Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=02/19/03

TYPE=PRESS REVIEW

TITLE=U-S PRESS RE: KURDS

NUMBER=6-12830

BYLINE=ANDREW GUTHRIE

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

EDITOR=ASSIGNMENTS

TELEPHONE=619-3335

CONTENT=

INTRO: A former senior U-S diplomat, writing in The New York Times, suggests the Bush administration is not being open with Iraqi Kurds. And in Ankara, the price for cooperation with the United States in a war with Iraq is going up. Those are among stories of interest to the Kurdish people appearing in the American press at Midweek. Here is a synopsis.

TEXT: On the OP-ED (Opinion-Editorial) page of the The New York Times, Peter W. Galbraith, a former U-S Ambassador to Croatia, says in part:

VOICE: As the Bush administration struggles to induce Turkey to support a war with Iraq, our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq are realizing that once again America is about to double-cross them.

Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, went to Ankara this month and told top Kurdish leaders to accept a large deployment of Turkish troops - - supposedly for humanitarian relief - - to enter northern Iraq after any American invasion. He also told the Kurds . they would have to give up plans for self-government, adding that hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes by Saddam Hussein would not be able to return to them.

For the Kurds, this brought bitter memories. They blame Henry Kissinger for encouraging them to rebel in the early 1970s and then acquiescing quietly as the Shah of Iran made a deal with Iraq and stopped funneling American aid to them. . After the Persian Gulf war, the first President Bush called on the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. When the Kurds tried to do just that, the American military let the Iraqis send out helicopter gunships to annihilate them. Mr. Bush partly salvaged his standing with the Kurds a month later when he cleared Iraqi forces from the region . enabling the creation of the first Kurdish-governed territory in modern history."

TEXT: Ambassador Galbraith goes on to point out that as the Americans sought greater Turkish cooperation for the war, "Turkey . demanded an ironclad assurance that there will not be a separate Kurdish state." He says the Kurds did their best to meet Turkish and American concerns by promising not to seek independence, and settling only for a self-governing province.

But he concludes, despite dramatic Kurdish progress at forming ".a real state within a state." in Northern Iraq, America has "sided with Turkey" in this dispute.

Wednesday's Washington Post reports in its front page that Turkey is now demanding that Washington "significantly enhance a multibillion-dollar aid package before it receives new U-S troops."

The Post says the Turkish demand threatens ".to scramble the Bush administration's plans to use Turkey to open a northern front against Iraq."

The Post goes on to report the delay in Turkish approval . has left four U-S ships carrying tanks and other heavy equipment for the Army's 4th Infantry Division stranded of the Turkish coast.

Separately, the Post, reporting from the Iraqi-Kurdish-administered zone town of Gobtappa, describes the personal anguish and wish for revenge of Qadir Ismail Ali who lost all of his family, including wife and children, to a poison gas attack from the Iraqi air force.

The thrust of the article says that many Kurdish men in the North are motivated to revenge the killing of family members and others close to them by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

The Post reports it was "part of Operation Anfal, mounted to punish Kurdish militiamen [peshmerga] and their families for rising up in alliance with the Iranian enemy of the time. The Post reports that Kurds say as many as 180-thousand people in 60 villages [in Northern Iraq] were killed in the operation.

[However] The appetite for more fighting against Baghdad is not unanimous, even among the Kurds who have suffered from Hussein's rule. In Halabja, the town about [90 kilometers] southeast of here [Gubtappa] that [militia commander Burham] Sofi's forces defend, interviews with survivors of Hussein's most infamous chemical attack revealed an avid interest in his demise, but no great hunger for fresh sacrifice."

That concludes this review of the U-S press in articles of special interest to Kurdish listeners.

NEB/ANG/MAR