28
April 2004
1. "Hell and Back - A firsthand account of Syrian atrocities", according to estimates, almost 100 Kurds were killed in the riots that followed a soccer match in the city of Qamoshli, Syria last month. Over1 , 300 Kurds are believed to have been arrested for treason, espionage, incitement, and disrupting the public order in the cities of Qamoshli, Ifrin, Dar-a Zhur, Aleppo, and Damascus.
2. "Turkey: Curbs on Assembly Undermine EU Bid", Police violence and local government restrictions are undermining freedom of assembly and the reform process in Turkey, Human Rights Watch said in an open letter today to the Turkish deputy prime minister Abdullah Gül.
3. "Turkey monitoring review clouded by DEP verdict", dismayed by last week's DEP verdict, the Council of Europe decides to postpone decision on whether Turkey is eligible to be removed from human rights monitoring and agrees to discuss the issue in June.
4. "Germany renews support for Turkey's EU candidature", Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Tuesday renewed Germany's support for Turkey to join the European Union, at a ceremony with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
5. "Turkish police arrest 14 family members after "honour killing" of 14-year-old girl", Turkey was in emotional turmoil on Wednesday amid reports that police had arrested a man who strangled his 14-year-old daughter to maintain family "honour" after she was abducted and repeatedly raped by a stranger.
6. "Split over Cyprus", the defeat of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for the reunification of Cyprus was not merely a short-term setback for the divided island. The 65 percent of Greek Cypriot voters who rejected Annan's plan Saturday also cast a dark shadow over Turkey's hopes of acceding to the European Union.
7. "Should we partition Iraq?", Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state: so writes Peter Galbraith, America's pre-eminent Kurdophile, in the May 13 New York Review of Books "How To Get Out of Iraq".
8. "Falluja tests Kurd ties to Iraq - Kurdish leader", the Iraqi city of Falluja, a bastion of loyalty to Saddam Hussein and now a symbol of Arab resistance to U.S. occupation, means something else entirely to Iraqi Kurds persecuted by the ousted strongman.
1. - National Review - "Hell and Back - A firsthand account of Syrian atrocities":
27 Apri l 2004 / by Nir T. Boms & Farid N. Ghadry*
According to estimates, almost 100 Kurds were killed in the riots that followed a soccer match in the city of Qamoshli, Syria last month. Over1 , 300 Kurds are believed to have been arrested for treason, espionage, incitement, and disrupting the public order in the cities of Qamoshli, Ifrin, Dar-a Zhur, Aleppo, and Damascus.
We received an e-mail from one of them earlier this month, which is translated below, but are not revealing names to save our sources from the torture chambers of the Syrian Mokabbarat. This particular account is that of a14 -year-old prisoner we will call Ahmed — a boy whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ahmed was released following a week in the hands of the Syrian intelligence. For some reason, his investigation cleared him from any pending charges. Other Kurds are not that lucky; according to Kurdish sources, a month following the "riots," 300 remain behind bars. "Most of those who stay imprisoned have not yet reached the age of18 ," another activist from the Syrian city of Aleppo yesterday. "The hideous story of Ahmed," he added sadly, "is hardly the only one."
When they took me from the car, I was met by one agent after another — five of them, all counted. They beat me on my back, on my stomach, on my arms, and over every inch of my body. They forced me into a basement, then into a crowded, dark room that reeked of dirty feet and sweat, and was dank with the stench of a butcher’s shop. I stretched out my leg cautiously, trying to make my way into the shadowy room, but instead I tripped over a body lying on the floor. It cried, so I tried to step away, only to stumble over another body — this one’s anguish even worse-sounding than the first’s.
Then I froze. I started crying, and fear gripped my entire body. I felt like I was in hell; all I could hear were the different sounds of agony punctuating the darkness. After about 30 minutes, the door to the room opened and I could finally see a bit of light.
Only then did I realize that the room was no bigger than our modest kitchen at home — except our kitchen would never see 30 or 40 people jammed into it. They were of different ages, but most were young, like me. I even recognized two who lived in our quarter.
