The Kurdish question

THE Kurds are often described as a people who fulfil the criteria of an independent nation-state but who have, historically, failed to establish it. They have their legends, their history, language and a rich cultural tradition. But their march across the sands of time, though heroic, has been tragic. Their aspirations for a sovereign homeland have, in the last hundred years or so, been mostly recognized as a problem for the regional powers.

Since the last decades of the 19th century, Kurdish nationalism has often been exploited by outside powers which encouraged and abandoned it at will. Tainted with this vulnerability to external manipulation, even the legitimate ambitions of the Kurds became suspect in the eyes of a resurgent Persia, Ataturk’s Turkey and the Arab states of Iraq and Syria built upon the debris of the Ottoman empire.

In fact, the rise of nationalism in the region and the tragic ethos of the Kurdish people are intertwined. Prior to the nation-states, the frontiers of which were often determined by colonial powers, the Kurds had a different kind of relationship with the great empires of Persia and the Ottoman Turks. Occasionally, they revolted to assert tribal privileges or the feudal prerogatives of their proud highland chiefs. More often, they were a dynamic and valued component of the power structure and, on the extended frontiers of these empires, their sword arm.

Muslim history celebrated their courage. They figured prominently in the defence line against Christian Byzantine. It was Salahuddin, the Kurd, who defeated the crusaders at Akka and Hittin, liberated Jerusalem and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. Much later, as Persia plunged into anarchy after the death of Nadir Shah in 1747, it was the Kurdish Kerim Khan, the chief of the Zend tribe, who picked up the pieces and presided over the glory that Shiraz became.

The Kurdish chiefs jealously guarded their fiefs and principalities but hardly ever thought of destroying the overarching architecture of Muslim power. As a matter of fact, the most serious Kurdish revolt against Kemal Ataturk in 1925 was made more in the name of traditional Islam and caliphate and less in the name of Kurdish separatism.

Xenophon, the Greek historian, records the clash with the ancestors of the present day Kurds in 400 BC. In the plateau of

Asia Minor, Armenia and Persia, their distinctive way of life existed in relative harmony with the great Iranian civilization brought to them by Cyrus and with Zoroastrianism. A wholehearted conversion to Islam enabled them to cross the Tigris and extend their settlements westwards. Islam found a way of assimilating this proud and warrior race much better than the modern nation-state has done. The powerful caliphs of Baghdad learnt to respect their free spirit though the Arab-Kurd entente broke down occasionally. At least on two occasions — in 838 and 905 AD — the Kurdish chiefs seriously challenged the central authority to assert their tribal autonomy.

The present situation is the legacy of the weakening and the ultimate demise of the Ottoman empire. Its protracted decline permitted the rise of nationalist feelings especially amongst the Arabs, Armenians and the Kurds.

Occidental ideas of ethnicity and linguistic identity were creeping in any way but they were also used by European powers to splinter the ostensible monolithic unity of the caliphate, of which the Sublime Porte was the symbol. As the mosaic unravelled, the idea of a sovereign Kurdish homeland gained momentum. From time to time the European powers supported it.

The high water mark in this enterprise was the infamous Treaty of Sevres which sought to carve Turkey up with a large tract in the east incorporated into autonomous Kurdistan. Turkey would have shrunk inland into an insignificant state. This moment of greatest peril for Turkey was to become Mustapha Kemal’s finest hour. He led a brilliant military campaign for the integrity and independence of Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne, concluded in 1923, recognized the inviolable frontiers of modern Turkey and the Treaty of Sevres was all but abandoned. The British insistence on securing the oil bearing region of Mosul for the new Iraqi state also superseded the promises made to the Kurds.

The last century reconfigured the political landscape of the world as nations rose and fell. The Kurdish people were fragmented as never before. Today, nearly 14 million of them live in Turkey, about 4.8 million in Iran, more than five million in Iraq and more than 1.5 million in Syria. Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia are home to smaller minorities. The Kurdish diaspora adds up to a million in Europe and to another 25,000 in North America.

