Exode (des Kurdes d'Irak) - Institut kurde de Paris

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REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAP~-RMSTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LAPRENSA-BASIN ÖZETi
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~. 1 ... .~ 7 April 1991
"
ALMOSTeveryone, including this newspaper,
has been wrong about the Kurds. That is to say,
we have most of us been wrong about Saddam
Hussein. We thought that the allies should not
proceed to Baghdad and finish off the monster.
The United Nations had not authorised that.
We thought, or we hoped, that Saddam had
been so weakened that he would topple off his
gildéd throne. President Bush explicitly incited
the Iraqis, who include the Kurds, to revolt,
and we believed that the Kurds might even succeed.
We - and perhaps the first person plural
now principally means John Major and George
Bush - omitted or forgot or declined to warn
Saddam not to use his helicopter gunships to
massacre Kurds. Mr Bush then went fishing or
.golfing and appeared not to dwell upon the
Kurds. They did not seem to be uppermost in
Mr Major's mind either, until Mrs Thatcher'
stepped forward like a figure in a dream and
told us what we should have been thinking.
Backseat drivers can, after alJ, be useful.
A few weeks ago, how pleased was the West
with the allies' conduct during the Gulf war.
How brilliant was victory, how noble the idea of
a new world order made safe by the power of
the United States and the smooth and harmonious
workings of the United Nations. How
vulgar such feelings seem now. We a~e left wi~h
the reality that though we have remstated In
Kuwait one of the world's nastier regimes we
'.have at the same time, precipitated the uprising
~nd flight of hundreds of thousands of in-
.nocent Kurds, though Mr Major, to his shame,
says he cannot recall asking them "to mount
this particular insurrection," as though the revolt
were a freakish event which had nothing to
do with us. The notion of a new world order
turns out to be a piece of empty optimism -
one could say, looking towards the United
States, of Wilsonian claptrap. Men are not
made new so easily. They and their orders prefer
to go on much as they did before.
Powerful nations cannot pursue their foreign
policy on Gladstonian principles of intervention.
You cannot come to the rescue of.
every persecuted minority. But, equally, great
nations - one might say successful nations ~
should not be wholly guided in foreign matters
by notions of self-interest or realpolitik. The
United States and Britain seem to have been so
guided in the Gulf war. The liberation of Kuwait
was a cool-headed response to a threat to
the West's oil supplies. There is nothing wrong
with that. But there is a horror in being too
cold in evading the opportunity,
: '. '.
which may be
thrown upin' the äbsolutily proper purSuit of
self-interest, of doing some good.
So long as Mr Bush represented the war as a
defence of civilised values, his version of events
could be indulged, though the reinstatement of
the al-Sabahs may have stuck in our gullets.
The man who reportedly told the CIA in January
to provoke the Kurds into insurrection and
preached rebellion during the Gulf war, n~w
acts like someone with a nasty bout of amneSIa.
Mr Bush represents the Kurdish revolt as
though it were a tribal conflict in an obscure'
corner of Africa of which he is blamelessly un-
.aware. The point is not that he or Mr Major
need to beexponents of a Kurdish state. Who
can even say that there should be one? So long
as the Kurds remain divided between five countries,
an unloved minority in each of them, it is
certain that there will not be. It is not unforgivable
for Mr Bush to have assured his allies,
Syria and Turkey, before the Gulf war that he
would not give a leg up to Kurdish nationalism.
But this does not justify allowing Saddam Hussein
to murder Kurds when there are still tens
of thousands of American troops within Iraq
who are capable of stopping him.
When Gladstone was steamed up about the
Turkish massacres of Bulgarian Christians, the
British public got steamed up too. Public opinion
can be a marvellous thing, generous as well
as cruel. Uut at ottlce, out of favour, Mrs
Thatcher sensed its mood while Mr Major
was still watching Arsenal beat Aston Villa .
Even now, one would not exactly describe
Messrs Bush and Major as being steamed up.
They have the look of men who have arrived
late at a function which they had forgotten
about. Their governments still seem less
aware than the public of the horror, the pity,
of the dying Kurdish children. Is there anything
they can now do? It is probable that at
least for the time being Sadd am Hussein has
killed all the Kurds he wants to. This may not
apply to any actual or potential Shia rebels in
the south of Iraq. Saddam must be told to put
his helicopter gunships away and not to use
them unless he wants them to be blown up.
Western countries must expedite their aid,
and the European Community members
meeting tomorrow in Luxembourg should tell
Turkey that if that country hopes to become a
Community member within the next hundred
years she had better start behaving in a civilised
way. Beyond that, we can now only pray
for the swift demise of Saddam Hussein -
and no more mention of a newworld order.
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