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This week's Editorial

Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: Squandering American Goodwill Abroad
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Reality Bytes
A Son of Palestine Returns
by Sam Husseini
A People Betrayed

February 15 marked the second anniversary of the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish rebel leader, by the Turkish authorities.

"Ocalan is giving orders for war," say the Turkish press while Ocalan tells the world from his prison cell that he "felt uneasy about the style and manner in which his comments were reflected in the press."

His life hangs by a thread, the same thread that holds Turkish hopes for inclusion in the European Union. Turkey does not dare execute Ocalan if it wants those hopes realized.

Eighty-one years ago after WWI the Allies and the defeated Ottoman Empire signed the Treaty of Sevres, which provided for an independent Kurdistan in the adjacent areas of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, where 18 million Kurds were concentrated.

The West simply ignored the promise while Turkish nationalists opposed it.

Uprisings in the 20s and the 30s were crushed by Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

In the 1960s Iran and Israel jointly supplied the Kurds with military hardware with the idea of keeping Iraq weighed down in internal wars. It "was always just enough to prevent their defeat, and never quite enough to enable them to attain their political objectives."

In the March Manifesto of 1970 Iraq and its Kurdish minority signed for peace. The Kurds were to be included in the national legislature and be granted autonomy in exchange for the oil fields of Kirkuk and for agreeing to sever ties with Iran. The plan unraveled.

In May of 1972 the CIA and the State Department secretly approved $16 million worth of arms for the Kurds. Iraq had just nationalized American and European oil firms so the US had its reasons. The aid was not intended to help the Kurds achieve independence but only "to continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally's neighboring country (Iraq)."

The US had also supplied the Shah or Iran with $22 billion in arms in 1972.

Three years later in 1975 when Iraq and Iran settled their dispute over the Shatt Al-Arab waterway Iran, Israel and the US abruptly stopped the flow of arms to the Kurds.

And again in the Persian Gulf War the Kurds were used as pawns. Said US diplomat Aaraon latham"What we wanted was to destablize the Iraqi government and topple Saddam Hussain."

In 1974 Turkey invaded Iraq in order to clean out the PKK strongholds. In their fight against the PKK, the Turkish government exploited rifts between the Turkish Kurds and the Iraqi Kurdish parties of Iraq.

Turkey, which has been receiving an average annual sum of $800 million in arms from the US since 1973, has used some of those armaments in its war on the PKK within its borders. The war is now 14 years in duration and has claimed over 30,000 lives.

Even Turklsh control over Syrian water, is, in part, a reprisal against the Syrian sponsorship of the PKK.

And the Mossad, despite Israel's warm relationship with Turkey, kept Ocalan apprised of Turkish attempts to capture him while it simultaneously tracked Ocalan and his followers in Syria and Iraq for the Turkish authorities.

The Kurds remain to this day a people without a land betrayed by friend and foe alike.

Jenifer Dixon


Copyright © 1999-2000, J. Dixon. All Rights Reserved.