Their fortunes have varied from state to state depending on how the memory of the promises made by European powers and their subsequent “betrayal” played itself out. Political rights, economic opportunities, language and culture have been the foci of Kurdish anxiety all over the region, reflected in a spectrum ranging from peaceful demands for institutional safeguards to armed insurrections. The responses of host states have also varied from progressive accommodation to relentless suppression of Kurdish militancy.

Turkey faced major Kurdish revolts in 1925, 1930 and 1937. Born in traumatic challenges to its very existence, the modern Turkish state put them down with severity. There was considerable relocation of Kurds from southeastern districts to other parts of the country and by now the Kurds, who are one fifth of Turkey’s population, have a largely undifferentiated existence. The Turkish constitution does not brook any ethnic discrimination. The Kurds are the highland Turks, not another sub-national entity.

The creation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was a serious setback to the assimilation of Kurds in the Turkish political culture. Wedded to violence from the beginning, the PKK declared a bloody guerilla war in 1984 which assumed serious proportions by 1990. The Turkish government deployed a very large force and pursued Kurdish rebels even into Iraq. Protracted instability during a lost decade made it difficult for the southeastern region to benefit from the rapid economic development in other parts of the country.

Turkish special forces captured the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Nairobi in 1999 and in 2002, PKK reconstituted itself under a new name, Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan (KADEK) which was again changed to People’s Congress of Kurdistan (KONGRA-GEL) in 2004. The state sent a helpful signal in 1991 by abolishing the 70-year old law prohibiting the use of the Kurdish language. At the moment, Kurdish separatism is not the main issue; it is more a question of economic disparity and the challenge of integrating the southeast into the mainstream of national economy.

In Iran, the Kurdish ‘question’ has generally emerged only as a consequence of external developments. In the Second World War, the Soviet troops had moved into northern Iran. The weakening of Iranian authority led to a short-lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. More recently, Kurds have figured in the Iran-Iraq conflict. The Islamic Republic of Iran had to fight Kurdish tribes during 1979-1982 but since then this sub-region has been no different from the other outlying regions of Iran.

After receiving the League of Nations mandate over Iraq in 1920, the British policy alternated between encouraging Kurdish autonomy and preserving a client kingdom in Baghdad. This policy was severely tested in 1922, when Sheikh Mahmud declared himself the king of Kurdistan. This was a brief interlude but made autonomy a recurring factor in Iraqi politics.

There were revolts in the early 1930s, in 1945 and again in 1961. The Ba’athists tried to stabilize Arab-Kurd relations by granting limited autonomy to Kurds in 1970.By then the Shah of Iran had started using the Kurdish card to seek an advantageous settlement (thalweg) in Shatt al-Arab; Saddam Hussein reluctantly accepted the Algiers accord of 1975. The eight-year long Iran-Iraq conflict radicalized Kurds on both sides of the battle lines. Some of Saddam Hussein’s worst atrocities sprang from the clash of loyalties triggered off by this war.

The US-led war to liberate Kuwait ended up with a de facto Kurdish secession which Baghdad never succeeded in overcoming. The 2003 invasion invested them with a quasi-independent status that is now enshrined in the new Iraqi constitution. For the present, the rise of the president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Jalal Talabani, as the head of state in Iraq under the protective umbrella of foreign occupation and the new understanding between PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) act as a hedge against Kurdistan declaring complete independence.

This restraint is necessary in view of the fear of a domino effect in neighbouring states. Turkey will use force to frustrate any attempt to revive the PKK campaign; it cannot countenance a federal structure. As evidenced by the visits to Tehran of the leaders of ‘new Iraq’, especially Jalal Talabani, Iran is employing proactive diplomacy to ensure that its ideology-driven unity does not come under the strain of linguistic and ethnic nationalism. Since a Shiite Iraqi state is the flip side of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have their well known concerns.

