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

REvuE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVIEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAP~-RlVISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE lA PRENSA-BASlN ÖZETi
WORLD AFFAIRS .
The Case for Action
The Kurds express the bitter lessons of
their history in a single adage: "The
Kurds have no friends, except the
mountains." Numbering some 25 million
ethnically and culturally distinct people,
the Kurds may be the world's largest nation
Without territory. They have been
obliged to live under the Turks, Arabs, Persians
and Russians. And they have been
repeatedly betrayed by Western powers.
, After World War l, the British
promised them an independent
state, but reneged in deference
to Turkey. In 1975, Secretary of
, State Henry Kissinger and the
Shal:1 of Iran withdrew joint
CIA-Iranian support for Kurdish
rebelsin Iraq, in exchange
for Saddam Hussein's signature
on a border treaty with
Iran. In 1988, the West barely
protested when Saddam gassed
thousands of Kurds in Halabja.
Today, the Kurds say, they
arebeing betrayed again. After
urging the Iraqi people to rise
up against Saddam Hussein,
President Bush is turning a
deaf ear to pleas for help from
leaders said they want autonomy, not a
separate state, Bush brushed the assurances
aside.
The administration's calculus overlooked
one possibility: that fighting the
rebels would give Saddam a cause to rally
the remnants of his regime, if only out of
fear of what would happen to them in the
event of a rebel victory. U.S. intelligence
now believes this is exactly what has hap-
PATRICK ROBERT-SYGMA
A young Kurd carries a rifle as his people flee
Bush can't turn his back after
both Kurdish and Shiite Muslim
rebels. Says Safeen Dizayee
of the Kurdish Democratic Party:
"The rhetoric ofthe administration
was directed at the people
of Iraq, to rise against the
regime. That they did, and all of
a sudden they've been dropped,
left at the mercy of the defeated
Army, the wounded wolf." To a
small but vocal group of critics
at home, this is even worse than
past cynical abandonments of U.S. allies, pened, NEWSWEEKhas learned. CIA and
like the Bay ofPigs. Some liken it to acqui- Pentagon analysts told the White House
escence in genocide. "It's immoral," said last wèek that putting down the Kurds and
Peter Galbraith, a Democratic Senate staff- Shiites has only bolstered Saddam's posier
who recently returned from a harrow- tion in Baghdad. "We see him in a much
ingtripwithKurdif'hrebelsthroughnorth- ,~str()n:gerposition-now thiül ever 1lefore,"
ern Iraq. "Throu{ 'ut Kurdistan, people one intelligence official says. •
talked to me rept.