Two days in Iraq ...

   

           

 By Andre Stemmet

Meintjeskop Ditaba, No 1/1998

It was all slightly unreal. We were relaxing and drinking beer in a guest house that used to be the exclusive hangout of Saddam Hussein's senior army officers in the town of Salahdin, when we heard gunshots, occasionally backed up by the sound of mortars. The guest house, perched on a hill overlooking the great Mesopotamian plain, gave us a grandstand view of a breakdown the cease-fire between the two rival Kurdish groups that were then, and are still today, controlling North Iraq.

Beer in hand we, that is myself, a colleague from the British Embassy in Ankara and a British Army Intelligence officer, were watching the exchange of fire. tracer bullets were illuminating the night and soon the fields were on fire. It appeared that no casualties were sustained, and fighting died down after a quarter of an hour. However, the feeling that one was watching a movie or a fireworks display, rather than shots fired in anger, remained. The reality of a low-scale civil war only dawned again the next day.

A senior official of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) whose guests we were, then invited us to dinner, a lavish affair in the fashion of Middle Eastern hospitality. Over dinner, lamb stew washed down with Efese Pilsen (a Turkish beer which found its way to Salahdin despite United Nations sanctions - the Iraqi Islamists are clearly not influential in the KDP), we discussed the situation in Iraq.

After the allied forces invaded in 1991 in retribution for the invasion by that country of Kuwait, the Kurds who are predominant in Northern Iraq rebelled against Saddam Hussein's regime.

While this move was tacitly supported by the West as a way in which Saddam Hussein's authority could be undermined a counter- attack on the north by Saddam's forces and a flight of thousands of displaced Kurds to Turkey generated public opinion to such an extent that the US, UK and France had to take action. Operation Provide Comfort was announced - an air umbrella by a multi-national air component stationed in southern Turkey would protect the enclave against Saddam's forces by enforcing a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq. These Western powers also decided to implement a democratic structure of government in the enclave, to be an example for the whole of Iraq to follow after the hoped-for downfall of predominantly KDP and its main rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), took their seats in a parliament building in Erbil.

The Kurds always had a separate identity fro the other peoples of the Middle East. They trace their roots back to the Medes of Biblical times and Kurdish is a language quite distinct from Arabic, rooted in the Indo-European languages. While strong Kurdish states existed in the Middle Ages, the Kurds live today in the mountainous areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, the KDP and PUK, based in the mountains of the North, have since the sixties waged an insurgency war against the government in Baghdad. However, the two sides are being led and supported by different Kurdish tribes. Tribal and leadership differences frequently led to clashes between the two sides.

This history of conflict between the KDP and PUK and an oversupply of arms ended the democratic experiment in Northern Iraq before if properly began. The KDP and PUK fell out over mainly the control of border posts with Turkey and Syria (as trade with Iraq, including the northern enclave, had been prohibited by United Nations sanctions, (read smuggling posts) Money was thicker than blood. A civil war between the two groups broke out, the PUK chased the KDP out of Erbil, and the division of Iraq was followed by that of Northern Iraq, the KDP controlling the northern and the PUK the southern part. The KDP made its headquarters in Salahdin, a nice hillside town with a view of the Mesopotamian Plain and Erbil, the PUK capital.

During dinner a senior KDP official explained that the fight we just witnessed, was in contravention of a cease-fire agreement between the two sides, not achieved by Western peace brokering and diplomacy, but by pragmatism, it was harvest time and fighting interfered with the gathering of the harvest. The people must eat and winter in the mountains is long and cold.

Despite the official cease-fire, broad daylight the next day revealed that everyone was on a war footing. Salahdin swarmed with KDP pershmergas (fighters) in traditional Kurdi.sh garb (headdress and wide pants}, men with large moustaches and dark eyes, with bandoleers across their bodies and armed with AK( rifles and hand grenades, a generation of people who grew up in the mountains, always fighting the Baghdad government and sometimes, like now, their own people.

While the soldier" were looking fighting fit,

the civilian population was the worse for wear.

Hospitah, once well stocked with the be3t

medical supplies petro-dollars could buy, were

now in a dismal condition. The3e showpieces

of Japanese engineering were falling apart; the

medical equipment standing idle due to a lack

of spare parts. The manager of a hospital

complained that 0.""orthern Iraq was suffering

from a double boycott, the C0: sanctions

against Iraq and Bagdad's O~TI sar;dions

against the :\ orth. Human suffering looked

me in the eye, but thi" time not from qui.:k

Cl\K report or the pages of Newsweek.

FortWlately some good Samaritaniam were

trying to help, two of whom, Julian and penny

Solomon, hail from Cape Town. Julian and

Perry worked for a non-governmental

organisation involved in the provision of

hOU3ing and health care, based in Erbili.

They came to fetch me in Salahdin and took

me across the "border" into PUK land. The

"border POBt" can rather be described as a

machine gWl post, a heavy calibre was poking

menacingly from behind sandbags. A shot up

Land Rover at the side of the road was silent

witness to the fact that, as elsewhere in the

world, one should preferably be nice to border

official:;.

Erbil is said to be to be the place of longest

continued human habitation, 9000 years. (I

have heard the same claim in Jericho). Today

it is a typical arid, dusty Middle Ea.3tern city.

The region's troubles did not dampen the

Middle eastern entrepreneurial spirit - in the

bazaar I was offered coffee and Kurdish kilims,

the coffee for free and the kilim.s at irresistible

pnces.

It is aLa a city carrying the scars of war. The

Parliament building was badly shot up during

the KDP-PUK cla3hes. Everywhere on the

streets were wrecked vehicles and pershmergas

- the PUK variety being indistingui3hable in

appearance from their KDP counterparts up

in the hills.

That night we had dinner at the home of a

;\lini3ter of the PUK administration. ~lore

and plenty meat (I was starting to miss my

pasta diet). The Minister, urbane and dressed

in a dark suit, arrived in a Mercedes, but

nunour had it that he was the owner of the

only a=oured var in 0.""orthern Iraq

("liberated" from Saddam's forces) and enjoyed

nothing more than jumping out of the suit

and Mercedes and into a pershmerga tmifo=

and the a=oured car in order to take the

fight to the enemy.

Our dinner discussion centred around the

peaceful election and transfer of power in

South Africa a few months before, and the

example it sets [or the world.

The next day it wail time for the long journey

back through the mountains to the Turkish

border, in a Toyota Landcruiser ("liberated"

from Kuwait), escorted by two more

Landcruisers and armed pershmergas for

securitv reasons,

Reflecting on the experiences of the previous

days, I realised that fighting was in these

men's blCXJd. T riballoyalties run deepe~ than

any other consideration. War and conflict,

together with the human suffering, have

become part of everyday life. The war in

~orthern Iraq Was just another conflict in this

region that is prone to instability.

The situation on the ground was light years

away from the sanitised reports in the Turkish

Daily );ews that I could read in the comfort of

my office in Ankara, and from the news

conferences by visiting US Under-secretaries

of '5 tate for ~ ear Eastern Affairs in the

Ankara Hilton. Conflicts in the Middle East

appear to' have their own logic, a logic that

cannot easily be reduced into boxes and files,

and political reports for the Desk.

I realised that we diplomats, trying to

understand the Middle East are probably more

often that not just scratching the surface in

our efforts to make sense of events in that

fascinating region. How lucky we in Foreign

Affairs are to be able to get the opportunity

tCXJ, if then only scratch the surface, of a part

of the world that is as old as time itself.