What have the Kurds gained from Operation Iraqi Freedom?

By: Dr Rashid Karadaghi

Jan 18, 2005

The question millions of Kurds are asking today is: "What exactly did we get out of Operation Iraqi Freedom?" Surely, Saddam is no longer, but there is an infinite number of his clones waiting in the wing and it is only a matter of time when one of them, or a collective of them, will assume power to continue on their master’s path. Surely, we are safe for now from Saddam’s chemical attacks, but there is no telling what the neo-Saddams will do when they come back to power with a vengeance.

I do not mean in any way to belittle the historic importance of Operation Iraqi Freedom for the Kurdish people. There is no doubt that the Kurds feel more secure because of removing Saddam and his murderous regime from power, for which they are, and will always be, grateful to America, even though they know that they were only coincidental beneficiaries of OIF, for it was not launched with them in mind despite all the pre-OIF rhetoric and the sudden awakening by the West to the suffering of the Kurds --- now forgotten again.

But while the Kurds are applauding the Bush Administration for removing Saddam and his criminal regime from power, they are shocked and puzzled by the antagonistic attitude of this same Administration towards Kurdish national rights despite the justness of those rights, the well-publicized and recognized Kurdish participation in the US-led Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the miss-perception in the Middle East that America is behind the Kurds.

It may come as a surprise to the families and loved ones of the one thousand plus brave American men and women who gave their lives so others could be free, and to the five thousand plus who have been maimed or injured, and also to those who will undoubtedly pay with their lives or limb to find out that since the fall of Saddam not only has America done nothing to promote legitimate Kurdish national rights but has opposed them vigorously, siding with those who have terrorized the Kurds for over eighty years and committed genocide against them, instead of supporting Kurdish freedom fighters who fought the same tyrannical regime that America overthrew almost two years ago. The American people are entitled to a convincing explanation from their government of the gap between the declared noble goals of OIF and the actual, on-the-ground, anti-Kurdish American policy, despite the fact that the Kurds are indisputably the truest and most reliable American ally in the whole region, reliable because they, too, believe in the fundamental American ideal of liberty and the inalienable human rights and have fought for that ideal and those rights for as long as history can remember.

The irony is that while America is standing against the national rights of the Kurds and does not recognize Kurdistan except as "northern Iraq," where not only has a single American or Coalition soldier not been killed but they have been welcomed, and rightfully so, with open arms as heroes, it is supporting those who have never had one good word to say about America. America is punishing its real friends while rewarding those whose whole political philosophy and creed is rooted in fighting and hating America and Americans. Can the State Department tell us how this twisted policy serves United States’ interest?

The Kurds cannot understand why America and its allies insist on the unity of the failed state of Iraq, thereby denying the Kurds the right to their own state like the other 192 nations in the UN, even though the Kurds are more numerous than the majority of these nations. In this regard, it must be said that America and its principal ally, Britain, which is historically to blame for most Kurdish ills, and the United Nations have all trampled on the rights of the Kurdish people by refusing to implement the will of over 1,700,000 voting-age Kurds who signed a petition a year ago demanding that a Referendum be held in Kurdistan so the Kurdish people would vote on whether they want to remain part of Iraq or not. Those signatures gathered dust for months at Paul Bremer’s office in Baghdad first and now at the UN headquarters in New York. So much for the will of the people and all the United Nations’ Declarations on peoples’ right of self-determination!

What American policy-makers fail to understand is that the American blueprint, while working so well in America (and I can testify to that after spending two-thirds of my life in this country), will never work in a country like Iraq with its long history of hatred and bloodshed between the ethnic groups (Kurds and Arabs) and even to some extent the sectarian groups. Those who are pinning their hopes on the upcoming election will be sorely disappointed because even with the cleanest and most democratic elections, the eighty-year-old problems of Iraq will not go away as long as the country is kept whole by force, which has always been the case. The only solution for Iraq’s problems is to stop forcing disparate people to live under the same roof. And what have we accomplished by keeping Iraq whole for almost a century other than mass graves and devastation and suffering? And after all, if family members who can’t get along well should have the right to go their separate ways, why can’t nations have the same right? It doesn’t really take a genius to understand this simple logic, despite what people who have a vested interest in keeping the world in turmoil say.

Apart from removing Saddam, which, in my view, will go down in history as one of America’s noblest acts despite the inevitable, tragic loss of many lives, the lofty goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom have proven rather empty for the Kurds, for instead of helping to reverse the ethnic cleansing of Kurds by Saddam and his predecessors, America is making ethnic cleansing permanent by not allowing the Kurds who were expelled from their ancestral homes and properties to return to those homes, still occupied by pro-Saddam Arab settlers brought to Kerkuk and other Arabized areas of Kurdistan, mainly in the eighties and nineties, to change the demography of Kurdistan. Thus, whether we like it or not, even though America overthrew Saddam, it is keeping his legacy alive.

And while it is true that South Kurdistan is thriving economically and is relatively secure for now, the much more important and larger issue, namely, the Kurdish national cause, has suffered some setbacks since the liberation, for the Kurds are not an inch closer to realizing their goal of independence than they were before Saddam’s fall, thanks largely to the US-led Coalition’s lack of faith in its own ideals and its submission to the evil demands and threats of the occupiers of Greater Kurdistan. Very simply put, Kurds are puzzled by the Coalition’s (and the rest of the Western democracies’) refusal to support the Kurds’ legitimate right to establish their own independent state, even though a Kurdish democratic, secular state would enhance Western ideals in the Middle East. The West’s insistence on perpetuating British colonialism’s terrible crime against the Kurds is a deep mystery to every Kurd, for any fair and rational person can look at eighty years of bloody history and conclude that the patchwork called "Iraq" has been like a plague to its people and, optimistic claims notwithstanding, will continue to be a plague since it is held together by force.

Within the last three weeks, two more mass graves have been found in Kurdistan, one in Silemani (28 December 2004) with the remains of sixty Kurds in it, and the other in Kerkuk (8 January 2005) with the remains of six Kurds in it. This is in addition to the hundreds of other mass graves that have been uncovered in Kurdistan since the fall of Saddam, and God knows how many more will be uncovered in the future. Despite all these horrible crimes committed against the Kurdish people by Arab Iraq, America and its principal ally, Britain, (and all the other Western democracies) insist that Iraq must remain whole, that the Kurds must not become independent, all of which means that the Kurds will continue to be subjugated by extremist Arab nationalists and Islamic radicals and must brace themselves up for more mass graves and genocides in the future.

Of the hundreds and hundreds of news reports about actual events on the ground in Kurdistan and Iraq, the following is perhaps as telling as any about what Operation Iraqi Freedom has evolved into for the Kurds. It was reported a few days ago that the Iraqi Election High Commission, which has the blessings of America and Britain and the UN, has disqualified a Kurdish political party from participating in the election because it has the word "Independence" in its name! The Commission required this Kurdish party to change its name if it wanted to participate in the election because, the Commission claimed, its name implied "separatism," which prompted the Kurdish party to boycott the election because it stood on principle and refused to change its name. Just imagine! Kurds are not free even to choose the names of their political parties! How can we reconcile this and countless other violations of basic Kurdish rights with the noble goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Was this the fate that launched a thousand missiles? Could someone in the State Department or the Foreign Office explain --- -without double-talk?