Ethnic Discord : From Rubble, a Kurdish Town Rises : * Residents battle time--and the threat of new Iraqi attacks--to reconstruct Qala Diza.

In 1989, the world was looking the other way when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s men swept through this Kurdish town of 60,000 people, dynamiting it street by street, house by house.

For two years it lay abandoned, a sea of shattered concrete 180 miles north of Baghdad, watched over by the crude sentry boxes of an Iraqi army fort and silently ringed by the lovely mountains of Kurdistan.

Now its Kurdish inhabitants are back, ripping apart the military base and even the rubble of their own houses for concrete blocks, iron rods and anything else to use in a remarkable effort to rebuild their devastated homeland.

“Reconstruction has started in 100, 200 villages. It has snowballed. . . . The whole atmosphere has changed,” said Carlos Zaccagnini, a Spanish field officer in northeast Iraq for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

With up to 400,000 refugees still camped out under canvas or in makeshift shacks covered by leaves and branches, the rapid approach of the harsh Kurdish winter is a big incentive to start rebuilding despite the fragile situation of no war, no peace.

In the heavily populated areas along the front, clashes can still send frightened Kurds fleeing for the hills by the thousands, as happened during fighting before an Oct. 8 cease-fire near the big Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah. Sulaymaniyah is one of three major cities now effectively controlled by the Kurds, who say that even during the latest bloody fighting they took thousands of prisoners.

Iraqi regular troops “are so demoralized, some of them ask us to tell them when we are about to attack so that they can surrender first,” said Siamand Banaa, a senior official of the Kurdish Democratic Party, the biggest guerrilla faction. “But Saddam has not changed.”

Kurdish leaders say that while Hussein may no longer be able to wage a war of mass destruction, his army could still easily defeat the lightly armed guerrillas if the West does not keep its April vow to protect the Kurds by prohibiting Iraqi military attacks north of the 36th Parallel.

The Kurds accuse Hussein of continuing to destroy Kurdish settlements in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, keeping alive memories of repeated attempts to annihilate them in the past.

Hussein ordered the destruction of 4,000 of their towns and villages during the last 20 years, Kurdish leaders say--part of a war with Iraq’s 4-million-strong Kurdish minority that reached a climax when they rose against the Iraqi dictator at the close of the Gulf War.

Before the allies stopped him from using helicopters and tanks, Hussein crushed the revolt, and more than 1.5 million Kurdish refugees fled over the mountains to Iran and Turkey. They left behind an empty land.

“The destruction was complete. There was not one building left standing,” said Hassan Mohammed Rasoul, chief resident engineer in Qala Diza for the new Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization, a group of former Iraqi-Kurdish civil engineers.

By now, however, U.S.-led allied relief efforts begun in April--and continued promises of military protection--have encouraged hundreds of thousands of refugees to return. More than 2 million Kurds, Turkomans and Assyrian Christians now live in the large guerrilla-controlled area of northern Iraq.

Only about 20,000 Kurdish refugees remain in Turkey and 500,000 in Iran, including 300,000 who left before the latest crisis. But even Kurds who fled in the 1970s are leaving stable lives abroad to rebuild their homes in Iraq.

“Five of my brothers were killed in 1983, when Saddam killed 8,000 men of our Barzani tribe,” said Yasim Khaled, 31, as four of his widowed sisters-in-law looked on from under their long, black chador veils.

“I was frightened to come back from Iran, because he is still the government. But (Kurdistan Democratic Party leader) Masoud (Barzani) called us back.”

Amid the wreckage of the 10,000 buildings of Qala Diza, there is a sense of urgency to rebuild before winter comes.

“The snow comes up to your ears here,” said Kadzhal Ibrahim Abdullah, 20, building a new house with her orphan siblings on the ruins of their old family home. “We are trying to make it out of the old stuff. We have no money.”

On the main street, tiny shops stand in boxlike rows, selling scrap metal, vegetables and clothes. One tailor was doing a busy trade sewing plastic pistol holsters and bullet clips for the omnipresent Kurdish guerrilla fighters.

Security is the main reason that many Kurds have waited until the last moment to build their winter homes. They wanted to see not just the signing of an autonomy deal with Baghdad, delayed now for five months, but also to hear how much support the West would offer in the future.

“The No. 1 thing we want is to be sure that they won’t leave us, they won’t just say goodby,” Rasoul said.

At the peak of the Kurdish emergency in May, the allied effort involved 22,000 men and women on both sides of the Turkey-Iraq border. Now only a group of allied colonels and their support helicopters travel regularly into northern Iraq to meet the Iraqi army and Kurdish leaders.

A 2,500-strong allied force has just closed down its residual Silopi base on the Turkish-Iraqi border, and a mandate from Turkey for key allied security overflights of northern Iraq ends in three months.

Another worry is the question of food supplies. Few are going hungry in northern Iraq at present, but roads are often impassable in winter and the future of foreign aid is as full of uncertainties as the Kurds’ own political fate.

The reassuring presence of a U.N. agency in northern Iraq may soon end if, as diplomats fear is possible, Baghdad does not renew the high commissioner’s mandate Dec. 31.

The mandate also forbids the U.N. office to help with formal reconstruction. The agency is only now starting with the urgent task of helping refugees who still have no proper shelter for the winter.

Over the next month, more than 2,000 trucks are due from Turkey containing 33,000 U.N.-supplied packs of corrugated iron, nails and wooden beams to help erect houses for refugee families that average 10 people each, the United Nations’ Zaccagnini said. An additional 8,000 winter tents are also on the way, he added.

Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization has done the most impressive work of any home-grown group.

Working in cooperation with the main governing authority in northern Iraq--the eight-party Iraqi Kurdistan Front--they have cleared and leveled many village sites. One small village has been almost completely rebuilt and work is proceeding fast on the planned, full reconstruction of a small town complete with parks, schools and 425 houses.

Pope was recently on assignment in northern Iraq.