Global Policy Forum

By Timothy Garton Ash

Here's a riddle with an explosive core: there's a hardy, mainly Islamic people, who have long been oppressed by a different ethnic group running a repressive state. They've been tortured, shelled, bombed, driven out of their homes; some of these oppressive state actions qualify as attempted genocide. A fighting people with a long tradition of mountain banditry, they've responded by armed uprising and guerrilla war; some of the means they have employed would qualify as terrorism. Who are they, and what are we doing about them?

Answer 1. They are the Albanians in Kosovo. We intervene militarily against their oppressor. American special forces work first covertly and then overtly with the Kosovo Liberation Army. We secure them effective independence from Serbia, under an international protectorate. As a result, one day there will either be a little state called Kosova (the Albanian spelling) or a greater Albania.

Answer 2. They are the Kurds in Turkey. We wring our hands, wave our dollars or euros, and tell Turkey that since it's a member of Nato and very much wants to be a member of the European Union, it should please, please, in the name of God, Allah and the World Bank, treat its large Kurdish minority a little better. After all, Turkey thinks it's part of Europe, doesn't it?

Answer 3. They are the Kurds in Iraq. We intervene militarily against their oppressor. American special forces work first covertly and now overtly with the Kurdish liberation armies which over the last decade have rallied under the aerial protection of British and American planes patrolling the "no-fly zone". Since Turkey has refused to allow US troops to move across its territory to open a northern front against Saddam in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Anglo-American coalition may have to depend more on these Kurdish forces. But Turkey is threatening to send (or, perhaps, already has sent) its own special forces into Iraqi Kurdistan. This is ostensibly to fend off a potential flood of refugees into Turkey, but is mainly to deter the Kurds of Turkey from imagining that they can follow the example of their brothers and sisters across the border.

All three answers are correct.

So, what is to be done for the Kurds? Bush and Blair in Camp David today, divided EU-rope, the UN, "the west" (if it still exists), and "the international community" (whatever that is now), will all pretend that we have an answer. Any reader of this column could write the spokesperson's brief: "minority rights", "internal autonomy but territorial integrity of Iraq", "federal structures", etc. But let me whisper this truth in your ear: we don't have an answer. We're flummoxed and floundering, as so often when faced with the issue of self-determination.

The Kurdish question raises a cardinal dilemma for the Anglo-Saxon liberal imperialism on which we have so curiously re-embarked at the beginning of the 21st century. When London and Washington were briefly making the case for the Iraq war as a "humanitarian intervention", it was the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja that they always cited, and the killing of an estimated 100,000 Kurds by Saddam's men. Though such comparisons are always odious, the Kurds have suffered even more terribly than the Kosovans. The moral case is also strong for two other reasons. The Bush (senior) administration encouraged the Kurds to rise against Saddam in 1991, and then let him massacre them with the helicopter gunships that Washington let him keep. Britain has its own special responsibility, since the first people to bomb the Kurds were us, when they revolted against the Iraq we created after the first world war. (Since Tony Blair has apologised for the potato famine in Ireland, will he be apologising for this?)

Watching the television footage from Iraqi Kurdistan, I am irresistibly reminded of Kosovo - tough, gnarled mountain people, dusty roads, village minarets, peasant women in Muslim headscarves, a still largely traditional, rural society, with extended families and clan leaders. The Kurds are not so very different from the Kosovans, after all, nor so very far away. Who would dare claim they should be treated differently because one group is in Europe and the other is not? In both cases, we are still wrestling, nearly a century later, with the legacy of the Ottoman empire.

The moral reservations are also familiar from Kosovo: among our new-found "freedom fighters" are unscrupulous brigands, heavily implicated in organised crime and no strangers to the use of terror. Uncomfortable allies in a "war against terrorism". The political reservations are familiar too: because these people live in several neighbouring countries as well, giving them autonomy here would be destabilising there. Which it was, and will be. Our support for the Kosovo Liberation Army mightily encouraged the Albanian insurgency in neighbouring Macedonia. As a result, we're still there to keep a fragile peace.

Turkey's fears are not unfounded. If I were a Kurdish separatist in south-eastern Turkey, I would be greatly encouraged by seeing US marine General Henry Osman hitching up with my brothers-in-arms across the frontier in Iraq. That's not the only potential knock-on effect. Turkey is the biggest headache, but the Kurds also live in Iran, Syria and Armenia. At an estimated 20 to 25 million they are, it is claimed, the largest stateless nation on earth.

If you think it's a little academic to ponder the fate of stateless nations while the war still rages around Baghdad, think again. The Kurdish question is the largest unexploded bomb in all Iraq. And its future will also be determined in the heat of battle over the next few days and weeks. If the Kurdish forces contribute significantly to the American victory on the northern front, while America's traditional ally Turkey refuses to help, and even actively hinders it by a cross-border incursion, the balance of American opinion will swing in their favour, as it did in Kosovo. Anyway, in one of the stranger freaks of international affairs, the Kurds in the north of Iraq have been enjoying far-reaching, de facto autonomy under our "no-fly zone" for a decade already. Hard to imagine that we will now abandon them to their fate.

So clever specialists are already designing schemes for a "federacy", involving autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan and individual rights for Kurds throughout Iraq. But Iraqi Kurdistan in what borders? With or without the Kirkuk oilfields? How can you guarantee such individual rights for Kurds in the other parts of a chaotic, occupied country? Or for Iraqi Arabs in Kurdistan? (Remember that British soldiers ended up guarding individual Serb grannies in Kosovo.)

If such delicate constitutional arrangements still don't avert inter-ethnic conflict in developed European countries like Spain (where Catalonia is just pressing for an enhanced autonomy that comes remarkably close to independence), what chance have they here? What would it mean for the democratic self-determination of all Iraq if this bit of radical devolution were immediately dictated by the occupying power? What if the majority of all Iraqi voters don't accept what the majority of Iraqi Kurds obviously want?

Let's face it: when this bleedin' war is over, we'll be back in 1918, confronting many of the same questions in the same places that our grandparents wrestled with, from the Balkans to the Middle East. And we still don't have answers. Sometimes I think we should reinvent the Ottoman empire.

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