On their part, the Kurds have to read the world afresh. Nationalism was the principal dynamic (“Each nation a state, each state a national being”) behind the proliferation of nation-states. But once nationalism had hit the Adriatic coast like a tidal wave and the Soviet Union like a whirlwind, western thought turned away from it. It is no longer axiomatic that self-determination means a separate sovereign state. Economic inter-dependence and the imperatives of globalization decree a return to inclusive multi-national structures, albeit in a different form. This option is available to Kurds in abundance.

For centuries, they were the backbone of extensive Muslim kingdoms. Embracing the idea of a separate nation-state brought them much suffering and sorrow. They should align themselves on the right side of history and claim their place of honour in the states that they inhabit. On their part, the concerned states should also rid themselves of antiquated concepts of the purity of a nation-state and tap into the vitality that comes from cultural pluralism, democracy and, above all, equalization of economic opportunity.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

Email: tanvir.a.khan.@gmail.com

Why Al Jazeera was a target

ON April 4, 2003, I was standing on the roof of Al Jazeera’s office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city.

I was about to start a two-way interview with Al Jazeera’s head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train “swish” brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones.

“Was that what I think it was?” he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris’s bridges and disappeared upstream. After finishing my “stand-upper” — television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries — I descended to the Al Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world.

I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage — seen across the Arab world — of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. “Don’t worry, Robert,” Tareq had replied. “We’ve given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won’t get hit.” Three days later, Tareq was dead.

Al Jazeera had indeed given their office’s map coordinates to the Pentagon. In fact, the State Department’s public affairs officer in Qatar — a man of Lebanese descent called Nabil Khoury — had pointedly gone to the station’s management on April 6 to assure them their bureau would be spared. Then on April 7, as Tareq Ayoub broadcast at 7.45am from the same spot on the roof on which I had been standing, an American jet flew across the Tigris and fired a single missile at Al Jazeera. Its explosion killed Tareq instantly. This was no errant attack. “The plane was so low, we thought it was going to land on the roof,” Tareq’s colleague Taiseer Alouni told me afterwards.

And Taiseer should know. He had been Kabul correspondent for Al Jazeera in 2001 when a cruise missile smashed into his (mercifully empty) bureau. Al Jazeera had been broadcasting Bin Laden’s threats and sermons from Afghanistan and no one doubted at the time that the attack — which the Americans claimed was a mistake — was deliberate.

After the killing of Tareq Ayoub in Baghdad in 2003, the Pentagon’s soulless letter of explanation expressed its sorrow for Ayoub’s death but did not even bother to offer an explanation for the attack. Why should it? After all, on the very same day, an American Abrams M-1 A-1 tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing three more journalists. Small arms fire, the Americans said, had been coming from the building. It was a lie.

Nor was I surprised. Back in Belgrade in 1998, I had watched the Americans bomb Serbia’s television headquarters, an act which, as I wrote next morning, allowed Nato to strike at targets for the words men and women said — rather than the deeds they committed. What precedent did this set for the future? I should have guessed.

So what was so strange about George Bush’s desire to bomb Al Jazeera in 2004? That Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara — the man who supposedly persuaded the American president to desist from this latest insanity — should now threaten the British press under the Official Secrets Act lest they divulge the entire can of worms is quite in keeping with the arrogance of power which we now associate with the Bush-Blair alliance. British ministers cravenly repeated America’s lies when US aircraft killed the innocent in Baghdad in 2003 and they will happily cover up Bush’s continued desire to bomb his supposed enemies, however innocent they may be.

When Al Jazeera first broadcast across the Arab world, the Americans hailed its appearance as a symbol of freedom amid the dictatorships of the Middle East. The New York Times’s messianic columnist Tom Friedman praised it as a beacon of freedom — always a dangerous precedent, coming from Friedman — while US officials held out the station’s broadcasts as proof that Arabs wanted free speech. And there was some truth in this. When Al Jazeera broadcast a brilliant 16-part series on the Lebanese civil war — a subject scrupulously avoided by Beirut television stations — the crowded seafront Corniche in front of my Lebanese home became deserted.

