judmxomupy

Imperialism Sabotaged Kurds' National Struggle soc culture spain
from http://www.themilitant.com

BY JACK BARNES

The following is an excerpt from the "Opening Guns of World War III:
Washington's Assault on Iraq" in the Marxist magazine New International
no. 7. The article is based on a talk given by Socialist Workers Party
national secretary Jack Barnes on March 30, 1991, right after the Gulf
War. It is particularly relevant today as the Clinton administration
claimed concern for the Kurdish population in Iraq to justify the
latest military assault on the Iraqi people. The excerpt is copyright a
408 Printing and Publishing Corp. (see also
http://www.pathfinderpress.com) and is reprinted by permission.


BY JACK BARNES
After fleeing the killing fields in Kuwait, some units of Baghdad's
defeated army went into open rebellion against the Iraqi regime. They
were fed up with the disastrous consequences for Iraqi soldiers and
civilians alike of Saddam Hussein's expansionist adventure in Kuwait
and treacherous refusal to organize its troops to fight. These soldiers
joined in revolts by working people who took up arms against the regime
in cities, towns, and villages across southern and northern Iraq. Much
of the population in the south, although far from all, is from the
Shiite Islamic majority and face discrimination from Iraq's
predominantly Sunni Islamic ruling clique. In the north most are
members of the oppressed Kurdish nationality who rose up, as they have
done repeatedly in this century, to press for autonomy and national
self-determination.

Throughout March 1991 Saddam Hussein used the troops of the elite
Republican Guards - as well as helicopter gunships and heavy armor he
had held in reserve and refused to commit during the allied invasion -
to drown these rebellions in blood. Cities in southern Iraq such as
Basra, Najaf, and Karbala were savagely bombed and shelled. As a result
of this brutal suppression, tens of thousands of Shiite and other
Iraqis in the south, and more than two million Kurds and others in
northern Iraq, have been uprooted and turned into desperate refugees.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled into neighboring Iran and Turkey;
hundreds of thousands more are massed along their borders, living in
wretched conditions with little food, shelter, or medical care.
According to a United Nations report in late April, some 2,000 are
dying each day from the cold, disease, and malnutrition; other reports
from early May indicate there may already have been 20,000 to 30,000
deaths. The spread of contagious disease threatens to push these
numbers even higher. The U.S. and Western European imperialist rulers -
themselves responsible throughout this century for repeated sabotage of
efforts to establish a sovereign Kurdistan - are today cynically
exploiting Baghdad's repression of the Kurds to enhance their own rival
economic, political, and military interests in the Gulf region. They
are organizing to drive the Kurds back into Iraq, and turning emergency
relief for them over to the United Nations, with a piddling budget. Not
one of the imperialist governments in North America, Europe, Japan, New
Zealand, or Australia - all supporters of the imperialist slaughter -
has offered to throw open its borders to these or other refugees from
Baghdad's attacks and provide them with jobs and housing. Nor have the
Gorbachev regime or other U.S. "allies" in the war opened their borders
to the refugees. All of them merit some variant of the title they so
freely gave to Saddam Hussein - the "Butcher of Baghdad."...


Kurdish self-determination
The U.S. rulers' military "victory" put an international spotlight on
another unresolved fight for national self- determination in the region
- that of the Kurdish people. Prior to the Gulf war the Kurdish
struggle had largely been in retreat, having been dealt repeated
defeats over the past half century by the Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian, and
Syrian ruling classes, with the complicity of Washington, London,
Paris, and Moscow. The consequences of the Gulf War have now posed
Kurdish national self-determination more sharply than at any time since
the close of World War II and the years just after the 1958 revolution
that overthrew the monarchy in Iraq.

Some twenty million to thirty million Kurds are divided between
southeastern Turkey, northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, and
northwestern Iran, as well as a small region in the southern part of
the USSR. An independent Kurdish republic came into existence in
northern Iran after the establishment of a workers' and peasants'
government in neighboring Azerbaijan in December 1945.

Although the Kurdish republic was crushed by the Iranian monarchy a
year later, the Kurds continued their struggle during the decades that
followed. The U.S. rulers have alternately doled out aid with an
eyedropper to Kurdish nationalist groups, and then abruptly cut off
this backing, depending on Washington's shifting relations with regimes
in the area, especially Baghdad and Tehran.

The Kurdish people took advantage of the weakening of the Saddam
Hussein regime as a result of the war to press forward their struggle
once again, holding many villages and towns - including the major city
of Kirkuk - for a week or more in March [1991]. Baghdad used helicopter
gunships and heavy armor to crush the Kurdish rebellion with ruthless
brutality, causing two million or more Kurdish refugees to attempt to
cross the Turkish and Iranian borders.

As we discuss here today, the U.S. and European imperialist powers have
declared a temporary refugee "enclave" for the Kurds north of the
thirty-sixth parallel in northern Iraq near the Turkish border.
Washington is sending troops, Special Forces units, into northern Iraq
to function as what amounts to little more than a police force for
Saddam Hussein. Along with Turkish soldiers, the U.S. troops are
forcing the refugees out of Turkey and off nearby mountains into
ill-provisioned and barren transit camps. Washington's aim is to push
the Kurds back to the towns and villages from which they fled.

At best, this enclave will be the temporary equivalent of an Indian
reservation in the United States or one of the many blocked-off areas
near Israel's borders containing Palestinian refugee camps. The
imperialists share a common interest with the capitalist regimes in
Baghdad, Ankara, Damascus, and Tehran in ensuring that such a "haven"
for the Kurds is short-lived. All of them know that any
more-or-less-permanent Kurdish area can only breed aspirations for more
land that is justly theirs, as well as potential "intifadas"
[uprisings] among young generations of Kurdish fighters. Bush will have
nightmares about setting up a very large reservation, nightmares about
a modern- day Geronimo leading a new breakout.

This is another of the unresolved and uncontrollable social forces in
the Gulf that has been unleashed, rather than contained, by the results
of Washington's war against Iraq.

As we continue campaigning against imperialism and war today, we must
call not only for "All foreign troops out of Iraq!" but also "Open the
U.S. borders!" - to the Kurdish people and to all Iraqi and Kuwaiti
refugees fleeing the Baghdad regime and the al-Sabah monarchy.

For the ruling class in Turkey, which joined Washington in the war
against Iraq in hopes of winning trade favors and military aid and
hardware, the results so far - nearly one million refugees pounding at
its borders - are nothing short of a catastrophe. (The Turkish regime
is also suffering major economic blows from honoring the continuing
blockade, which shuts off Turkey's oil pipeline with Iraq and the
resulting flow of funds into the state treasury.) These events have
brought to greater world attention once again the Turkish rulers' own
suppression of the Kurdish people, until recently legally denied the
right even to speak their own language in Turkey - and they are still
denied the right to read, write, or be educated in Kurdish.

Above all, the Kurdish people have come to the center stage in world
politics as never before, not primarily as victims, but as courageous
and determined fighters for national rights.