Someone shouted my name, and I responded, "Present!," as if I were in school. The man inquired, "You are a Kurd, right? Come with me, you son of a whore." Upon exiting the room — while trying hard not to bump into anybody lying on the ground — I was once again beaten from all sides, all over my body. My tormentors cursed as they punched me. I raised my arms to protect myself, only to have them struck down, and only to invite more blows and insults. Two or three men pinned me and asked if my name was Ahmed, and when I said yes, their savage abuse resumed. Interspersed with the punches, I remember them saying that my mother was a whore for having had me, and that my father was a dog. I don’t remember much else: The thrashing was making me weaker, and I felt my knees buckle under me. Several strong arms held me up so that the battering might continue, intensified by vile cursing that culminated in unmentionable obscenities uttered against my sister and mother.
My eyes were then covered with a black cloth. The beating continued, as ever, but now I could not see where the punches were coming from. Again, I felt myself weak. I remember screaming and crying for help.
They finally stopped and began their interrogation. "What is your name? Which quarter do you come from? Why did you burn and throw stones? Why? Why? Why?" It was a barrage of questions that I could not answer, because I could not focus. Then they asked who else was there with me: "Give us names, names, names. Why were you marching?" (I told them that I was not marching.) Then someone called to bring me downstairs. I started crying again, uncontrollably. While I was still blindfolded, one of them asked to strip me down. They did. Then cold water hit me and I started shivering. The beating resumed, but I slipped because of the water, and they began kicking me as I lay on the ground. I was startled as someone stomped on my stomach, hard. All I remember next was a voice saying, "Place it in his mouth." "It" was my own feces.
Then they took me to another room. I was still naked, blindfolded, and shivering. I felt them kneeling and attaching something to my toes and fingers. Suddenly, without any warning, I felt myself being electrocuted — and I began to cry again, not knowing what else to do. I was electrocuted twice on each of the seven days I was there. And each time, I could only cry like a baby.
Each time, they demanded, "Do you confess?" And each time, I replied, "I will confess" — though to what, I did and do not know. While I was still blindfolded, they lifted my arm and placed my finger on a paper — and told me that that was my confession.
Eventually they returned me to the room and removed the blindfold. I realized then that everyone there was naked like me — naked, naked, and all writhing and crying in pain. There were some with broken ribs: I could tell because when I bumped into them, their screams were the loudest, and it lifted them off the ground. Then there were those whose blood had turned black, and whose bodies were covered more by purplish bruises than normal-colored flesh. Some had had salt sprinkled into their open wounds; they could only whisper to one another of their pain. Someone cried that they had electrocuted him through his penis and testicles; he felt ashamed and could not stop sobbing. All were young, like me.
Some had their fingernails removed. Another said that he was whipped with cables, his penis having been a special target. There was a young man who stood the entire time because he was not allowed to sit down or rest against the wall. We took turns, during those seven days, holding his head in our arms so that he could get some sleep.
I will never forget the absolute horror unleashed by those brutal killers — not for the rest of my life. And I will never forgive them for it. Never.
Cruelly ironic is the fact that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad visited the Kurds in 2002 with promises of a better future. But Syria’s ability to bring that better future to its people must be measured by Ahmed and his friends; clearly, there is a long way to go. For them, a truly democratic Syria remains the only hope, and the only answer.
* Farid Ghadry is the president of the Syrian Reform
Party. Nir Boms is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
and the Council for Democracy and Tolerance. 
2. - Human Rights Watch - "Turkey: Curbs on Assembly Undermine EU Bid":
LONDON / 28 April 2004
Police violence and local government restrictions are undermining freedom of assembly and the reform process in Turkey, Human Rights Watch said in an open letter today to the Turkish deputy prime minister Abdullah Gül.
“Police violence against demonstrators and unwarranted
restrictions on freedom of assembly aren’t compatible with Turkey’s
EU bid and its goals on human rights,” said Rachel Denber, acting
executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia
Division. “The government needs to affirm the right to protest
before the issue begins to tarnish Turkey’s progress toward EU
membership.”
