The Kurds' fragile peace

National Review, July 8, 1991 by Donald Kirk

THE LIGHTS of the "city center" sparkle and twinkle at dusk. Young men, some in Western dress, others wearing the baggy pants, sashed blouses, and turbans that are almost uniforms for the Kurdish guerrillas, chat in cafes over cups of tea-or cans of Seven-Up, Pepsi, even beer. The clatter of dominoes vies with laughter and small talk. The women and children in this strictly Islamic society are all safely in their homes, and the men are free to enjoy the cool evening air after long days in non-air-conditioned shops and offices or in the nearby fields and hills.

It's an almost idyllic picture in this pleasant provincial center on the southern fringe of the "allied zone." It's an image of which the Americans and their allies are justly proud after more than two months of providing both the military security and the aid needed to induce the Kurds to come down from their camps in the mountains and resume some semblance of their former lives. It's a scene, though, that no one believes will last for very long after the allies go home.

Much of the small talk, one learns, revolves around Kurds' fears for the future-and their certainty that fighting will again flare across the mountains. "History tells us even the most innocent child will not be safe," says Ali Ahmad Berwari, a representative of Massoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) on the local committee of the Kurdistan Front, which took over many of the functions of a government in the absence of Iraqi authorities. "There were ten prisons in this city alone," says Berwari. They had torture rooms. There was a law giving soldiers and police the right to shoot anyone in certain zones, and they would charge an `execution fee' to recover the mutilated body-"

Berwari and a young man carrying a Soviet-made AK-47 rifle gladly jump into my car, rented in Turkey, for a drive a few miles out of town to meet higher-ups in Berwari's own party and its sometime rival, the PUK or Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, under Jalal Talibani. Slogans self-consciously written in English, for the benefit of a stream of foreign officials and journalists, adorn the PUK office.

Yes to Democracy, No to Dictatorship," says the biggest one. "No to another Halarja," says another, conjuring the memory of a massacre in 1987 in which the Kurds say five thousand civilians were killed by poison-gas bombs dropped from Iraqi helicopters.

A former businessman named Shawkat Mushir, identifying himself as a member of the PUK central committee, predicts "another catastrophe" even while smiling benignly behind gold-rimmed glasses. "If the allies leave," he says, "Saddam's regime will be more powerful, there will be another civil war." We are chatting in a rambling stone building guarded by at least a dozen rifle-bearing men, all wearing the requisite Kurdish dress. Up a steep slope is the local headquarters of Barzani's party and, at the top, a fortress-like stone blockhouse over which flutters, incongruously, the Union Jack. British soldiers are at the gates, guaranteeing not only the safety of the Kurds against the Iraqis to the south but also at least an appearance of cooperation among often conflicting Kurds, eager as never before to show they are all "one people" under the Kurdistan Front.

The Kurdish groups should stay together for longer," says Fadihil Merini, who says he is a member of the political bureau of the KDP. We've been friends for a long time. We are together." The PUK and KDP-the largest among seven groups banded together in the Kurdistan Front-are especially together in their view of the prospects for security under the United Nations' High Commission for Refugees, all that's left of a Western presence here in the vacuum left by the departure of the allied troops. "With only five hundred guards, can they help?" Mushir asks rhetorically.

"Neither we nor you believe they can do what the allies have been doing," says Merini.

Departing American officers, while trying to offer the most optimistic view about the future, refer to the blue-uniformed UN guards-authorized to carry Smith & Wesson .38s and walkie-talkies, and no other weaponry-as "rent-a-cops" and say the United Nations must send in a full-scale multi-national, peace-keeping force similar to the one in southern Lebanon. They laugh over the miserable performance of UN guards in two shootouts here in early June in which Kurds attacked the headquarters of the ruling Iraqi Baathist Party, killing two party officials and three Iraqi policemen. The leader of the local UN guard contingent ordered his men to withdraw from the UNHCR building, which they had orders to protect-and retreat to a hotel down the road, occupied by American troops.

"The UN is the weakest thing in our whole strategy," says Army Colonel Dick Naab, a one-time Notre Dame football player who did two tours in Vietnam. I'd like to see them more aggressive. We need a tripwire here to keep the Iraqi government honest. You need guys that are not afraid. They are the wrong guys to do it." The chief of the UNHCR office here, Pierre-France Pirlot, a veteran of crises from Somalia to Iran, responds simply: "We're equipped for a normal repatriation operation-to make sure the people can go home and the social infrastructure is in place."