Kurds A People in Search of Their Homeland

Chapter One Viva la Fiesta A man who has been bitten by a snake will always be afraid of rope. Kurdish proverb Beginning As bulldozers unearthed the corpses of fifty-four men executed in 1983 by Saddam Hussein's troops, several Kurds from a nearby refugee camp stared at the remains with curiosity. "They are just skeletons in uniforms," said one refugee. The hands of many of the captives had been tied, noted another refugee, remarking that the killings must have been hasty: Loaded ammunition clips clung to their belts and one of the dead wore a canteen that was still full, eight years later. Someone unhooked it from the skeleton's belt and emptied the water into the grave. Nevertheless, what stuck in the minds of the Kurds, traumatized victims of a genocidal campaign largely unknown in the West at the time, was the sight of the watches, inexpensive ones, on the wrists of two of the corpses. The brand name was Orient, and the watches were still ticking. One witness told me calmly, "Everyone here was surprised that watches could last so long underground." Watches ticking on the wrists of skeletons. Husbands and sons disappearing. Millions of refugees fleeing for the mountains in winter lest they, too, "disappear." Such searing images were my introduction to the Kurds when I arrived in northern Iraq in 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War. The White House had exhorted the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The Kurds did rebel, but without aid from Washington, they were savagely crushed, and one and one-half million starving refugees were driven into the mountains of Iran and Turkey. I followed their story in all three countries, and then I saw it fall out of the news. That was a dozen years before a U.S. invasion would topple Hussein, bringing Shiite Arabs and minority Kurds to power in Baghdad and setting the stage for the Transitional National Assembly's selection of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president of Iraq. By 1991, I had seen my share of conflict as a journalist, beginning as a public radio reporter in the 1970s, when I covered the FBI-Indian wars in South Dakota. Since then, I had been a witness to war in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. Despite the horrors I had seen elsewhere, I was unprepared for the scale of devastation visited upon the Kurds. By the time I arrived in Iraq, one hundred eighty thousand Kurds were dead or missing, according to human rights monitors, and nearly four thousand villages had been destroyed in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees still remained in the mountains, most of them living in tents in the snow or under plastic tarps, still terrified that Hussein's troopswho were regrouping after their retreat from Kuwaitwould return. Before long, many of the Kurdish refugees I met would be inching their way home, putting the nightmare of Iraqi domination behind them, trying to piece together a future. For the remainder of the decade, Iraqi Kurds would occupy a mini-enclave in northern Iraq, protected by allied overflights but mostly forgotten by the world. After a quarter century of forced relocation to "modern villages," mass murder, and widespread disappearances, they suddenly found themselves in the throes of a fragile liberation. For the first time, the Iraqi Kurds could travel and associate freely, share information, trace missing relatives, and rebuild villages. Sporadic fighting remained between Iraqi soldiers and the Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death). But each day, despite the misgivings of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and even the United States, the Kurds of Iraq were moving closer to autonomy, if not eventual independencMcKiernan, Kevin is the author of 'Kurds A People in Search of Their Homeland' with ISBN 9780312325466 and ISBN 0312325460.