.  Indeed, in the frenetic months leading up to the launch of hostilities, there was more concern within the US war cabal about the southern front.  But as a member of NATO and the US’s most loyal ally in the region after Israel, Turkey’s logistical and locational support for a northern front was simply taken for granted.

  TURKEY’S WAVERING SUPPORT

 Things did not quite work out that way. A flotilla of US ships carrying huge numbers of troops and vast quantities of war materiel arrived at the Turkish ports late-February. They waited restively offshore as the Turkish government debated participation in the war of aggression. With evident reluctance, the newly elected government then sent a resolution to parliament, seeking endorsement for the use of Turkish military bases for ground operations and air sorties against Iraq. On March 1, the Turkish parliament threw the resolution out of court.

 However, two days after the aggression started, Turkey’s parliament finally granted overflight rights to the US. But it firmly ruled out permitting US ground forces to transit through Turkish territory. The Turkish government simultaneously made a telling revelation about its true intentions, announcing that it would send a large force of army commandos into Iraq, supposedly for humanitarian purposes. Alarm bells sounded immediately in Washington. Given the tortured history the Turks’ oppression of the Kurds, a Turkish military incursion into Iraqi Kurd territory would have effectively opened up a war within a war.

 Under immense pressure from the US, Turkey held back on force deployment, though it continued to insist that it had legitimate interests to protect in the region. The US meanwhile, has been unable to induct significant force levels into northern Iraq. It has stationed special forces in the region to operate in close association with Kurdish guerrilla groups. But this leaves the balance of numerical advantage in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds. Should the Kurdish guerrillas leverage US patronage into a campaign to take the town of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, then Turkey’s quiescence could no longer be taken for granted. Situated in the heart of one of Iraq’s most productive oilfields, Kirkuk is a strategic prize that Turkey has long coveted. If the town were to fall to Kurd forces, it could conceivably become the pivot of a powerful new movement for Kurd autonomy or independence. This would inevitably, have repercussions for Turkey’s own restive Kurd regions.

 The US “ambassador at large for Iraqi freedom”, Zalmay Khalilzad, was till March 25, engaged in desperate negotiations with Turkey. His foremost priority was to keep Turkey from taking action on its own. A deployment of Turkish soldiers under the command of US forces was not being ruled out though.

 The Afghan-born Khalilzad, a former oil industry operative who was deeply enmeshed in all the sordid US bargains with the unlamented Taliban regime in Afghanistan, has not had a great negotiating track record. He led the US effort in February to bring Turkey on board the coalition of aggression. Late February, he was scheduled to arrive in northern Iraq to finalise US war plans. As his Iraqi clients—including the Kurds— awaited his arrival, word reached them of a deal that would allow Turkey to bring several of its armed divisions into northern Iraq. The ostensible purpose was to prevent a serious humanitarian disaster and restrain a potentially massive cross-over of refugees into Kurdish territory within Turkey. It was also reported that the Turkish army would disarm the guerrilla fighters of the two main groups operating in northern Iraq - the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

 The reaction was instantaneous. Sami Abdul Rahman, deputy prime minister of the KDP denounced the deal as a “betrayal”. Barely able to control his fury, he fumed: “The Americans should ask our consent; we are a partner. … We are opposed to the freedom of our people being part of a price paid to Turkey. Our people will resist it by all means possible.”

In the streets of the Iraqi Kurd region, reactions were rather more nuanced, with US avarice for oil and Turkish repression being held almost unanimously to be greater dangers than the Iraqi regime. An American journalist, accustomed to US propaganda about the Iraqi president, was shocked to find a man on the street tell him that “Saddam Hussein is much better than Turkey”. Indeed, he was told: “The Arabs are better than the Turks. If Turkey sends troops to the region we are ready to fight them and then go back to the mountains”.

 The historical factors behind these reactions are not hard to find. Vera Saeedpour, founder of the Kurdish Library and Museum in New York and a close observer of the community for many years, puts the matter very succinctly: “One thing is certain, Turkey has for most of this (i.e., the 20^th) century, been the world’s worst place to be Kurdish”.