As part of its ongoing legislative reform efforts, in July 2003 Turkey
adopted amendments improving the Law on Public Meetings and Demonstrations
(law 2911). Nevertheless, in the intervening nine months, police dispersed
at least 105 peaceful public gatherings, press conferences and demonstrations,
and arrested 1,822 demonstrators. Human Rights Watch said that police
used violence to break up gatherings on thirty-one occasions—beating
demonstrators and spraying them with pepper gas.
“The Turkish government is gaining international credit for recent
legislative progress on human rights in many areas including freedom
of assembly,” said Denber. “But when Turkish citizens attempt
to gather publicly to voice their concerns and criticisms they frequently
meet official restrictions and police brutality.”
Human Rights Watch said that the vast majority of incidents arise from
small gatherings for open-air press conferences. In some provinces,
governors and police permit such gatherings, while in other provinces
police disperse them as “unpermitted demonstrations.” A February
2000 Supreme Court ruling suggests that gatherings for press conferences
do not require organizers to notify local authorities, nor to obtain
their permission.
Human Rights Watch today wrote to deputy prime minister Abdullah Gül,
who is also minister for human rights, urging the government to clarify
the questions around press conferences by issuing a circular affirming
the right to hold press conferences in public and to distribute leaflets
without notifying the authorities in advance.
“The lack of clarity about what is a press conference and what
is a demonstration is resulting in the prosecution and even ill-treatment
of people gathered to speak their minds,” said Denber. “The
government should address the confusion with a clear policy that backs
the right of peaceful assembly.”
In December 2004, the EU is due to decide whether Turkey has sufficiently
fulfilled the so-called “Copenhagen criteria” on human rights,
democracy, and the rule of law, to proceed with its candidacy for EU
membership.
“What Turkish civil society has to say is bound to influence the
European Commission when it makes its December decision,” said
Denber. “Human rights defenders and non-governmental organizations
are likely to be much more enthusiastic about the reform program if
they aren’t roughly moved on by heavily armed police officers when
they come out to address the public.”
Turkish law now entitles local governors to postpone a demonstration
only if there is a serious risk that it will result in criminal acts.
In reality, public political activity continues to be subject to excessive
restrictions. Governors and the police have banned and broken up demonstrations
and gatherings because people attended in “local (Kurdish) dress,”
sang songs in Kurdish, or used names spelled with the letter “x,”
which does not occur in the Turkish alphabet. In some provinces, governors
require so much paperwork from organizers (including in some cases,
records of past convictions and lists of proposed slogans) that it presents
a substantial obstacle to the right to demonstrate.
On March 30, 2004, gendarmerie intervened to disperse a press conference
conducted by Süleyman Çelebi, the president of the Confederation
of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DI.SK), outside a factory in
the Ümraniye district of Istanbul, on the grounds that it was an
“unauthorized gathering.” The press conference had been called
to protest the sacking of thirty-three textile workers who had joined
a trade union. In the town of Bingöl in southeast Turkey, the authorities
are using the law on demonstrations to prosecute 125 people, including
Ridvan Kizgin, president of the local branch of the Turkish Human Rights
Association and the national vice president of the association, Eren
Keskin, for attempting to set up a public information table on June
16, 2003, to publicize peace protests. University authorities are also
conducting investigations and imposing suspensions on students for participating
in non-violent demonstrations.
Demonstrations protesting the prison conditions for Abdullah Öcalan,
the founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), have been dealt
with particularly severely. In recent months police have dispersed scores
of demonstrations and press conferences protesting the solitary confinement
of Abdullah Öcalan, often using unwarranted violence.
“In the wake of fifteen years of bitter internal conflict, these
demonstrations may be unwelcome and offensive to security forces and
governors,” said Denber. “But provided that such gatherings
are peaceful, they are protected forms of protest under the European
Human Rights Convention.”
