Touched by History : Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has jolted families, jobs and hopes. : PARIS : Conflict Raises Kurdish Hopes for a Homeland

“You have a few thousand hostages in Iraq,” said Kendal Nezan, chairman of the Kurdish Institute in Paris. “We have 4 million.”

Nezan, 41, is a molecular physicist with an Albert Einstein hairdo. He holds a doctorate from the elite Faculte des Sciences d’Orsay outside Paris. But he is also a leader of the large Kurdish refugee population in Europe. For him and the other 25 million Kurds in the world, mostly found in the mountainous region where Turkey, Iraq, Iran and the Soviet Union converge, the prospect of a U.S. military confrontation with the regime of Saddam Hussein gives new life to the dream of a homeland called Kurdistan.

If Hussein can be eliminated and his army crippled, they reason, then the 4 million Iraqi Kurds could set up house as an independent nation in the oil- and water-rich lands of northern Iraq where the Kurdish population is centered.

“We are like people caught in a storm without a roof,” said Nezan, a soft-spoken native of the Kurdish region in eastern Turkey. “Of course, we are ready to accept even a morsel of land in Iraq. Since we have no land, anywhere we have a chance to get some is already a start.”

Kurds--there are 70,000 in France, 600,000 in all of Europe--have fought valiantly against successive Iraqi governments for decades. They are hawks on Iraq even though they fear that thousands of Kurds might die in a war. No one has forgotten 1988, when Iraqi forces destroyed 3,479 of 5,086 Kurdish villages in Iraq and used chemical weapons on their populations, killing more than 5,000 people in the city of Halabja alone.

The American forces, Nezan advised, should ignore the hostage problem and “rapidly bomb the strategic centers in Iraq.”

“The hostages complicate the situation,” Nezan said during an interview at his office in a working-class Paris neighborhood, “but no one should have the illusion that Saddam is going to let them all go. Iraq knows it is going to lose in this unavoidable war and that it risks causing many deaths.

“There will certainly be human losses, but they will not just be for the oil or so that the emirs can reinstall themselves in their palaces in Kuwait. They will also help restore democracy and resolve the Kurdish and Palestinian problems. Our hope is that this tense crisis in the gulf will focus attention on all the big problems in the region, the first being the Kurdish problem.”