Democracy for the Kurds

Tom Gray tgray at igc.apc.org
Mon Apr 15 00:53:57 BST 1991


[reprinted without permission]

[from the New York _Times_, April 14, 1991, p. E19]

VICTORY, ELATION; REFUGEES, DESPAIR
By Danielle Mitterrand

PARIS -- While in Washington on Feb. 28 -- only a month and a half
ago -- we heard the good news: the Persian Gulf War was over.  And we
started dreaming about the future.

I say "we" because I was gathered with my Kurdish friends and defending
their cause at a meeting on Capitol Hill jointly sponsored by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Congressional Human Rights
Foundation.

It was the third time that I spoke in the U.S. on the tragedy of the
Kurdish people -- once in New York City at an event sponsored by the
Elie Wiesel Foundation and twice on Capitol Hill.

On Feb. 28, at the end of the war waged for the rule of law in the
Persian Gulf, we were full of hope.

Today, I cannot hide my disappointment.  In so short a time, we have
descended from elation, from the hope of seeing the victory of the rule
of law, to deep feelings of bitterness.  We are brought to despair by
witnessing, powerless, the exodus of a whole population -- women,
children, men, old people -- fleeing again from massacres and the
destruction of their towns and villages.

When we learned about America's vastly expanded relief effort to rescue
them, announced yesterday, we felt somewhat heartened.  The massive
program being mounted by the U.S. military to feed hundreds of thousands
of people a day and to provide temporary settlements in northern Iraq
is good news.

Yet, while that's fine for the time being, we can only ask ourselves
what will happen to the Kurds as time passes.  Will they be permitted to
return to their homes and to live there safely, and how soon?

Imagine the situation today: perhaps more than 500,000 Iraqi Kurds
clinging to harsh mountain slopes on the border of Turkey and Iraq, far
from their villages and land -- and more than a million in the vicinity
of the Iran-Iraq border.

I well remember what I saw two and one-half years ago, after the
Halabja massacre in Iraq, when I visited the Iraqi Kurds' refugee camps
in Turkey near Mardin, Dyarbarkir and Mus.  I saw the tragic
circumstances in which the Kurds found themselves -- parked behind
barbed wire, under armed military guard and in a country where it was
forbidden to speak Kurdish and to claim Kurdish identity and culture.

My ever-growing interest in the Kurdish people -- some call it an
obsession -- was kindled the day in 1983 I received a letter from a
young Kurdish woman whose husband, the mayor of their town in Turkey,
was on trial for having allowed Kurdish to be spoken in city hall.

With the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, we were
able to send a lawyer and an observer to the trial; we hoped their
presence would awaken people's consciences.  The mayor was given a
35-year prison sentence -- a terrible decision.

And yet this was quite an achievement.  He was not condemned to death,
as he might have been.  But he is still in jail.

Today, thanks to a U.N. Security Council resolution, the Iraqis' right
to receive humanitarian aid has at last been internationally recognized
-- and is now being implemented on a large scale.  One can therefore
say that, in human rights matters, interference in what is known as the
internal affairs of a state should now not only be a right but also a
duty -- especially when it is a matter of not leaving the weakest to
face the strongest without doing anything.

Today, the priority need to bring the Iraqi Kurds emergency
humanitarian aid is being more fully met.  But, beyond that, as free
men and women we have an obligation to do our utmost to enable them to
return to their land, their villages, their homes, their cattle.  They
must be able to return to a life of honorable citizens in their own
country, which they want to be democratic and prosperous.

When I speak of democracy, I have in mind rights that are inseparable
-- that is (in addition to a state's lawful rights) human rights,
economic rights and cultural rights.

Such an indivisibility of law for everyone would help this fragmented
world move toward the broad goals that the war in the Persian Gulf
was fought to realize.

-----------
Danielle Mitterrand is president of France Liberte's, an international
human rights organization.


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