The Human Rights Watch letter also calls on the Turkish government to
limit any restrictions on public demonstrations to those mandated by
the European Convention on Human Rights, and to clarify the official
notification requirements for demonstrations. The letter also calls
on the Higher Education Council to issue guidance to university authorities
not to suspend students for participating in peaceful protests on campus
or elsewhere.
3. - Turkish Daily News - "Turkey monitoring review clouded by DEP verdict":
Dismayed by last week's DEP verdict, the Council of Europe decides to postpone decision on whether Turkey is eligible to be removed from human rights monitoring and agrees to discuss the issue in June
ANKARA / 28 April 2004
The Council of Europe decided to postpone a debate over the proposed removal of Turkey from its human rights monitoring procedure after a Turkish court decided last week to keep four former deputies in jail, rebuffing calls from Europe and human rights activists for their release.
Removal from the monitoring procedure of the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog, is widely seen a major test that any country should pass in order to become eligible to join the EU.
Turkey has been on the list of countries monitored by the Council of Europe since 1996. A special committee of the Council recently decided that Turkey no longer needed monitoring because it proved its commitment to democratization and reform process.
A Parliamentary Assembly move to remove Turkey from the monitored countries was originally expected to be a formality after the special committee decision but last week's court order changed the atmosphere in the Council of Europe significantly.
Last Wednesday, a State Security Court in Ankara concluded a retrial and ruled that Leyla Zana, a onetime Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and three other former deputies of the banned Democracy Party (DEP) should stay in jail, upholding a previous prison term for links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The retrial was ordered by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, which said the four former deputies had not received a fair trial. The Parliamentary Assembly said the decision damaged its view of Turkey, and demanded the prisoners' release.
On Monday, the Parliamentary Assembly decided to postpone debate over whether Turkey should be removed from the monitoring list to June.
Analysts said the postponement decision was essentially a setback, given that the Monday's session was widely expected to become a formality confirming that Turkey was no longer under Council of Europe monitoring. But it is also a positive development because otherwise a decision against removing Turkey from monitoring would have been almost certain.
The DEP verdict was issued by one of the State Security Courts, which are to be scrapped according to a constitutional amendment package drafted by the government.
"There may be changes in the Turkish judicial system in May," said Terry Davis, head of the Socialist group in the assembly, in arguing for a delay in the review.
EU leaders are due to decide in December whether to start
entry negotiations with Turkey. The Union says the case clouds Turkey's
human rights record.
4. - AFP - "Germany renews support for Turkey's
EU candidature":
COLOGNE / 27 April 2004
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Tuesday renewed Germany's support for Turkey to join the European Union, at a ceremony with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"You can count on Germany to keep its word," Schroeder said, reiterating Berlin's long-standing support for Turkey, which has been a formal EU candidate since 1999, to begin accession talks.
Speaking at the opening of a German-Turkish chamber of commerce in the western city of Cologne, Schroeder said that Turkey's "non-aggressive" Muslim society would bring "an incredible security boost" to Europe when it joins.
Ankara has passed numerous democracy reforms to meet the Union's political criteria and believes those steps should be enough to ensure it can begin membership talks after EU leaders assess Turkey's reform progress in December.
But early this month, the European Parliament adopted a highly-critical report which said Ankara must adopt a new constitution and ensure reforms are implemented properly to show it is serious about becoming an EU member.
In addition to the democratic overhaul, Turkey has to battle doubts among European leaders on whether the EU can absorb a vast and relatively poor country of some 70 million inhabitants with a strong Islamic faith.
Erdogan said that Turkey's "reform process is beyond
the point of no return" and the changes "are adapted to our
goal of meeting the European Union's criteria."
5. - AFP - "Turkish police arrest 14 family members after "honour killing" of 14-year-old girl":
ISTANBUL / 28 April 2004
Turkey was in emotional turmoil on Wednesday amid reports that police had arrested a man who strangled his 14-year-old daughter to maintain family "honour" after she was abducted and repeatedly raped by a stranger.
