INTERVIEW-Iraqi Kurds want security, not fight with Saddam 
Feb 12, 2002

LONDON (Reuters) - Iraqi Kurds may fervently desire Saddam Hussein's downfall, but bitter past experience has made them wary of U.S. talk of overthrowing the Iraqi leader.

"The scars are still there, the fear is still there," Rowsch Shaways, president of the Kurdistan National Assembly in northern Iraq, told Reuters in an interview Tuesday.

He was referring to past treatment meted out to rebellious Kurds by Iraqi governments, culminating in the bloody ethnic cleansing of the late 1980s, including a poison gas attack on the eastern town of Halabja that killed thousands of people.

President Bush last month branded Iraq as part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and North Korea. He vowed Monday that the United States would prevent nations developing weapons of mass destruction from teaming up with terrorists.

Some Washington hawks see the Kurds, whose peshmerga guerrillas fought Baghdad on and off for decades, acting as a local ground force in a U.S.-led campaign to oust Saddam, likening them to Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

"Nobody has asked us to play this role," Shaways said cautiously. "If someone asks us, we will think about it."

He said the two overriding requirements for the Kurds were to retain Western military protection for the northern Iraqi enclave they have held since the 1991 Gulf War and to keep their 13 percent share in Iraq's U.N.-supervised oil revenue. 

MUCH AT STAKE

Shaways, who belongs to the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties, said his people had far more to lose now from any failed attempt to topple Saddam than they did during their desperate post-Gulf War uprising.

In March 1991, hordes of panic-stricken Kurds poured across snow-bound mountains into Turkey to escape Iraqi troops crushing revolts by Kurds in the north and Shi'ite Muslims in the south.

The United States, under former President George Bush, had seemed to encourage the unrest, but failed to aid the rebels.

"The Kurdish administration is responsible for 3.6 million people and for the achievements of the last 10 years," Shaways said of the enclave that is off-limits to Baghdad. "Any step must be thought about very carefully, and should not be at the expense of our principles of democracy and federalism."

The Kurdish Democratic Party and its chief political rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, both endorse a federal solution that would give Kurds substantial autonomy within a united Iraq.

Shaways said Iraqi Kurds backed the U.S.-declared war on terrorism and considered Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party and Islamic radicals based near Halabja as terrorist groups.

"What the (Kurdistan Workers Party) has done in northern Iraq has caused a lot of damage," he said. "We are against our areas being used to launch attacks on Turkey. The Turks should feel that our area is an element of stability for them."

Shaways said he had no information on reports that members of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which Washington believes was behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, had fled to northern Iraq from Afghanistan.

"There are Islamic fundamentalists operating in eastern Kurdistan and they are terrorists," he said of the Jund al-Islam group. "But no important al Qaeda people could be there."

The Kurdish Democratic Party backs the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in its periodic clashes with groups such as Jund al-Islam. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's assertions that Jund al-Islam has links with bin Laden have not been confirmed. 

NOBODY'S PAWN

Iraqi Kurds, while keenly aware of their reliance on the U.S. and British warplanes that have defended them for a decade, clearly have misgivings about a U.S. bid to remove Saddam.

"If the U.S. strikes Iraq, there is nothing we can do," Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani said last week. "But we will not be ordered by America or any others. We will not be a bargaining chip or tool of pressure to be used against Iraq."

Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani echoed the views of his old rival.

"We will not enter adventures whose end is unclear. In the same way we cannot support any project for change in which we do not see the alternative," he declared. "We prefer the current situation to a change we could not accept. At least now Saddam is under international pressure and contained, alone and powerless, and we are under international protection."

Vice President Cheney will make stops in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, which all border Iraq, next month during a regional tour to seek support for U.S. policies.