For Kurds, Dashed Hopes Are Ages Old

Walking across the rickety bridge from Turkey into Iraq, one encounters first an overpowering stench of diesel fuel and then a sign pasted crookedly on a guard shack saying “Welcome to Kurdistan.”

The fuel, ferried out of here by Turkish trucks in endless caravans, is a blatant but accepted violation of United Nations sanctions against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The sign celebrates a country that never was--a contorted land where brothers fight and outsiders jostle for scraps. To make room for an arriving passenger’s luggage, a taxi driver casually tosses his grenade launcher, a dented old friend, deeper into the trunk.

After centuries of struggle, the Kurdish dream of an independent homeland is once again aground on shoals of violence, internal dissension and international intervention. For a proud people inured to disillusion and displacement, there is more of both to come.

Five years after the United States created a protected area for Kurds in northern Iraq, a civil war between rival Kurdish factions has whipped destructively across dusty crossroads, parched mountains and desert cities mired in divisive isolation.

When fighting began, the Americans abandoned a headquarters here in Zakhu whose very existence underpinned Kurdish hopes for a better tomorrow in northern Iraq. Now, Iraq, Iran and Turkey regard Kurdish distress the way cats watch a tired sparrow.

“Kurds have no real friends,” said Bahman K. Maulood, president of Salahuddin University in Irbil, the regional capital.

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“This is a dirty, stinking business,” said Fatah Hussein, flanked by dirty hoses and a big, rusting gas tank perched on a dirt mound.

“How I long for my green village. There were fruit trees and a forest. We had 60 sheep and goats; five cows. We had real lives. Here we are prisoners,” said Hussein, a patriarch in traditional baggy pants and a black-and-white darsok, as Kurds call their headdress.

Hussein and his 10 sons own one of the more than 500 mud-brick gas stations that have sprung up in the last few years to dispense contraband diesel fuel trucked from areas of Iraq controlled by Saddam Hussein’s government.

The lean-to stations in a noxious stretch of desert along the Zakhu road keep families together and generate enough Kurdish-administered border and customs fees to run rudimentary public services. The revenue of $100,000 to $250,000 a day is temporary economic lifeblood, perhaps, but the diesel trade hasn’t much competition. There is no industry, and there are few paying jobs in rural northern Iraq.

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The Fatah Hussein family is a microcosm of the heartbreak and disruption so familiar to the 20 million Kurds who live in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and parts of the former Soviet Union. Mostly Sunni Muslims whose language is a cousin to the Persian spoken in Iran, the Kurds--a fierce, strongly tribal people--have rebelled against foreign overlords across bitter centuries. But they have never succeeded in winning their own state. They have been kicked, pillar to post, by regional governments who regard an independent Kurdistan as anathema.

Fatah Hussein, 63, recites modern history as he has lived it.

“The Iraqis, the Turks and Iranians all want to kill us,” he lamented. Then, with a sad smile, he finished his thoughts with a flash of irresistible charm: “So what do we do? We kill each other.”

Saddam Hussein agreed long ago to an autonomous Kurdistan in the Iraqi north but then betrayed his promise. Across two decades, he killed about 180,000 Iraqi Kurds, including 4,000 to 8,000 by poison gas in 1988. He destroyed 4,000 villages.

As the Persian Gulf War was ending in 1991, the Kurds of northern Iraq--encouraged by President Bush--rebelled against Hussein. With what was left of his army, the leader fell on them with savagery; about 1.5 million fled into snowy mountains of Turkey and Iran.

“There were about 30 of us from the village. We would carry the young and very old up into the mountains and then go back to get the others,” said Fatah Hussein, amber worry beads clicking through his fingers in the afternoon sun.

A 1-year-old grandson, Wasy, was among the thousands of Kurds who remain in the mountains. “He was small and weak. He got diarrhea and then he died,” said Tasher Hussein, the boy’s father.

After international outcry at the plight of the Kurds, the United States created a haven for them protected by daily flights over the area. That neutralized the menace of Saddam Hussein, lured the Kurds back home and raised emotional hopes of a real Kurdistan. But nobody wants one except the Kurds: The American commitment was humanitarian, not political.

“America said, ‘Come back and we will protect you.’ And we did. But then the Turks came,” Fatah Hussein said with undisguised hatred. His village, Jume, is northeast of Zakhu and near the Turkish border in an area where Marxist Turkish Kurds shelter and launch cross-border strikes.

In 1995, the Turkish army sent 30,000 troops into Iraq against these separatist rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Hussein says the Turks hounded everybody from Jume and more than 100 other villages in the border region.

When a visitor offered to take Hussein home to Jume for a visit to see if his pears were ripe, he exploded with baleful anger.

“If we go to Jume, the Turkish helicopters will come.” His fist slammed through the air. “Boom, boom, boom. We are all dead.”

Last month, an Iranian army column advanced more than 100 miles into northern Iraq to attack Iranian Kurdish guerrillas. On Aug. 31, Iraqi military support for one faction of Iraqi Kurds against another was decisive in the victorious faction’s recapture of Irbil. And now the Turks have announced that they will soon cross the border again in force to establish an anti-guerrilla buffer zone inside Iraq.

Turkish soldiers will probably see Jume again before Fatah Hussein does.

“I feel it like poison,” he said.

In Turkey, where about 12 million Kurds live, successive governments have routinely suppressed Kurdish political agitation. The bitter and accelerating 12-year struggle against the PKK has claimed about 21,000 lives, nearly 200 this month alone.