Thirteen relatives who ordered the father to carry out the murder were also arrested. Most newspapers ran front-page reports on the killing, which provoked outrage in Turkey, where parliament passed a law last year to toughen penalties for so-called honour killings.
The girl, Nuran Halitoglu, was abducted late last month while on her way to a supermarket in Avcilar, a working-class district of the country's largest city, Istanbul.
Her kidnapper, a man in his 20s, repeatedly raped her before she escaped from the house where she had been held for four days.
The family, which comes from Van in eastern Turkey, then held a meeting and ordered the father Mehmet and his son Alaattin to kill the girl in order to lift what they saw as a stain on their honour, the reports said.
The daily Milliyet said Nuran was strangled with electrical flex in a relative's house and her body buried in a forest.
After reporting his daughter's disappearance in an attempt to throw police off the scent, the father confessed to killing her, the papers said. He said he would also have killed the rapist had the man not been in police custody.
Dozens of honour killings are committed every year in Turkey, most of them in the deeply conservative southeast of the country.
In July last year, the Turkish parliament adopted a law saying people convicted of honour killings must face the same penalties as other murderers and that it was no longer acceptable for courts to impose light sentences on them.
But parliament has yet to review the lighter sentences handed down to killers who claimed that they reacted to "strong provocation".
Feminist organisations and others point out that provocation is sometimes used as a defence by people accused of honour killings.
They also note that the definition of provocation is left to the discretion of judges, who often accept the notion that a woman's sexual behaviour is tied to family honour.
The law currently in force sets a maximum sentence of 24 years in prison for honour killings" but a killer can be released after serving 10 years.
In February, 22-year-old Guldunya Toren was shot dead by her two brothers as she lay in a hospital bed in Istanbul, recovering from a previous attempt by relatives to kill her as punishment for having a baby out of wedlock.
Turkey has drawn fire from the European Union for failing to ensure the equality of men and women before the law, a serious obstacle to its aspirations to join the EU.
In December, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said he would
amend a draft penal code under which all charges against a person suspected
of rape would be dropped if he agreed to marry his victim.
6. - The Boston Globe - "Split over Cyprus":
28 April 2004
THE DEFEAT of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan for the reunification of Cyprus was not merely a short-term setback for the divided island. The 65 percent of Greek Cypriot voters who rejected Annan's plan Saturday also cast a dark shadow over Turkey's hopes of acceding to the European Union.
The serious implications of this event have been obscured by the irony that it was Greek Cypriots, not their Turkish neighbors, who nixed the UN reunification plan. For a long time it had been the Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash who opposed plans to reunify the two communities, which had been sundered in 1974. In the run-up to the referendum, though, Turkey's political and military leadership overrode Denktash's objections. It was the Greek Cypriot leader, Tassos Papadopoulos, who counseled a no vote, arguing that a better deal for the southern Greek part of the island would come along sometime soon. Yet Turkish military leaders were not without fault in this bungled opportunity. They had insisted on last-minute additions to the plan, such as the stationing of Turkish troops on Cyprus -- a repellent for Greek Cypriot voters.
EU officials had anticipated that a unified Cyprus would become one of 10 new members May 1. But now member states will have to accept the Greek sector of Cyprus as one of their own despite the no vote by the Greek Cypriots. Conversely, the EU finds itself in the ludicrous position of having to exclude the Turkish Cypriots even though 76 percent of them voted for unification.
"This is an affront to Europe," declared Belgium's foreign minister, Louis Michel. "Those who campaigned for a no may perhaps not have measured all the consequences." Unsubtly, the Belgian was threatening to punish the Greek Cypriots. In practical terms, the EU may divert to northern Turkish Cyprus $309 million in aid that had been set aside to pay for implementation of Annan's reunification plan. The EU is also considering ending key sanctions on Turkish Cyprus, particularly the ban on international flights and shipping and on direct exports into European markets.
