DANGER LURKS:

Beware of the Kurds (Melik Kaylan, Wall Street Journal, 3/19/2003)

I have been living here in the guise of a businessman. Not being registered as a journalist means I don't need a KDP minder "for my protection." In the age-old fashion, such minders have a distinct influence on what foreign journalists see and think. In this case, journalists have not noted the nefarious activities of the Kurdish authorities in charge of the northern "no-fly" zone....

[T]he Kurds could ... integrate into their northern zone a population of Turkmens and Assyrians that would almost match their own -- and for a while, perhaps for a long while, they would rule over them. Their treatment of those minorities to date in their own preponderantly Kurdish zone suggests it won't work ...

I witnessed a "spontaneous" stone-throwing riot against [Turkmen] party headquarters by a Kurdish mob in Irbil, which the KDP offered to dispel by occupying the premises. The Turkmens refused, as the KDP have a passion for invading and looting their offices. Some nights later, KDP commandos occupied the high-points around Turkmen office buildings and pointed Kalashnikovs at the guards. Turkmen officials are detained without charge, their homes looted anonymously....

Saddam used [the Turkmen] as cannon fodder in the Iran-Iraq war. Many were taken prisoner by the Iranians. Others escaped to [Kurdish-controlled] Irbil, leaving behind relatives at Saddam's mercy. Saddam in turn has tortured and killed those unfortunates for having "foreign" connections. Now the Irbil exiles are stuck with Barzani -- dubbed "Mini Saddam" -- who also treats them as spies for the Turks. Barzani's rival-cum-uneasy confederate, who rules the other official Kurdish zone as strongman of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), is a mite more civilized, though insidious. He refused minority-language TV channels, for example, on grounds that he couldn't protect them adequately....

Barzani's new-found pan-Kurdish nationalism is pragmatic. Any change in the status quo brought on by Turkish or American forces breaks his monopoly on trade and smuggling revenues and threatens his financial hold over the mercurial Kurdish tribes. Until the trade in oil with Iraq stopped a few days ago -- after Turkey closed the border -- Barzani made nearly a billion dollars a month on transit "taxes." His family takes a cut from all trade in tobacco, textiles, tea, alcohol and medicines. None of this bodes well for his future governance in a wider Kurdish area. It is an open secret here that he has allowed Iraqi intelligence to operate under cover, and that Saddam's family and friends have regularly visited here -- after all, Barzani and Saddam's son, Qusay, co-own the local firm that traded in U.N.-sanctioned oil....

In the weeks I've been here, I've learned the last thing local leaders want, or intend to employ, is democracy and the rule of law.

As the State Department recently warned, establishing democracy and freedom in Iraq will be difficult. But it must be done. Posted by Paul Jaminet at March 19, 2003 9:14 PM