Like many of the up to 800 truckers who come each day to buy the embargo-breaking diesel, 45-year-old Suleyman, who drove from Cizre in Turkey with three partners, is a Kurd who carries a Turkish passport.

“Twice a month, we are allowed to come. The profit from the journeys is what keeps our families alive,” he said. Apart from the jouncing rides to Iraq, the truck is hardly used. “There is always work in Turkey for Turkish truck drivers, only rarely for Kurdish drivers,” he said.

Suleyman said he and some neighbors bought the truck after the Turkish army destroyed their village in southeastern Turkey.

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Cities in southeastern Turkey such as Cizre and Diyarbakir, which at 1.5 million is the world’s largest Kurdish city, have all experienced a great influx of Kurds forced from their land--just like the cities of northern Iraq.

Zakhu Mayor Rashid Hussein Ahmed balances pressing municipal affairs against the local implications of international events. Fresh from a meeting with advisors on ways to increase city water supplies, Hussein Ahmed lamented the unannounced dawn departure this month of the 21-member American-led Military Coordination Commission (MCC) from its Zakhu headquarters.

“It was a shock. The commission was a small sign that America could help us solve our problems,” said the 41-year-old mayor, a former high school psychology teacher. “I am sorry you find us living as if in a stadium--there are too many players. Things will be better when the fighting ends.”

Maybe. But the lesson of Kurdish history is that while fighting always ends, there is always more fighting.

On a winter afternoon in 1991, U.S. Marines dropped from helicopters into a wheat field outside Zakhu in the aftermath of Iraqi attack and Kurdish flight. The Americans helped restore confidence. Zakhu, its population swollen to more than 100,000 by displaced villagers such as Fatah Hussein’s family, got a new start.

The city became the over-the-bridge staging point for journalists and other foreign visitors, and the headquarters of private and international relief agencies working in northern Iraq. The customs duties and offshoots of the diesel trade pumped in money, and so did some quiet cigarette smuggling.

City Hall, severely damaged in fighting between Kurds and the Iraqi army, was repaired. The headquarters of the ruling Democratic Party of Kurdistan, a major source of government jobs, got a new coat of paint, and the popular downtown pool hall replaced its shot-up windows.

Today, it is not so much that Zakhu is poor as that it seems so forlorn. There is bustle along the main street, but little construction and few signs of verve at municipal hallmarks like the Ivan Hairdressing Saloon, the Harem Refreshment restaurant or the Baghdad Hotel, which is crammed these days with Turkish reporters.

The American military mission is locked up tight, and so are the offices of many foreign relief agencies, all victims of the Kurd-versus-Kurd instability.

Across Kurdistan, isolation, uncertainty and inactivity are facts of life. When electric power sputtered to life in Zakhu in recent days, televisions were tuned to Turkish channels but received mostly snow.

Exactly eight Kurds from northern Iraq are allowed to cross the Habur bridge into Turkey each day, and they must carry Iraqi passports, because no country recognizes Kurdistan.

Zakhu Police Chief Lt. Col. Mohammed Hassan Abu says there is no problem of crime or public disorder. He is still looking, though, for unknown terrorists who set off a bomb in the local market last year, killing more than 100 people.

The Kurds of Zakhu and the rest of northern Iraq complain that they have been victims of two embargoes: the international one against Saddam Hussein and the one he imposed against them as residents of the part of Iraq that he could not control.

“After five years, brothers are killing brothers. There is no electricity, no water, no new roads, no new schools, no books. There are no jobs, no business. When the MCC went to Turkey, a lot of people wished they could go too,” said one of Zakhu’s biggest traders.

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When the Turkish army next sweeps across the border on a guerrilla-hunting incursion into northern Iraq, it may fall hardest on villages like Mala Arab, population around 250, along a crumbling road east of Zakhu where PKK guerrillas are known to operate.

Mala Arab is a village reborn, a poor, fetching and stubborn place that speaks eloquently of the Kurdish passion for the land and of the pathos of people unable to protect themselves.

There is no running water in Mala Arab, but there is electricity, and a school for 70 students that the villagers built themselves with the support of a foreign aid agency. The flocks are plump after a good summer, and the fruit harvest is good too. The villagers, interrupted from building a communal toilet one recent afternoon, wondered if there is much future for them.

“We are not very comfortable,” said Jabbar, a 40-year-old father of 11 who is the village leader. “We are afraid of Saddam, and we are afraid of the Turks.”

In 1985, the Iraqi army came hunting Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas fighting Saddam Hussein. “They said the peshmergas were sleeping in the village by night and fighting Saddam by day. That was true,” said Jabbar.

The soldiers arrested 50 village men and held them 40 days. “We were tortured often, but we always said we were simple peasants working the land,” he said.

The Iraqi army brought a bulldozer and razed the village. “My father died that day. He was in our house, and he would not come out,” said Jabbar.

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The villagers eventually returned to rebuild, but in 1990 Hussein’s army returned. This time they fled into the mountains, where about 20 of them died. Last year, the Turkish army came.

“They took our guns, but that was all. In other villages nearby, they killed people,” said Jabbar’s brother Khaled.

Now, the villagers of Mala Arab know that the Turks will return and that there is nothing to protect them. They might be lucky again. Or maybe not.

“What I know is that we were not free under Saddam and we are not free now. Why don’t the Kurdish people have the right to be free?” the village leader asked. “We have little, but we are happy here with our children. As long as they don’t come to kill us again.”