But the real specter haunting Europe is that the Greek Cypriots will join the EU May 1 and then veto the opening of accession talks for Turkey in December. If the Greek part of Cyprus and Turkey were both EU members, there could be unlimited migration of impoverished Turkish agricultural workers into both parts of Cyprus. This demographic fear that haunts Greek Cypriots may be exploited all too readily by French and German leaders who barely mask their reluctance to have Turkey in the EU but who would rather not be the ones to blackball Ankara.
Instead of lecturing Cypriots, the EU chiefs ought to
have an honest discussion about the kind of Europe they want.
7. - Slate - "Should we partition Iraq?":
27 April 2004 / by Timothy Noah
"Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state." So writes Peter Galbraith, America's pre-eminent Kurdophile, in the May 13 New York Review of Books ("How To Get Out of Iraq"). Leslie Gelb, formerly an assistant secretary in Jimmy Carter's State Department and subsequently a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, made a similar point on the Times op-ed page in November. Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who writes on military strategy, has been calling for the breakup of Iraq for nearly a year. Reluctantly, Chatterbox is starting to think Galbraith, Gelb, and Peters have a point.
"The Iraq we're trying to herd back together," Peters wrote in July 2003, "consists of three distinct nations caged under a single, bloodstained flag." Iraq was famously invented in 1921 by Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary tasked with carving up the recently defeated Ottoman Empire. Churchill's main concern was to consolidate areas containing, or suspected to contain, oil fields. He achieved that at the expense of long-term political stability. From the start, mistrust existed between the country's three predominant groups: the Shiite Arabs in the south, the Sunni Arabs in the middle, and the Kurds, who weren't Arabs at all, in the north. A succession of regimes managed to yoke these three groups together only through varying degrees of repression, with Saddam's the most repressive of all. Short of putting a tanned, rested, and ready Saddam back in charge—a possibility we can surely rule out—government by repression is no longer an option.
Peters and Gelb seem to believe that the Bush administration's attempt to maintain postwar Iraq under a centralized government was doomed from the start. Galbraith, a liberal Democrat who opposed Saddam's regime well before the GOP did, thinks a unified Iraq may once have been achievable. But the failure of the United States to maintain order after the fall of Baghdad—most especially, to stop the looting of all the country's major institutions save the oil ministry—caused Iraq's professional class, "the very people the US looks to in rebuilding the country," to lose "confidence in, and respect for, the US occupation authorities." Now, Galbraith says, Humpty Dumpty can't be put together gain.
How would partition work? Gelb and Galbraith propose a very loose federation on the model of the former Yugoslavia. (Gelb envisions something akin to Yugoslavia as ruled after World War II by Marshall Tito, a Communist leader who avoided Soviet control; Galbraith prefers the model of Yugoslavia after Tito's death in 1980.) The obvious problem with this model is that the federation unraveled starting in the early 1990s, leading to bloody civil war. But Galbraith, who was ambassador to Croatia in the Clinton administration, maintains that Yugoslavia's breakup was not inevitable. If Slobodan Milosevic had been willing to settle for "a looser federation," Galbraith argues, "there is every reason to think that Yugoslavia—and not just Slovenia— would be joining the European Union this May." Gelb blames Europeans and Americans for taking too long to come to the aid of Bosnians and Croats but notes that the region is now relatively stable and that Kosovo will soon enjoy some form of autonomy.
The sharing of oil revenue would be the main function of the loose federation envisioned by Gelb, Galbraith, and Peters. Galbraith posits "a weak presidency rotating among the republics, with [further] responsibilities limited to foreign affairs, monetary policy, and some coordination of defense policy." Peters has a more radical proposal. By all means, he says, let's try the federal solution. But if the Sunnis, who are bitter about losing control over Iraq, persist in their violent rebellion against all proposed post-Saddam arrangements, Peters says we should dissolve the federation and create three "fully independent states." That, Peters notes, would "leave the Sunni Arabs to rot," since the Sunnis have no oil to speak of. In practice, Peters' plan to dissolve the federation altogether may well be what Gelb's and Galbraith's plans would lead to. "Loose federations rarely last," observes Joost Hiltermann, a human rights expert who has followed events in Iraq. (The organization he works for, International Crisis Group, has been urging Kurds to moderate their territorial demands, which would be advisable no matter what the larger outcome.)