Arabs wanted to see and hear truths that had been denied them by their own leaders. But when the same Al Jazeera began broadcasting Bin Laden’s words, all the enthusiasm of Friedman and the State Department dried up. By 2003, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz — that paragon of democracy who asked why Turkish generals did not have “something to say” when the democratically elected Turkish parliament prohibited US troops from using their territory for the invasion of

Iraq — was fraudulently claiming that Al Jazeera was “endangering the lives of American troops”.

His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told an even bigger lie: that Al Jazeera was cooperating with Iraqi insurgents. I spent days investigating these claims. All turned out to be false. Tapes of guerrilla attacks on US forces were delivered anonymously to the station’s offices, not filmed by Al Jazeera’s crews. But the die was cast. Iraq’s newly elected government proved its democratic credentials by throwing Al Jazeera out of the country — just as Saddam had threatened to do in early 2003.

Of course, Al Jazeera is no golden child of journalism. Its discussion programmes are often weighed down with uncompromising Islamists, its dutiful presentation of Bin Laden’s tiresome sermons balanced by interviews with western leaders far tougher than any questions put to Al Qaeda’s bearded leadership. But it is a free voice in the Middle East — and so was attacked by the Americans in Kabul and in Baghdad. And almost in Qatar. And thus British journalists must now be suppressed by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara if they dare to reveal the latest revelation from the dark and bloody pit into which Messrs Blair and Bush have plunged us. — (c) The Independent

Making proper use of donations

THE donors’ conference held recently in Islamabad had all the ingredients of high drama as the generosity of the rich and the not so rich, tumbled thick and fast off the pages. The fattest single-country purse belonged to the Saudi Arabia followed by the United States, China and Iran. What did surprise a number of people in this country, however, was that large-hearted Turkey had edged out Germany, France, Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan and the UAE.

This statistic is being mentioned not as a casual point of reference, but to illustrate the point that some critics treated the conference as something of a popularity contest, where the country’s concern for the plight of the victims was gauged by the size of the donation. A couple of mandarins in Islamabad who drive around the capital in their bullet-proof limousines, expressed the view that some of the European nations could have perhaps been a little more open-handed.

One of them also wondered why a country that is famous for its diamonds and where paedophiles receive the same judicial courtesy as rapists receive in Pakistan, couldn’t find the time to write a couple of cheques. Could it have had something to do with the universal law of diminishing returns, where the leaders of the First World are getting a little tired of seeing the same beggar’s bowl being passed around over and over again? Or the fact that some of the donors realized during the first three days after disaster struck the fabled northwest that a government just did not exist in the country?

The donors’ conference was a resounding success according to the government, even though some of the largesse that poured in was in the form of loans. There was nobody to point out at the time that while the grants were welcome the country already had enough loans which were going to saddle three generations of Pakistanis. The latest news that has come down the pike is that the government is not going in for the loan option. Common sense has eventually prevailed.

Nevertheless, the president, the prime minister, and other lesser functionaries who have now acquired a television voice which is so arch and self-consciously louche that it comes across as natural, decided to give the nation the good news, carefully calibrating their emotions. The earthquake might adversely affect national development, but it will not have the slightest effect on the panoply of raw thrusting consumerism and the newfound wealth fuelled by a thoroughly corrupt society.

Everybody in Islamabad is immensely pleased, including the speaker of the National Assembly who cruises down Constitution Avenue in his eleven-million rupee Mercedes-Benz bought with the taxpayers’ money. For what with ADB and the World Bank offering to fork up a billion dollars each and IDB chipping in with around half that amount, there is enough in the kitty for the model villages that the prime minister is intent on building.

The danger, however, is that the quangos, the waste merchants who regularly indulge in unnecessary extravagance, and who had withdrawn their collective finger from the dyke when disaster struck, might be tempted to stick it back in and indulge in another round of useless expenditure, now that the international community is taking care of the rehabilitation of the people and the reconstruction of the areas hit by the seismic violence.

