Washington Times, DC
Aug 18 2004

Kurds build own identity

By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

ERBIL, Iraq – Americans may be vilified in much of Iraq, but in the
15,000 square miles encompassing Iraqi
Kurdistan, wedding parties pose with U.S. soldiers, American
flags are posted proudly on dashboards and officials beg visiting
Americans to tell Washington to establish a permanent military base
here.

“That would send a message to everyone not to do anything to the
Kurds,” said a visiting professor at the 14,000-student Salahaddin
University in this sprawling north-central city.
Thirty years of political oppression, poison gas attacks and
outright genocide by the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad have led
northeastern Iraq’s 4.5 million Kurds to rethink all their alliances.

Some even suggest contacting the Israelis for advice. Although
most Kurdish Muslims instinctively distrust Jews, some say Israelis
would be eager to help bolster a Kurdish democracy in the Middle
East. Jews inhabited Kurdistan starting with the Babylonian exile in
597 B.C. and ending in the 1950s, when many returned to Israel.
Others say Kurds are flirting with Zoroastrianism or atheism, as
Islam is seen as the religion of their Turkish and Arab oppressors.
Evangelical Protestant missionaries who are quietly planting churches
in the major Kurdish cities report flickers of interest. Copies of
the New Testament, or at least portions of it, are available in both
Kurdish dialects, and Campus Crusade’s “Jesus Film” has been on
Kurdish television several times.
The evangelistic Dallas-based Daystar Television Network can be
seen in any Kurdish home with a satellite dish.
The Amman, Jordan-based Manara Ministries, a Christian agency
that conducts relief work in northern Iraq, estimates 200 Kurds have
converted to Christianity in 20 years and that Erbil has at least one
Christian bookstore. Other Christian agencies in the region agree
numbers remain in the low hundreds, but thousands have received
evangelistic literature and have had some contact with Christians.
Kurds have substituted their own red, yellow, green and white
flag in place of the national Iraqi flag on flagpoles everywhere. In
the few places the Iraqi flag is displayed, it is the de-Islamicized
pre-1991 version before Saddam Hussein added “God is Great” in Arabic
to the red, white, black and green banner.
“Some people are blaming Islam for what’s happening to us,” one
college professor mused. “But I think the fault is with the British
who divided our land after World War I. We have tolerated this bitter
reality, but we have never accepted it.”
The Kurdish penchant for independent thinking begins with its
“Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan” sign at the Iraqi-Turkish border – a
calculated insult to Turkey, which has denied human rights to many of
its 15 million to 20 million Kurds and whose border guards lecture
travelers that “Kurdistan” does not exist.
Kurdistan is an unofficial nation-state encompassing at least 25
million people in the 74,000-square-mile mountainous region
encompassing chunks of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It is the
world’s largest ethnic group without a country of its own.
Kurds were promised a country in the Aug. 10, 1920, Treaty of
Sevres that divided the former Ottoman Empire among Britain, Turkey
and others, and gave independence to Armenia.
However, the treaty drafted in Sevres, France, was ignored by
Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, who did honor the
1923 Treaty of Lausanne that established Turkey’s present borders but
partitioned Kurdistan into four parts.
Kurds generally were oppressed in all their host countries,
resulting in the establishment of exile communities in Europe and the
United States. Iraqi Kurdistan blossomed after the 1991 Gulf war,
when overflights by British and American fighter jets generally kept
Saddam’s forces at bay.
Today, some Baghdad residents are moving their homes several
hundred miles north to tranquil Kurdish cities such as Dohuk, where
legions of peshmerga – Kurdish militia – patrol the city streets and
man checkpoints on rural routes. The more American – or Western – a
passenger appears to be, the more quickly one is waved on by the
peshmerga. Cars sporting Baghdad license plates or holding Arab
occupants are pulled over and searched.
One Assyrian Christian driver relates how, while conducting
business in Mosul 40 miles south of Dohuk, he was threatened at
gunpoint by insurgents. He managed to talk his way out of trouble.
Asked the reason for the AK-47 assault rifle in the front seat?
“To shoot Arabs with,” he said.
Although danger remains, others are enjoying their new lives.
“I’m 37 years old, but I feel like I am only 1 year old because I
feel freedom now,” said the Rev. Mofid Toma Marcus, an Assyrian
Christian monk who oversees the Monastery of the Virgin Mary in Al
Qosh, a Christian village near the burial spot of the Old Testament
prophet Nahum. “America has given new life to Iraqi people.”
In five years, he said, “Iraq will be better. Under Saddam, we
had no cell phones, no Internet, no interviews with American
journalists. America took 200 years to get to where it is today.”
Al Qosh is one of seven Christian villages stretching north from
