SULAYMANIYAH (Iraq): Qadir Mala Khadhir is standing in the doorway of his stall in the central market, in front of wardrobes, end tables and bedsprings no one is buying. His business is off, war looms, his car is gone and his family is packed into one jumbled room. But on balance, he said, life is getting better all the time.
“Of course it’s better,” said the used-furniture salesman, recalling a time before the Kurds of northern Iraq enjoyed relative autonomy, as they do today. “Even if there was no water to drink, the situation would be better than before 1991.”
In the dozen years since one-sixth of the Iraqi population began a new life in the northern mountains, they have built a quasi-state within a state, protected by US and British fighter patrols. Now, with war again on the horizon, Kurds are pondering whether their independence will last.
The Kurdish zone is not sovereign, nor is it ruled by any of the surrounding states that have frustrated Kurdish ambitions for centuries. It extends from the mountains on Iraq’s northern border to an armed front line where the government of President Saddam Hussein assumes control. Three and a half million ethnic Kurds here revel in what their leaders call a scale model of the Middle Eastern democracy that President Bush says he wants to see rise in post-Saddam Iraq.
“The Kurdish experiment,” as it has come to be known here, boasts an elected parliament, a free if careful press and a feeling of independence that eases the hardship and virtual isolation. “I don’t want to lose this,” said Khadhir.
The Kurds have been protected in their northern enclave since their failed revolt against Saddam in 1991, when Iraqi helicopter gunships forced tens of thousands of Kurds to flee toward Turkey. The creation of a “no-fly” zone in the north allowed the Kurds to return to a haven that has flourished in the past decade.
Kurds applaud any military campaign to unseat Saddam, whose forces gassed, shot and bulldozed about 100,000 Kurds 15 years ago, according to estimates by human rights groups. “He’s the murderer of Kurds,” said Azad Mohammed, trimming a sheet of tin in his shop.
At the same time, however, Kurds fret aloud that a new war will put their fragile golden age in jeopardy. Their autonomy could be doomed either by the whims of a new Baghdad government or the meddling of Turkish forces who threaten to enter from across the border, even if US forces do not.
In Irbil, an ancient city of more than a million on the edge of the vulnerable plain to the south, booksellers offer a map of the ultimate dream: “Kurdistan,” a mythical country extending from the Mediterranean coast of Syria east to Iran, north into Turkey and south toward the middle of Iraq. But the reality of the Kurdish zone today is more limited — 17,000 square miles, mostly in the Zagros Mountains, to which Kurdish guerrilla fighters retreated often over the last century while trying in vain for something grander.
Kurds may be a nation in almost every sense of the word; the estimated Kurdish population of 25 million spread around the region is united by language, culture and a stubborn history of fighting for self-determination. But the Kurds have never had a state.
And the collective desire for one is a force that complicates the Bush administration’s best-laid plans for war.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.
