"Dream of Kurds is Fading in Iraq," reads the headline on a 1957 news story, the oldest clipping about Kurds in The Globe and Mail library.
"Iraq Now Solving Kurdish Problem" is the next. The second was premature, to say the least. But the first is slowly acquiring the status of eternal truth.Year after year, the dream of territory run by and for the Kurdish people recedes further into the future. And for the 22 million Kurds, the future is increasingly clouded by internal strife and political upheavals in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and beyond.
The Kurdish region of northern Iraq is now braced for renewed fighting between factions backed by Iran's revolutionary Islamic regime and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whose dispatch of troops into the region last week provoked U.S. missile strikes.
Turkey sent jet fighters to bombard suspected camps of a third Kurdish faction this week and said it would send troops into Iraq to make sure the rebels did not flee to Turkey. It was yet another demonstration of the attitude of powerful countries in the Middle East toward the Kurds, an almost exclusively Muslim people who have occupied the rugged mountains of southwest Turkey, northeast Syria, northern Iraq and western Iran for at least 1,400 years.
"They were always used by various regional powers as instruments for enhancing their own interests, and the Kurds have never achieved their goals," said Ibrahim Karawan, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Kurds are among the most impoverished residents of the countries they live in. There are an estimated 12 million in Turkey, 5 million in Iran, 3.5 million in Iraq, 1 million in Syria and several hundred thousand in Armenia. They were promised an independent state by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations after the First World War, but the pledge was not fulfilled.
One of the greatest architects of unity in the Islamic world was a Kurd - the legendary Saladin, who forged a regional alliance to battle European crusaders in the Middle Ages. But in this century, Kurdish history has been characterized by rivalry that is often based on tribal or clan loyalties.
The control of contraband routes is at the core of some of the current feuding. Iraqi oil is theoretically embargoed. But a fleet of specially modified dump trucks takes petroleum products across the Turkish border, with a "tax" paid to the Kurdistan Democratic Party under Massoud Barzani.
For years, Barzani has been jousting with Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, an Iranian-backed group that is said to control the trade in cigarettes and other goods smuggled into Iraq from Iran and Syria. The United States sponsored talks this year aimed at forging a peace agreement between the two sides. But the talks collapsed and sporadic fighting broke out.
It was after Iranian troops pushed into Iraq in August in support of Talabani's group that Barzani appealed to Iraq for help. Talabani tends to draw support from well-educated, secular Kurds, whereas Barzani is a tribal chieftain, according to Hanna Freij, a political scientist and specialist on Kurdish affairs at the University of Utah.
Three of Barzani's brothers have been killed by Iraqi agents, Freij said, but the KDP leader nevertheless has a history of proposing deals with Saddam.
The profile of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey is different. There it is led by the Kurdistan Workers Party, a Marxist group with a strong base in the cities and towns of southwest Turkey. Turkish authorities are ruthless in their campaign against the PKK, as well as moderate Kurdish nationalists. In 1995, "free expression was still punished with arrests and imprisonment, torture was still employed as a routine instrument of police investigation, an abusive counterinsurgency campaign continued to empty Kurdish villages and there were continued reports of disappearances," the Human Rights Watch reported.
Dozens of writers and journalists have been charged under an antiterrorism law for reporting on the Kurdish conflict, the Committee to Protect Journalists says in its annual report.
Analysts say both Kurdish factions in Iraq have cooperated with Turkish authorities against the PKK. Remote as the possibility seems, Freij says the only hope for peace in the Kurdish region lies in self-rule - not the independent state that was promised 75 years ago, but autonomous regions in the countries where Kurds live.
"I'm very sympathetic to the notion that Kurds should have their own region where they control and run their own affairs, speak their own language and obtain some oil revenue," he said. Such an arrangement in both Turkey and Iraq would strengthen moderate Kurds and undermine hard-liners and profiteers, he added.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)