While listening to Kurdish singing

[kurds at gn.apc.org]

This conference was originally started to give you background
information about the Kurdish people, land, history, culture and
present situation.  Sadly, it has been dominated by the tragedy
that followed the Gulf War.  For the last month now, we have been
working round the clock on our Kurdish Disaster Fund Appeal.
(Which is now at around 400,000 pounds sterling - we're aiming
for a million.)   Our Appeal began with no funding - indeed, no funds -
all the money we had raised earlier in the year had gone to help
children who were cold and hungry in the Turkish refugee camps
that had been established after the 1988 chemical attacks on
Kurdish villages.  We had to borrow the money to run the first
advertisement - so we've come a long way.  But it feels like being
halfway up a steep and dangerous mountain.  Looking back the way
you came, you are amazed you made it - but then you look upwards
and see that the steepest, most dangerous part is still to come.

I did not actually begin this topic to tell you all this, but to
make a plea for more discussion on this conference.

What are your views on what should happen in Iraqi Kurdistan or, as
it is known to most Kurds, to Kurdistan (Iraq sector)?  Do you
think the Kurdish people will ever achieve true self-determination
and, if so, how do you think such a thing will ever come about?

Indeed, in these days of world federalism and European communities,
is the nationalism of a dispossessed people a backward looking
stance?  Think globally, act locally - the rallying cry of the Greens -
could this hold a clue to the future of our region?

What do you think of some of the ideas put forward in earlier items
on the conference?  What, in the light of EUNOMIA's comments, should
one make of the Libyan remarks about 'sacred' sovereignty?  And vice
versa?

Someone thought there was common cause between the Kurds and the Jews.
Might it not be argued that there is at least as much common cause
between the Kurds and the Palestinians?  And does not herein lie another
poignant irony?

Sooner or later the full extent of Western support for Saddam Hussein
in the years before his Kuwait adventure will come out into the open.
When it does, will anyone learn anything?  Isn't it incredible that
after Auschwitz, German firms could still supply chemicals to Saddam,
knowing full well that he was probably turning them into weapons?

Has anyone yet realised that the first use of chemical weapons against
Kurdish civilians was not by Iraqi forces but by Britian's Royal Air
Force, back in the bad old days after the First World War?  No-one has
told the British public this.

Isn't it at least arguable that if western governments had behaved -
as Antennae puts it - 'morally' when Saddam was gassing Kurds, and had
taken strong measures to stop him, that he would never have invaded
Kuwait in the first place?

In which case doesn't it become incumbent on the peace movement to
make its main concern PREVENTATIVE protest action, rather than banner
waving when it's too late?  In other words, if you want peace, fight
for human rights.  Do it now.  Tomorrow is always too late.

If it is too late, as it was with Saddam, what is the 'moral' stance
on military action?  Is war always totally and utterly wrong?  Can
it be justified to free a people that is being unjustly oppressed and
wickedly tortured?  I can't remember the exact quotation, but didn't
Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest pacifist ever, himself say that if it
came to a choice between cowardice and violence, he would choose
violence?  (He did, by tomorrow I'll have checked the reference.)

And is it not the rankest moral cowardice to stand by when a people is
being slaughtered, wringing your hands and calling upon higher moral
principles to justify your actions?

These thoughts are like huge rocks, they prop each other up and cannot
be shifted.  Yet wouldn't it be wonderful if, somehow, there was a way
for a people to be free, without violence, without hatred, without tears?

Indra