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

REVUE DE PRESSE-PRESS REVlEW-BERHEVOKA ÇAPÊ-RNISfA STAMPA-DENTRO DE LA PRENSA-BASlN ÖZETi
followed ever since, and Kurds in Turkey,
Iran and Syria have also remained restive.
Life under non-Kurdish rulers .has not
been easy. Teaching the Kurdish language
is prohibited in Iranian and Syrian schools.
In Turkey singing a Kurdish ditty can bring
a jail term. Syria has revoked the citizenship
of many of its Kurds to punish .their
rebelliousness. Iraq has expelled tens of
thousands of Kurds from their homes, and
in 1988 gassed the town of Hala1;Jja,killing
5,000 people. The world community
scarcely took notice.
Over the years, the Syrians, Ininians
and Turks have quietly supplied military
aid to Iraqi Kurds. But the assistance was
only enough tO'create a nuisance for Baghdad,
never enough to enable the Kurds to
break loose.
In their latest campaign the rebels claim
that in addition to their 30,000 fighters,
called the peshmerga (those who face
death), they have on tlieîr side some 20,000
defectors from the regular military and another
200,000 militiamen. But these figures
are believed to be greatly exaggerated. "If
you add them up,"
says a senior British Rebels watch owr
diplomat, "the fighting
the body of a security
should have ended
some time ago."
agent they killed
in Erbil; another
Yet there is no denying
group poses incon-
that the Kurds gruously in front of
have made serious a Manhattan-skyline
advances. After the mural.inside a
captured mil~ry
installation in Harir
relatively easy task
of capturing barren
r-..-.-"'"
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countryside, last week they began to move
on the cities, including Kirkuk, a metropolis
of nearly 1 million people and the heart of
Iraq's oil-producing north.
The Kurds have alwaysbeen tough fighters;
Saladin, the nemesis of the Crusaders,
was a Kurd. But this time, they have been
helped by a convergence of propitious factors.
Because Baghdad at first considered
the unrest in the Shi'ite areas more threatening,
it moved troops in the north southward,
givingthe guerrillas a more open field. Popular
disgust with Saddam's disastrous Kuwaiti
adventure fertilized the ground. "Uprising is
an art," saysJalal Talabani, Damascus-based
leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
"There must be a climate for it."
Though there is no indication that the
Kurds are coordinating military tactics
with the insurrectionists in the south, both
Kurdish and Shi'ite groups belong to the
Joint Action Committee formed by Iraqi
opposition organizations in December.
Still, the ambitions of the Kurds, who are
Sunnis, and the Shi'ites, who want a fundamentalist
government in Baghdad, are
hopelessly in conflict. Last week Talabani
said bluntly, "There will not be an Islamic
regime in Iraq." Meanwhile, the Shi'ites
suspect that in victory Kurdistan would
bolt from the republic at the first opportunity.
Outsiders are equally skeptical that
the Kurds would settle for autonomy. "As
the first step, yes," says Michael Lazarev,
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TIME, APRIL 1,1991
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