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

REvuE DE PRESSE-PRESS REvIEW-BERHÉvOKA ÇAP~-RlVISTA STAMPA-DENTRO DE lA PRENSA-BASIN ÖzETi
feated anity and thearmor that escaped.
.the allies into a loyal force that rapidly
overwhelmed the weak and ill-equipped
Shi'ite insurgents. He dispatched two Republican
Guard divisions that had been
stationed around Baghdad to ensure the
efficiency of the Iraqi troops that had
failed so miserably against the allied coali-
,tion. This time it was the Shi'ite rebels who
,were doomed to failure. They lacked a
joint command-and-communications system
and were dependent largely on weapons
and ammunition abandoned by Iraqi
soldiers as they fled the allies. The holy
sites of Karbala and Najaf, sa meticulously
avoidedby coalition bombing raids, were
,reportedly ravaged. In some cases targeted
with napalm and phosphorus, thousands of
.civilians streamed toward the southern
'sector of the country occupied by U.S.
',troops. Ordered not to intervene, Ameri-.
'can soldiers could offer little more than
food, water and medical assistance.
In the north, things were different, and
.for almost a month the Kurds lived a
dream. An uprising that began on March 4
in the town of Rania spread like a sandstorm
to engulf all Iraqi Kurdistan. The
peshmerga (those who face death), as the
rebel fighters are called, did not need to
capture towns, as local Iraqi Kurdish militiamen
spontaneously joined the rebellion.
Fighter Kamal Kirkuki repeated joyfully to
all who would listen, "We Kurds are finally,
free." Jails were thrown open; prisoners
set at liberty. Kurds spoke openly of their'
travails without fear of retribution from
, Baghdad's once omnipresent spies. Even
the discovery of the horrors of Saddam's
torture camps-corpses studded with mag-
'gats, canisters of rotting human flesh
stored at local outposts of the dreaded Estikhbarat
(military intelligence), prisoners
.who had not seen the light of day for so
:'manyyears that they thought they were still.
living in the 1970s-seemed a catharsis betore
the new era of freedom.
Less than 30 km north of Erbil, commander
in chief Barzani was granting confident
interviews from his luxurious new
headquarters-the concrete villa of Saddam
,
Hussein in the hill town of Salahuddin.
"We realize that an independent Kurdistan
is out of the question," he told TIME.
'AIl
we want is the right
to till our land in
peace, the right to 10-
, cal government, the
•.
right to speak our lan-
:guage and have it taught in our schools."
•The rebel leader's bodyguard lounged
•.around in the pink-and-beige interior, staring
out through floor-to-ceiling windows at
the snowy mountains glowing pink in the
sunset. For Barzani, the rapid ouster of the
'regime from Kurdistan was vindication for
'his father Mustafa, who died in exile in
1979 after his own uprising against Bagh-
.dad failed. "We were all taken by surprise
.;at the swiftness of our victory," Barzani
acknowledged.
Butd~leat, was equally swift. With the
SClutlrsubduoo; Sâdélam wasllble to move
100,000 more troops north, rapidly outnumbering
the Kurdish fighters. Within a
weekgovernment forces had relieved the
siege of Mosul, the thirdlargest city in,
Iraq. In the same period, Kirkuk, Erbil,
Sulaymaniyah, Zakhu and other Kurdishoccupied
cities were reconquered.
, The Kurds fought back bravely. But
there was a stylized, almost medieval ferocity
to their resistance. The peshmerga.
were dressed in turbans and baggy khaki
trousers. Along with their AK-47s, SAMS'
and submachine guns. they carried a traditional
dagger stuck .into their sashes, "I am
very happy," said one peshmerga. He pointed
toward the battle zone to indicate the
source of his joy: "War." Possessed of an
incredible sense of honor, the peshmergti
buried all the Iraqi soldiers they killed with
full military honors. Explained Idriss Makmaud,
a peshmerga commander: "That is
the honorable way." Attempting to retake
Kirkuk, a band of warriors came under attack
from Iraqi helicopter gunships nea~
the town of Altun Kupri. As the aircraft
came around again and again, the peshmerga
opened fire. Suddenly a line of m~'n
rose up, wrapped their armnound one à~other
and sang and danced. Only the se~-'
ting sun prevented the helicopters from
slaughtering them all.
