U.S.
Has to Meet Responsibility to Kurds

	As one might expect during this election season, President Clinton is 
eager to proclaim the unqualified success of recent US missile attacks against 
defense installations in southern Iraq.  To do so, however, Clinton has had to 
downplay the importance of U.S. operations in northern Iraq, where a UN-
mandated "safe haven" was set up at the end of the Gulf War to protect Iraq's 
long-besieged Kurdish minority, thousands of whom fled Saddam Hussein's 
brutality after the war.  Now that this Kurdish "safe haven" -- patrolled by US, 
British, and French planes for the last five years -- has erupted into civil war, 
with Saddam Hussein backing the victorious Kurdistan Democratic Party, led 
by Massoud Barzani, the Clinton team wants to walk away, as if the north 
were of minor importance.
	The truth, beyond this election-year bluff, is that northern Iraq is an 
area of immense strategic significance, where the US's failure to mediate 
between rival Kurdish parties in the region left a dangerous power vacuum 
waiting to be exploited.
 	This week, Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, 
conveniently dismissed the takeover of northern Iraq by Kurdish forces 
aligned with Hussein, arguing that "the United States has strengthened its 
strategic position in the area that matters to us most, which is the area south 
of Baghdad, the area that borders on oil-rich neighbors."  Of course, most 
Americans know the US went to war because of strategic oil reserves in the 
Gulf, not the plight of the Kurds.  Nonetheless, we should not forget the 
special responsibility the US bears for recent events in northern Iraq, after 
more than five years of direct US involvement.  
	First, a UN trade embargo, actively pushed by the United States, was 
foolishly imposed not only on Iraq, but on the Kurdish protection zone as 
well.  This left an impoverished Kurdish population totally dependent on 
international relief operations.  Development aid was withheld.  Within this 
desperate environment, fighting broke out between rival Kurdish groups 
over the question of who would control the customs revenue from a growing 
black-market border trade with Turkey, the only open route to the outside 
world.  
	Then, in July, 1994, several international mediation efforts collapsed 
because the United States (at the insistence of Turkey, a close US ally) opposed 
granting the Iraqi Kurds even the most minimal rights to self-government.  
By 1995, a significant "peace agreement" was signed by both sides in Ireland, 
only to collapse later when the US failed to provide the estimated $3 million 
dollars needed to carry it out.  For the cost of just three of the 44 cruise 
missiles used against Iraq the US could have financed a mediation force to 
bring about a peaceful resolution of the conflict, which both sides ultimately 
wanted.
	Instead, inconsistent US policies repeatedly demonstrated the weakness 
of our commitment to the Kurds.  A weakness of resolve that Iran, Iraq and 
Turkey -- the competing powers in the region -- were only too happy to 
exploit.  In March, 1995, the US allowed Turkish troops to violate the "no fly 
zone" in northern Iraq to attack the bases of the Kurdish Workers Party 
(PKK), a militant Turkish opposition group.  The US permitted repeated 
Turkish incursions despite civilian deaths and massive flights of Kurdish 
villagers.
	Then, in late July, the US issued only muted protest when Talibani's 
party permitted 4,000 Iranians to attack an Iranian Kurdish opposition group 
based in Iraq.  In exchange, Iran delivered a cache of weapons to Talibani's 
forces.  The astonishing complacency of the US response to this incursion 
prompted Barzani's party to seek immediate outside assistance.  Feeling 
threatened, he turned to his dreaded former enemy, Saddam Hussein, the 
man who poison gassed thousands of his own Kurdish people in the 1980s.
	Yes, the Kurds themselves bear much of the blame for their lack of 
unity.  But why did the US ignore both parties' requests for a peaceful 
mediation of the conflict?  And now that Barzani, backed by Hussein, has 
assumed full control of the region, how will the US respond to the 
contending regional powers who try to exploit the power vacuum the US has 
left behind?
	So far, the US has shown a dangerous inclination to throw up its hands 
and abandon the Kurds of the north.  Announcing a desire to end its 
humanitarian assistance to the Kurds, Washington will leave international 
relief agencies to cope with this desperately poor population.  Furthermore, as 
recent news reports indicate, the US plans to leave many Kurdish and Iraqi 
dissidents, formerly working with the CIA, to fend for themselves without 
protection.  And despite a recent pledge to continue patrolling the "no fly 
zone" over Kurdish territory, the US has already granted approval for Turkey 
to establish a security zone (6-15 miles wide) inside the Iraqi border.
	The purpose of Turkey's new security zone -- akin Israel's border zone 
inside Lebanon-- is to wipe out the bases of the PKK, Turkey's militant 
Kurdish opposition group.  For the last twelve years, the Turkish military has 
waged a brutal civil war against its Kurdish minority, bombing and 
depopulating over 3,000 Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey, and 
creating an estimated two million internal refugees.  The vast majority of 
these shameful human rights abuses have been carried out with US weapons 
(85% of Turkey's arms imports come from the US).  Using Turkey's reliance 
on US military assistance as leverage, the US should pressure Turkey to stop 
its ethnic war against the Kurds, and prevent northern Iraq from becoming 
the next staging ground for Turkey's civil war.
	It would be cynical and foolish for the US to turn its back against the 
Kurds.  Ignoring northern Iraq now will only leave a volatile region open to 
violent exploitation and dangerous instability.  Time is short.  A Turkish 
bombing campaign has already sent Kurdish villagers into flight, forcing 
them to abandon their fruit crops before the harvest.  There may still be time 
for the US to negotiate a lasting peace between Iraq's two warring Kurdish 
parties.  If we don't try now, the chance won't come again.

--  Jennifer Washburn is a research associate at the World Policy Institute at 
the New School for Social Research in New York City.