WE MUST ACT ON KURDS - HERBFIETH

[harryvm at peg.pegasus.oz.au]

The Kurds : Towards a Political Solution

The Kurds of Iraq need more than humanitarian help, 
desperately urgent as that is. They need a breakthrough on 
political formulas. They need what most of their leaders 
have sought in recent years, genuine autonomy within Iraq, 
guaranteed by UN presences and enshrined in international 
law. 

The massive exodus of Kurds from Iraq since late March has 
highlighted a problem to which the UN High Commission for 
Refugees has persistently called attention. Refugee 
authorities have stressed for years that it is unrealistic 
for most of the world's 18 million or so refugees to hope 
for permanent resettlement either in the countries to which 
they have fled or in faraway places like Australia, Canada, 
the US or Western Europe. 

Their best hope, these authorities contend, lies in 
voluntary repatriation to the countries they left, which 
requires the unmaking of the processes of ethnic, political 
and other repression which caused them to flee. 

Refugee specialists have taken a similar view. The UN, they 
argue, must stop treating refugee problems by bandaid 
methods which are obviously inadequate to the scale of the 
problem. It must begin to tackle refugee problems with a 
concern for "root causes" and seek "durable solutions". 

Frustrated claims to self-determination 

What is needed is a breakthrough in the capacity of the UN 
system to deal with frustrated claims to self-determination. 
It is thwarted claims of this kind which lead people to join 
what they see as patriotic movements of resistance to 
oppression, to cross borders en masse when their resistance 
is suppressed, and then to languish in refugee camps for 
years and decades while the rest of the world forgets them. 

Why then have the world's major powers been reluctant to 
listen, either to the Kurdish leaders or to the UN High 
Commissioner for Refugees? Basically, it seems, for reasons 
of oldthink, because few of them see any way of conceding 
self-determination to the Kurds of Iraq without breaking up 
Iraq. 

President Bush and the other main leaders of the concert of 
powers are understandably frightened of Iraq's 
disintegration. 

They are committed to the present system of borders world-
wide because they are worried that a change in one multi-
ethnic state would set off falling dominoes in many others, 
including some already very unstable ones like the USSR and 
Yugoslavia. 

No need to break up Iraq

But the leaders of the Iraqi Kurds, or the great majority of 
them, have not been asking for the breakup of Iraq. All the 
major Kurdish parties are committed to a federal Iraq, as 
are the other major opposition groups, the Shiite parties, 
the Sunni Arab ones and the Communists. All of these are 
members of the Democratic Opposition Front of Iraq which 
wants the Saddam Hussein regime replaced by a federal state. 


A second generation of claims to self-determination 

The UN system was rather successful in mediating claims to 
self-determination with regard to the decolonization of 
Asian, African and Pacific colonies in the decades after 
1945. But it has been far less adequate to the task of 
processing the more recent claims to self-determination, 
especially those which have nothing to do with the colonies 
of Western European states. 

It was war rather than UN conflict resolution which settled 
the claims of the would-be secessionist Biafrans against 
Nigeria in 1967-70. And war was a major part of the process 
by which the Bengali nationalists of the province of East 
Pakistan created the state of Bangladesh in 1971. 

The second generation of claims to self-determination, of 
which Biafra and Bangladesh were early representatives, has 
grown powerfully in the last 5-10 years, and now constitutes 
a major world order problem. Witness the increasingly 
clamorous demands of the Lithuanians, Latvians and 
Estonians, of the Georgians and other Soviet peoples, of the 
Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia, the Quebecois in Canada, 
the Eritreans, Tibetans and Kashmiris And, most immediately, 
the Kurds. 

UN machinery and principles 

Happily the UN system is now somewhat better prepared to 
deal with these challenges, at least less unprepared than is 
often thought. It has developed a lot of relevant capacities 
since the days of Biafra and Bangladesh, particularly as a 
result of its Human Rights Commission and various sub-
committees of that body. And the three years before the Gulf 
War saw a major expansion in its conflict resolving and 
peace-keeping activities. 

One UN body that which has been coming to grips with the new 
generation of self-determination claims is the Working Group 
on Indigenous Populations. Another is the body drafting the 
Convention on Genocide. 

Moreover the General Assembly has established principles, 
first developed in the period of decolonization, which are 
highly relevant to the present generation of self-
determination claims. One particularly useful formulation is 
a 1960 resolution of the General Assembly which sets out 
three ways by which non-self-governing territories can 
become self-governing : independence, integration with an 
existing state and the apparently flexible but as yet 
largely unexplored range of options termed "free 
association". 

What is needed now 

The Kurds of Iraq are asking for a redefinition of their 
relationship with Iraq. Theoretically granted autonomy in 
1970, they are demanding that Iraq become a federal state to 
give them the genuine autonomy they see as necessary for 
their security and self-management. They are asking that the 
UN should facilitate  negotiations towards this end, and 
that it should create machinery to give their outcome 
recognition in international law. 

Far-sighted people in states and non-government 
organizations everywhere should therefore be pressing the UN 
to a major initiative of political reconstruction. 

Such an initiative would not only help the Kurds and other 
repressed groups in Iraq like the Shiites.  It would also 
help the other "peoples of the second generation", peoples 
which have been struggling against what they see as 
oppression by outsiders. It would also help the governments 
of a number of multi-ethnic states, offering them a way to 
get off the treadmill of repression, resistance and more 
repression, enabling them to stop wasting resources in 
fruitless efforts to maintain an untenable status quo. 

The UN clearly needs to fashion new procedures by which 
self-determination claims of the second generation variety 
can be evaluated. And it would not be surprising if those 
procedures generated some entirely new outcomes, not only 
the old ones of independent statehood, membership of a 
federal or confederal unit, "special regions" and "special 
autonomous territories", but also new forms of "free 
association" for which there are currently no precedents. 
Those could well involve new types of international 
guarantees and new types of UN presence. 

Is it too much to hope that the Kurds' tragedy  will force 
the UN to act innovatively in ways which help not only the 
Kurds but also the other repressed peoples of the second 
generation? 

It may not be, for what the Kurds are up against is not much 
more than a set of mental blocks. Most government leaders 
are cautious when there is talk of expanding the role of the 
UN and extending the scope of international law. Many of 
them, especially those of multi-ethnic states, are worried 
about what they see as threats to the domestic jurisdiction 
of states. 

But most of these leaders are also aware that the 
interdependence of states is here to stay and to grow, that 
global problems need global answers, and specifically that 
something must be done to prevent the refugee problem from 
getting further out of control. 

Most immediately, they are aware that millions all over the 
world are actively sympathetic to the Kurds, and puzzled 
that the coalition of powers which came to the aid of Kuwait 
could avert its eyes from the terrorization of the Kurds and 
Shiites of Iraq by the same Saddam regime. 

        * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

This article is by Herb Feith and Alan Smith of the Politics 
Department of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. 
Herb Feith is an Associate in this Department. He was a 
Reader in it till 1990. Alan Smith is completing a doctoral 
dissertation on self-determination. 

A 740-word abridgement of this article (with an Australian 
focus) was published in the Sunday Age (Melbourne) of 14 
April under the title of "UN must answer the many calls for 
a homeland". 

Correspondence to:

Herb Feith
40 Kyarra Rd.
Glen Iris,
Victoria, Australia, 3146

phone and fax 613-885-5422

(ring first to send fax)


Melbourne 14 April 1991