KurdistanObserver.com

Pack up and Go Home!

By: Dr. Rashid Karadaghi

Aug 8, 2005

There isn't a day going by without hearing or reading vicious anti-Kurdish statements by Iraqi government officials and leaders of various political and religious parties. And with each passing day, these statements get bolder, less veiled, and more vicious. By now, all of the builders of the "new" Iraq, Saddam's heirs, have spoken their mind and, as expected, it is the same evil mind that our people have been accustomed to, and fighting, for almost a hundred years. Nothing about their thinking has changed -- or ever will. The Kurds said it well when they said, "The wolf repents only in death."

Based on what we have heard from the new rulers of Iraq, and would-be rulers, in the last two-and- a -half years, we detect absolutely no difference between them and Saddam. The new rulers of Iraq would not hesitate for a moment to terrorize our people just as Saddam and his men did for more than three decades. Do we want to put our fate in these people's hands? It is the Kurdish people who must have the final say about this.

It is instructive to review a bit of history here in case some with a short memory might have forgotten. (The Jews remind us repeatedly of the Holocaust sixty-five years after it happened, lest we forget.) It was people with the same mentality as that of the new rulers of Iraq who carried out the infamous Anfal operations and gassed our people in Halabja and dozens of other locations in Kurdistan. We must never forget how they went around house by house and village by village and rounded up thousands upon thousands of unarmed, defenceless Kurdish men, women, and children, loaded them up on trucks, took and buried them alive in the deserts of southern Iraq, and then burned or dynamited their homes, turning the Kurdish countryside into a wasteland. The hundreds of mass graves, uncovered after the liberation, are a testimony to the real nature of our "brothers."

It is this bloody history that Arab Iraq wants us to forget. It is these horrific crimes that Arab Iraq has yet to admit to and apologize for. Not only that, but it wants to have a free hand, whenever it wishes, to implement the same genocidal policies that Saddam and his predecessors practised against the Kurds for almost a hundred years. And this is what the international community is oblivious of and in denial of, otherwise it wouldn't have insisted, just like the Arab Iraqis, on keeping Iraq intact and leaving the fate of the Kurdish people in the hands of the little Saddams.

Given what we know about Arab Iraqis and their chauvinistic mentality, it should come as no surprise when we hear that no agreement has been reached in the committee drafting the Constitution on any of the major Kurdish demands. We should be even less surprised by the news that a Kurdish proposal to give them the constitutional right to hold a referendum on self-determination in eight years has been rejected. But we were wrong, to begin with, in asking Arab Iraqis to give us the permission to hold a referendum on our self-determination. We should be empowering our own people to hold the referendum and declare its results and implement them as any free people would do.


Unless we break the vicious cycle of the last hundred years by turning all our wrong assumptions and our thinking patterns upside down, and unless we stop thinking of Arab Iraqis as the arbiter of our fate and stop asking them to grant us our freedom, we will be doomed to live another hundred years under Arab Iraq's oppression and terror.

The two unofficial referendums that were held in Kurdistan in 2004 and 2005 made it abundantly clear that the Kurdish people do not want to be part of Iraq. All that is required now is to let the results of those referendums stand --- unless some don't consider them legitimate because they were not sanctioned by Baghdad!!!!! ---or conduct yet another one on our own and implement the results. It is the Free World's obligation, under US leadership, to then make all parties concerned accept the results. If Iraq stands in the way of exercising the will of the Kurdish people as expressed in the referendum, which it will, that would be Arab imperialism pure and simple, which the Kurds reject totally.

America's stance on the drafting of the Constitution and the modest Kurdish demands has been more than disappointing; in fact, it has been an affront to America's ideals. When American officials urge a "compromise" in order to finish the drafting of the Constitution by the 15 August artificial deadline, we know at whose expense that "compromise" would be. It seems that America wants its friends to lose and its enemies to win. And when the new US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, says that the Ba'athist Arabs whom Saddam brought to Kerkuk to change the demography of the province, after kicking three hundred thousand Kurds out, don't have to go back to where they came from, he is putting America's stamp of approval on Saddam's ethnic cleansing practices, which neither any of the Iraqi governments after the liberation nor the Coalition authorities have lifted a finger to undo; on the contrary, they have all tried to make it permanent. Ethnic cleansing was considered a crime in Kosovo and Bosnia and elsewhere, and rightly so, but it is legal when it is done to the Kurds!

In light of what we expected all along and what even the skeptics among us are now convinced of about Arab Iraq's attitude towards our people, the one honorable choice left to the Kurdish members of the Constitution is: Pack up your bags and go home! Do not waste any more of your time trying to reason with a people who cannot be reasoned with. Knowing what you knew about Iraq, you should never have gone to Baghdad because going there could only have meant, as you found out from experience, doing what Arab Iraqis want you to do: Legitimize their rule of terror for another one hundred years over your people and your homeland through a farcical document they call "Constitution." Honor the victims of Halabja and the Anfal and thousands of martyrs before them and their families by saying "NO!" to a document that dishonors them. Do not dishonor yourselves and your people by willingly putting your signatures to a document that is clearly not what you or your people want. No power on earth can force you to sign a document which says that you are less than another people, a document in which you willingly give your people's freedom away, a document that says you cannot be free because the self-appointed masters want you to serve them forever. Your people will never forgive you if you give in to pressure, real or perceived, from your enemies. You've lingered too long in Baghdad. It is time to come home to your own people!