Gelb and Galbraith both assume the Sunnis are probably ungovernable, at least for the near term. But partition, Galbraith argues, would at least limit the anarchy to "a finite area," thereby making the U.S. military's peacekeeping job easier to perform than it is now. Eventually, some sort of Sunni government would, one hopes, emerge, though given the region's propensity for thuggery (Saddam was a Sunni), it's hard to imagine that government would be a model of parliamentary democracy. Maybe the Peters threat to cut off oil revenues would help. The effectiveness of this threat can only be known down the road, when there is significant oil revenue to cut off.
Autonomy for the Shiite region is in many ways more problematic. The Shiites wouldn't starve, because they have oil. And there's no particular reason to think they don't know how to run a free and fair election. The worry is what that free and fair election would choose. In December, Gelb said it wasn't likely that the Shiites would preside over "a theocratic state." Taking into account subsequent events, Galbraith has to concede that the Shiites are, in fact, pretty likely to vote themselves a theocratic government. That would almost certainly mean the Shiites would impose restrictions on free speech and the rights of women that Westerners and more than a few Shiites would find repugnant. But Galbraith says that if we were able to remove ourselves relatively quickly, the Shiite government might be "less overtly anti-American."
Andrew Apostolou, director of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit group, is more hopeful that the Shiite theocrats can be defeated. "I don't believe that just because they're the loudest and the noisiest they're the most powerful," he told Chatterbox, citing an April 5 Guardian account of an election in Tar, a town of 15,000 people. Neither of the two Islamist candidates for 10 town council seats won. But Tar is hardly typical; it was the first town in Iraq to rise up against Saddam during the unsuccessful rebellion that followed the first Gulf war.
The third autonomous state created by the breakup of Iraq would be Iraqi Kurdistan. Autonomy is what Iraqi Kurds have long desired, and it's more or less what the No-Fly Zone created by the United States and Britain gave them after Gulf War I. The Kurds have already demonstrated that they can hold free elections and maintain a free press. An early March memo from the Coalition Provision Authority, unearthed last week by reporter Jason Vest, alludes vaguely to Kurdish corruption. (The Washington Post's "Reliable Source" columnist, Richard Leiby, says three sources told him the memo's author was former Pentagon aide Michael Rubin, though Rubin wouldn't confirm it.) The memo describes an evening with an Iraqi Kurd spent watching the Godfather trilogy and "discussing which Iraqi Kurdish politicians represented which character." But assuming that means the Kurdish leadership has a propensity for Chicago-style ward politics, its vices shouldn't cause much loss of sleep. In any event, Kurdish leaders would have a long way to go before they robbed Kurdistan of as much money as Rubin suggests the United Nations did under the Oil-for-Food program.
Just about everybody who's operating free of any bureaucratic imperatives (including Chatterbox) believes the Kurds should enjoy autonomy within whatever kind of Iraqi state emerges. God knows they've earned it. The awkward question, though, is how you grant autonomy to the Kurds while denying it to the Shiites and the Sunnis.
The probable answer is: You can't. But accepting a three-state solution, enclosed inside a loose federation or not, likely means giving up on certain aspirations. One aspiration is to make Iraq a democratic nation. More likely, it would be a two-thirds democratic federation or geographic region, with the possibility of a Sunni democracy down the road. Another aspiration is to establish the rule of law. In the short run, and perhaps even in the long, that would likely happen only in Iraqi Kurdistan. A third aspiration is to stop the killing. But that wouldn't happen in the Sunni territory, though it might happen later. A fourth and final aspiration is to avoid taking a country that was fascist, but not terribly theocratic, and allowing one-third of it to become a theocracy. This hope is not merely idealistic but also, conceivably, related to national security, insofar as the creation of any new Islamic theocracy provides a potential recruiting ground for al-Qaida. But Chatterbox doesn't have any great ideas about how to keep Iraqi Shiites from making that democratic choice. As Galbraith says, maybe they'll hate us less if we let them make that choice sooner rather than later.
