DownloadMay 11, 2009 issue
CPT won't abandon Kurds
By Kathleen Kern Christian Peacemaker TeamsPage:
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The Kurds, like other ethnic minorities in modern nation-states, are usually noticed only when tragedy befalls them, and often not even then.
Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.
Some may remember the late 1980s Anfal campaign when Saddam Hussein killed thousands of Kurdish civilians through ground offensives, aerial bombing, destruction of villages, deportations, mass executions and chemical warfare.
The West decried these actions, using the Kurds as emblems of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, but remained quiet about less thorough human rights abuses Turkey, Syria and Iran inflicted on their Kurdish populations.
Since 1992, when the United States established a “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, has been functioning as an autonomous state. Most Kurds want that region to become the nation of Kurdistan.
I knew that Turkey, along with Iran and Syria and the rest of Iraq, vehemently opposed this outcome. I knew that Turkey and Iran had been bombing the Kurdish border areas in their battle against the secessionist Kurdish Workers Party and Free Life in Kurdistan Party guerillas, and that the United States had been providing Turkey with military intelligence.
I did not know, until members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq began visiting border villages, that Turkey has military bases inside Iraq. When villagers leave their Internally Displaced Persons camps during the day to tend their crops, orchards and livestock, the Turks shell the villages as soon as they see people in their fields. Some watchers have speculated that Turkey and Iran intend to destabilize the KRG region, to help quash the nationalist aspirations of Turkish and Iranian Kurds.
When Christian Peacemaker Teams moved to the northern region of Iraq, Iraq team members thought their work would be an extension of what they had done in the south.
Instead, they found that the oppression facing the Kurds — from their own Kurdish Regional Government, from countries surrounding the Kurdish region, and from past traumas — needed to be addressed in different ways.
Most recently, the team has been documenting damage that Turkish and Iranian attacks have done to Kurdish villages, and the plight of the people in the camps for the displaced. Once they have finished documenting, they plan to accompany some Kurdish refugees back to their villages.
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