Kurds brace for Turks

The Kurds - roughly 25 million stateless people spread mainly across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey - have provoked anxiety and repression from these states since the breakup of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century.

But the 1991 imposition of a "no-fly zone" in the northern part of the country and the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and officials have given them a space in which to fashion a quasi-state that sometimes seems like a way station on the road to independence.

Not at all, say Iraqi Kurds, insisting that while they want to preserve their autonomy in a new Iraq, preferably through a federal system of governance, they have no designs on statehood. Ms. Sideek, the development minister, argues that "we have been acting as Iraqis for the past 12 years," a period in which Iraqi Kurds might have made a decisive move toward independence. "I run this ministry according to Iraqi laws."

Even so, some Kurds do reveal more expansive political ambitions, albeit obliquely. "As a nation, we would like to have our own state," says Bapier Sleman, the head of a small political party based in Arbil called the Kurdistan Persecuted Peasants Movement. "But looking at the situation right now - regionally and internationally - the federal solution is the best for this stage."

Presumably it is this sort of comment that fuels Turkey's desire to hobble Kurdish autonomy. Turkey has brutally repressed a rebellion by its own population of Kurds - some 15 million people, or 20 percent of Turkey's population - and its officials may fear that a vibrant, largely self-governed Kurdish region in Iraq will inspire renewed nationalism among Turkish Kurds.

The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which runs the eastern portion of the Kurdish haven in northern Iraq, does not seem quite so strenuous in its anti-Turkish rhetoric. PUK leader Jalal Talabani indicated on Feb. 15 that he would limit himself to verbal criticism of Turkish and US plans for the invasion and its aftermath. "We cannot fight Turkey, we cannot fight the United States of America, but we will say our words," he told reporters.

As Mr. Talabani's comments suggest, Kurds recognize that they can do little militarily against Turkey, a NATO power whose forces are vastly superior to those of the Kurds. That is why some Kurds are considering nonviolent resistance against a Turkish presence.

As Sideek observes, "We cannot stop Turkey with guns; we don't have the capacity. The only way we can stop them is by using our bodies and we will do it if necessary."

KDP official Zebari argues that the Kurds do have some leverage with the US, more than any other group in the Iraqi opposition. "The only people who are on the ground are the two main Kurdish political parties," says Zebari, drawing a distinction between the KDP and PUK, and a wide variety of exiled groups and parties who have fought the Iraqi regime mainly from abroad.

The Kurds have succeeded, with crucial help from the US, in building two parallel but relatively democratic administrations in northern Iraq.

"Nobody can bypass us, nobody can ignore us in the long-term," Zebari says.

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