In fact, a couple of days after the conference had ended one of the bright sparks in the ministry of defence announced with an unaffected precision that the two aircraft in which the VVIPs do their globetrotting were in urgent need of replacement. The chartered accountants with their heads full of words like “replacement cost” and “depreciation” call it “planned obsolescence”. The thinking man, who has been driving the same car for 20 years and has watched with weary resignation the gradual destruction of all national institutions, calls it a sheer waste of precious resources.

One commiserates with the prime minister and the president, who would probably want to be seen flying around the world in a shiny new iron bird with their huge entourages. One wishes, however, that somebody would bring to the notice of El Supremo that Queen Elizabeth II has gotten rid of her luxury yacht and thinks nothing of travelling with one escort in a commercial airline when attending a Commonwealth conference.

Besides, how would it look to the various ambassadors in Islamabad, some of whom have earnestly pleaded Pakistan’s case with their governments to extend the amount of their financial assistance, when they find out that while European doctors and other volunteers are still pitching tents and tending to the sick and are pouring out their hearts for the refugees, hard earned foreign exchange is being squandered on totally useless things?

The president has already stated that in deference to the tragedy that has occurred, the purchase of some sophisticated weaponry that the top military brass initially considered necessary for the defence of the nation, like the F-16s and the SAABs, have for the moment been put on the back burner. What this statement implies is that if the dreadful earthquake had not struck and obliterated a part of the northwest, the nation would have been saddled with a lot of military hardware which, in this world of fast-changing technology, would, in the course of time, have been declared obsolete.

It is, however, not very clear why this extra equipment is required when both India and Pakistan possess a nuclear deterrent, when both countries are engaged in extended peace talks, are about to re-open consulates in Karachi and Mumbai and are even hinting at treating the Line of Control as an unfortunate historical aberration. Is there really a need for this display of extravagance?

While these purchases have been put on hold, there is still the highly debatable and controversial move to shift, at considerable expense, military headquarters to Islamabad, which a columnist has described as a white elephant. This writer is not an expert on military strategy but the question that a lot of people are asking is: what possible advantage can be gleaned from such a venture, especially when it is been demonstrated that the capital is in the earthquake zone. The issue has not as yet been resolved. But surely the same arguments that apply to the purchase of the aircraft and the warning system apply here also.

This business of shuffling around priorities reminds one of the time when President Ayub Khan decided to move the federal government out of Karachi and to build a capital up north near the Margalla Hills. The cocktail circuit gossip at the time was that the soldier president didn’t like the climate in Karachi and that was why he decided to do the Feroze Shah Tughlaq on the nation.

The politicians, however, knew that the climate in lower Sindh had nothing to do with the move and that the real reason was that Ayub Khan didn’t want to be too far from the power base — the military headquarters located in Rawalpindi. Apparently, Ayub Khan had been informed that Islamabad was smack in the middle of an earthquake zone and that it would be unwise to construct a capital in that area.

But he apparently chose to ignore this warning and proceeded to construct a city which a wit described as being half as large as Arlington cemetery and twice as dead. One can only hope that wiser counsel will prevail and that President Musharraf won’t go through with his plan of relocating the GHQ.

The money thus saved could be utilized for so many other projects that are badly neglected and desperately need financial help, like procuring potable drinking water and formulating a national integrated education policy.

It is time the national leaders showed a little humility and began to think small for a change, like the man in the Volkswagen beetle advertisement.

It is time they asked themselves: how would the Cubans, or the Vietnamese or the Cambodians have reacted in such a crisis? Would they cut out all luxuries, get back to the basics and set an example to the rest of the Third World? Or would they behave like the cavaliers of Islamabad who, in spite of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, landslides and other natural disasters, manage to find the time to devise unique and novel ways to squander the taxpayer’s money, even before the last corpse has been fished out of the rubble?