  IRAQI KURDS

The situation of Kurds in Iraq is quite different as Saeedpour documents.  Contrary to US claims, “Iraqi Kurds were not subjected to a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing nor threatened with cultural annihilation”. Iraq is the only country that accords official recognition to the Kurdish language. And Saeedpour confirms that “many of the publications (she holds) in the Kurdish library were published in Baghdad”. What is more, till the upheavals of the Gulf War and the havoc wrought with the education system, there was a Kurdish University in Sulaimaniya in Iraq.

 The bitter internecine warfare between the KDP and the PUK is one of the great untold stories of the years since the Gulf War. The squabbling broke out 1992, shortly the US sponsored elections in northern Iraq to set up a government for the Kurds. In 1995, an armed Kurdish uprising against the Iraqi regime fell in upon itself and the PUK desperately petitioned Iran for military help. Massoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, lost little time calling in Saddam Hussein’s forces, quickly tilting the military balance his way. The event was celebrated all over Iraq as the reunification of the country after the vivisection imposed by the US.

 Barzani, the most powerful tribal chief in the Iraqi Kurdish area, is an integral part of US plans for regime change today. But his relations with the Baghdad regime remain an area of uncertainty.

 How the current impasse in northern Iraq will work out remains to be seen. The US is deeply worried that Iraqi forces in the north could be emboldened by the resistance being offered by their counterparts in the south. Any further delay in opening a northern front, could in the military judgment, prove expensive. But a northern front seems to require that the Kurds should be delivered into the overlordship of Turkey. If that indeed does happen, then it would be decisive proof that the Kurds have fallen victim to a strategic misalliance, not for the first time in their recent tortured history.

Unlike in Turkey, political and cultural reconciliation with the Kurds has always been a strong motif in Iraqi politics. The prospects for reconciliation though, have been consistently thwarted, partly because of factors internal, but in no small measure on account of external machinations. Principal among the external players have been the ubiquitous superpower, Iran under the Shah, and Israel, which always had an interest in keeping the eastern Arab world weak and disunited.

The Iraqi revolution of 1958, which overthrew the Hashemite monarchy, was the first stage in the reconciliation of Arabs and Kurds. The revolutionary charter recognised that the Iraqi people were made up of two nations - the Arabs and the Kurds - and committed itself to evolving a fair and reasonable system of power-sharing. Stricken by chronic instability and intrigue, the revolutionary regime proved unable to deliver on this promise.

Since then, the Kurdish war of attrition in Iraq has been through several distinct phases. Needless to say, by the mid-1960s, Israel had become one of the Iraqi Kurds’ main external props.

The Baath Socialists seized power in Baghdad in 1968. In the immediate aftermath, hostilities with the Kurds escalated rapidly. But secret negotiations were underway, which culminated in the historic agreement of March 1970, recognising the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Shah of Iran, by now preening himself as a regional superpower, would not have a united Iraq on his western flank if he could help it. In 1969, he unilaterally abrogated the 1937 agreement demarcating the Shatt-al-Arab waterway between the two countries, massed troops on the border and sandbagged buildings in Teheran, doing everything possible to create a war hysteria. The next year, he actively backed a right-wing attempt to topple the Baath regime.

The Shah’s machinations gained momentum as the confrontation between the Baath regime and the western oil companies escalated, culminating in the nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972. In May 1972, US president Richard Nixon called on the Shah in Teheran. According to a classified US Congressional investigation - later leaked to the press - the covert assistance programme for the Kurds was finalised at this meeting.  Iraqi participation in the Syrian sector of the 1973 Arab-Israel war lent a new urgency to this stratagem. In the spring of 1974, Iran in collusion with the US and Israel, fanned smouldering Kurdish resentments into flames, just when Baghdad was finalising the autonomy package agreed in 1970.

With minor amendments, history now repeats itself in the Iraqi Kurd areas.  Now as then, the well-being and security of the Kurds is the last consideration on the agenda of US imperialism. Now as then, the main concern is the security of Israel and uninterrupted access to the oil wealth of the Gulf. And now, as then, the Kurds are likely to succumb to the blandishments of external powers, rather than grasp their opportunities for reconciliation within the Iraqi state. Should wisdom finally dawn though, it would not be a moment too soon.