What's most depressing about the Peters-Gelb-Galbraith
scenario is that it would create three autonomous governments or independent
states that represented only an incremental improvement on what was
there before (except with regard to geopolitical stability). It would
make us scratch our heads and wonder why we fought a war in Iraq. But
that may be unavoidable, too.
8. - Reuters - "Falluja tests Kurd ties to Iraq - Kurdish leader":
SULAIMANIYA / 28 April 2004
The Iraqi city of Falluja, a bastion of loyalty to Saddam Hussein and now a symbol of Arab resistance to U.S. occupation, means something else entirely to Iraqi Kurds persecuted by the ousted strongman.
Where many Arabs in Iraq and abroad see the U.S. military killing civilians in Falluja and sparking the most bloodshed since it invaded Iraq, many Kurds see the last stand of Saddam's Baath party, which used chemical weapons against them.
Barham Salih, prime minister of half the northern zone Kurds wrested from Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf war, said the killing and mutilation of U.S. contractors that sparked the U.S. attack on Falluja resembled Saddam's brutality to his own people, and undermined the commitment of Kurds to a unified Iraq.
"The scenes that I see from Falluja worry me because the value system that gave rise to Saddam Hussein is what we are seeing in the thuggery, where these Americans are burned and the bodies mutilated," he said in an interview in Sulaimaniya, capital of the area held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
"This kind of culture is seeping still from some of those places and it is obviously a danger for the Kurdish people; it's a danger for the Arabs of Iraq as well."
The comments, as well as accusations that Kurdish forces fight alongside U.S. troops in Falluja, underline the depth of animosity between Iraq's Arabs and Kurds, against whom Saddam launched a military campaign to crush separatist ambitions and punish them for aiding Iran in its 1980-1988 war with Iraq.
An interim Iraqi constitution recognises Kurdish self-rule in the north in the framework of a future federal state, annoying Arabs who -- like neighbouring countries with large Kurdish populations -- see it as a step toward the possible division of Iraq.
Salih said that sentiment, as well as calls by some majority
Shi'ites for a broad role for Islam in government, made it harder to
sell Kurds on a unified, democratic Iraq, to which a Kurdish leadership
on good terms with Washington has signed up to.
No 'Fundamentalist', Arab 'Dictatorship'
"We are willing to be part of a federal, democratic Iraq, but should you, my Arab compatriot, contemplate turning Iraq into a fundamentalist state or an Arab nationalist dictatorship, again, I am sorry...but we are not willing to be part of such a country," he said.
He said Kurds embraced the idea of a federal state as the best possible guarantee of their rights in light of the hostility of neighbours like Turkey, which fears such autonomy would rekindle separatism among its own 12 million Kurds.
"We understand our geopolitical predicament. We also understand that a federal, democratic Iraq, a prosperous, stable Iraq, can be good for the Kurdish people...can protect us from the predators who don't wish us well," he said.
"We are willing to work with our Iraqi compatriots to turn the tide and make sure that Iraq will have a future, but we cannot do it on our own," Salih said.
"Should it fail, there is nothing I can do to convince my people of being committed to this, and I will not do anything in my position, or any other position that I'll be in, to try."
Salih said Kurds could not press their case in Iraq without uniting the northern governments of the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which fought a mid-1990s civil war in Iraqi Kurdistan.
"There is distaste with us because we fought hard in Baghdad for recognition of our situation here and are arming the opponents of all that we sought by allowing them to point out that we do not have our house in order and to ask why should you be entitled to this if you are not united," he said.
Salih has been suggested as a possible candidate to become Iraq's U.N. ambassador, but said his only concrete plan was to resign his post and set a precedent among leaders in the fractious, patronage-driven politics of Iraq's Kurds.
"I want to be the first Kurdish politician who will
bow out of office voluntarily," he said.