'
Just three days after Barzani spoke to
TIME, his headquarters was a shambles as
the commander tried to pull his forces together.
For want of, a better communications
system, handwritten requests for supplies
and assistance, scribbled on pieces of
children~s notepaper, were passed from,
soldier to soldier until they reached the
chief. There was little opportunity to consider
each message. Hearing news that Kir.
kuk had fallen to the Iraqis, Barzani waved
off a request for an interview. Said an aide:
"We can't hold the cities. We cannot deal
with ground-to-ground missiles, helicopters,
warplanes and heavy artillery. How
can boys and old men stand up to the Republican
Guard?" His advice: "Leave as
.quickly as possible. The battle for the
plains is over. Now we must continue the.
:battle in the mountains." . r •
Civil wars inevitably result in mass migration,
but the forced exoduses out of
Iraq's north and south seemed almost as
.much the product of deliberate policy. In
Kurdistan babies have reportedly been suffering
from marasmus and kwashiorkor,
diseases usually brought on by the 'severe.
malnutrition endemic to countries like Sudan,
and Ethiopia. The infants' limbs we,re
stringy, their faces shrunken to their sklIlls,
their eyesfilled with pus, ."There are many
of them like this in this region," said Dr.
Sabry Hassan of the Zakhu General Hos-
. pital, "but we have nothing to keep them
alive with," Since the Kuwait invasion last
August, Saddam has channeled his country's
meager supplies to his power base in
central Iraq, thereby imposing a kind of se.,
lective starvation on his Shi'ite and Kurd- '
ish enemies. .
Beforefleeing to the hills, Bar~
zani complained of his people's
predicament. "We have
two blockades," he said, "one
from Baghdad, which purposely
starved Kurdistan of food and medicine,
and the U.N. blockade, which strangled
Iraq. Now the U.N. is talking about
emergency food relief for Iraq, but does it
really believe Saddam will feed the Kurds?
No, he will let them starve. And those he
does not starve he will order his troops
to kill."
As refugees, not only were the Kurds
more numerous than the Shi'ites but their
prospects were more dire. The mountains
presented a formidable rampart of bare
stone, their soaring cliffs and giant crevices
providing few navigable passes to borders
across which few would be welcome, A,S
they trekked up into the barren ranges, the
Kurds saw constant reminders of their brutalized
past: rusting pipes, a few founda-.
tion stones. the ruins of a gristmill. the
skeletal remnants of Kurdish villages
demolished by Baghdad during earlier
repression.
In some places the escape track became
a mess of mud; many abandoned
their cars and trucks to wade through the
bog. Sentries, set up every 1,000 m,
watched the skies far approaching enemy
helicopters, which they called "damnation
birds." Not all destinations were reachable.
Syria, for example, was arrived at by.
crossing the Tigris on a boat and a prayer,
through some 30,000 mines planted in the
riverbank on the Iraqi side. The peshmerga
boats that ferried refugees were at the
mercy of incoming Iraqi shells, and the few
bridges had already been blown up. By last
week, Baghdad had completely shut down
the escape route into Syria.
Sc the Kurds headed north and east tbward
Turkey and Iran. It was impossible to
estimate the number bottled up at those '
borders. Tehran claimed that 1 million to 2 '
million Kurds were seeking sanctuary in
Iran and that 200,000 had entered its tertitory.
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati
announced that his country would continue
to keep its frontiers open to the refu- ,
gees. Iran's generosity toward the Kurds is
hardly based on altruism: it is designed
partly to mollify Iran's own restless Kurdish
minority, which makes up 9% to 12% of
the population, and partly to improve the
country's deplorable human-rights image.
Despite pressure from Washington and
London, Turkey's borders were closed ..
"We are trying to help the refugees on
both sides of the border," President Turgut.
Ozal said. "There are already 100,000 of,
them inside Turkey and another 150,000 in
Iraq. The number is much higher than we
can handle."
Turkey's problem is that it already has 7
million to 14.5million Kurds on its territory.
For a decade, Turkey has been trying to
suppress Kurdish agitation for autonomy in
.its eastern provinces. Ankara believes even
an autonomous Kurdish region jn the are;i
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