Mosul.
“We don’t give permission for Muslim families to live in
Christian villages,” Mr. Marcus said, explaining that Muslims would
gradually turn it into an Muslim-majority village, then institute
Islamic law.
A half-mile down the road is Bozan, a village populated by Yezidi
Kurds who worship a pre-Islamic peacock god linked to Zoroastrianism
and Mithraism. The children play in the town square near a bombed-out
school that the monastery is trying to refurbish.
They run to fetch Elias Khalaf, the headmaster, a dignified man
in a Kurdish-style gray suit with baggy pants, who begs for Americans
to come stay in some of the monastery’s 200 rooms and help rebuild
his school. Missing are all the basics: paint, windows, water, doors,
blackboards, electricity, desks and toilets.
Thirty teachers toil with 1,100 students, sometimes as many as 60
per class.
“We need teachers,” he begs. “We need everything.”
The Yezidis were forced out of their villages 30 years ago by
Arab Iraqis, gaining them back only since the overthrow of Saddam. On
their way out, the Arabs cut the electric lines and poisoned the
wells.
Kurdish cities are filled with unemployed men of all ages idling
in cafes to escape the 111-degree heat. Despite the scorching
temperature, many of the Muslim women cloak themselves in heavy,
long-sleeved jackets, ankle-length skirts and head scarves.
Sulaymania, a city about 80 miles west of the Iranian border
surrounded by hot, rocky, barren hills, has a reputation for free
thinking and slightly more liberal dress codes. It has become a
center for experimental newspapers that operate on shoestring
budgets. The London-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting has an
office in Sulaymania, where it tries to instill journalistic
standards into eager but inexperienced reporters.
One student-run paper is in a tiny third-floor office with no air
conditioning. Cold sodas are brought for the guests, who are told
that the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which controls the
northwestern tier of Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
(PUK), which controls the southeast, exercise Mafialike control over
Kurds. Any newspaper that criticizes the parties, they say, finds
itself banned from local newsstands.
A similar conversation the next day with an Islamic newspaper
reveals how dissatisfaction with the slow pace of change is
everywhere. At a quiet dinner with Kurdish businessmen in the
touristy suburb of Sarchinar, the topic of conversation is the
failure of Kurdish political leaders to encourage Western investment
and the reluctance of American companies to take a chance on the
Kurds.
“If you don’t move quickly here,” one computer technician said,
“the Chinese and the Germans will fill your place.”
The Iranians already have a consulate in Sulaymania, one is told,
while the Americans only have plans for a consulate in Kirkuk,
leaving most of northern Iraq with no official American presence.
Meanwhile, the Kurds already have a functioning airport in Erbil
and plans are to open another one soon in Sulaymania. Iraq has been
on hold for too many years, they say. Gas may be 3 cents a gallon
here but passports are impossible to come by, reducing many Kurds to
learning their English from BBC World telecasts. There is no postal
service.
Plus, any Kurdish public figure working with Westerners knows his
life could be snuffed out at any time. A drive to a lunch interview
with Salahaddin University President Mohammed Sadik in Erbil begins
when two armed bodyguards jump into the passenger seat of his car and
perch on the back bumper.
Their caution stems from the Feb. 1 suicide bombings at the Erbil
headquarters of the KDP and PUK during celebrations for an Islamic
holiday. More than 56 Kurds, adults and children were killed.
The Kurds at this lunch are distraught over U.N. Resolution 1546,
which they hoped would support Kurds’ semi-independent status. But
the resolution was vague, not even mentioning the regional government
for which Kurds have long campaigned. Furious Kurds now refer to L.
Paul Bremer, who served as the United States’ Iraq administrator
after the fall of Saddam, as “Lawrence of Arabia” for selling them
short to Arab rulers who have little experience or taste for
democracy.
“We feel Americans have bargained at the expense of the Kurds,”
Mr. Sadik said. “The worst person they brought here was Mr. Bremer,
who didn’t want to take any advice from the Kurds but who was willing
to bargain with everyone else.”
All the lunch guests scoffed at the notion of “a new Iraq” touted
by the Americans.
“We have nothing in common with the rest of Iraq,” said Kirmanj
Gundi, a Tennessee State professor visiting his homeland. “Why did
Bremer always compromise on Kurdish interests in favor of the
Shi’ites and Sunnis who shoot at them?
“If America supports us, we’d be the most loyal friend in the
region.”
Every Kurd in the room wanted independence. Why, they asked, was
America so quick to recognize Israel 56 years ago but today raises
objection after objection about Kurdish independence.
“When America decided to recognize Israel,” one said, “America
didn’t care about how the 22 Arab countries would react or how the 56
Islamic countries would react. So why should the Kurds care what the
Iraqi government thinks?”