Kurds

Turkey can kill the terrorist Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) with firmness toward it and kindness toward Kurds. This it seemed to be doing when the late Turgut Ozal was president and increased Kurdish cultural rights in 1991, and when the PKK called a cease-fire last March. Several things happened. The popularity of PKK went down; Mr. Ozal died; Turkish security forces brutally attacked PKK suspects in southeastern Turkey. The PKK eruption in June is the delayed result.What motivates Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader operating from exile in Syria-controlled Lebanon, is unclear.

BAGHDAD - The Abdullah Restaurant was the kind of place Iraqis took their families on special occasions. It was the kind of place high-ranking officials in the northern city of Kirkuk chose for power lunches, where they dug into plates on tables covered with white cloth as water burbled from a decorative fountain. Yesterday, as families celebrated the Eid al-Adha holiday and Arab and Kurdish leaders talked reconciliation in the crowded dining room, it was the kind of place a suicide bomber decided was the perfect target.

The Kurds of Iraq deserve to win provincial autonomy within that sovereign country. They deserve humanitarian aid from the United States in the form of food and medicine. And those fleeing Saddam Hussein's retribution deserve safe haven in Turkey, despite its own Kurdish problem.Humanitarian aid would not contradict President Bush's repeated determination not to intervene in Iraq's internal affairs. For that matter, the U.S. should also offer humanitarian aid to Baghdad. It is not in the U.S. interest to let people with whom we have no quarrel die of disease and starvation as the consequence of U.S. action against their despotic rulers.

BAGHDAD - Iraq's Cabinet asked for changes in a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement yesterday, once more casting doubt on the document's speedy passage with less than three months to go before the U.N. mandate authorizing the presence of American troops in Iraq expires. The first Cabinet session reviewing the document revealed what a divisive issue the security agreement has become. The country's Kurdish bloc is publicly backing the current accord, while Shiite Muslim and Sunni Arab allies of the United States remain wary of endorsing the draft, which had been described by both Americans and Iraqis as in its final form.

Put not your faith in princes.Niccolo Machiavelli THE KURDS of Iraq made a fundamental political error: They trusted George Bush's clumsy, imprecise rhetoric and their own hopes of liberation more than a cold assessment of their chances to overcome Saddam Hussein's fierce desire to survive in power. They are paying for that misjudgment dearly.But Bush should not escape all blame. Despite his protestations, the president indeed held out an unreasonable hope to the Kurds when he was rallying the world against Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

Washington -- IN DIPLOMATIC secrecy, the Bus administration is negotiating a deal with its coalition allies to pull the last protective troops out of Iraqi Kurdistan.Our policy is driven by the politics of extrication: how to get out of Iraq quietly, replacing a force of coalition troops with more than a company of U.N. eunuchs. The plan is to prevent Iraq's underdefeated dictator from merely waiting a decent interval before he breaks his promises of peaceful autonomy and resumes his genocide against the Kurdish people.

The United States Air Force, having demonstrated its military power, now has a chance to show off its humanitarian capabilities. Starting immediately, it should begin parachuting vast quantities of food, clothing, blankets, tents and medicine to the tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees pinned up against Iraq's border with Turkey. All our pilots need is the go-ahead from President Bush.Vigorous, massive relief action by the United States is something the American people owe Iraqi insurgents and refugees who heeded U.S. calls to rise up and overthrow the despicable Saddam Hussein.

GEORGE BUSH'S answer to genocide is to insist angrily that "our kids" -- his new term of juvenile vulnerability for what he used to call America's armed forces -- will not be "sucked" by sinister outside pressure into anybody else's civil war.That's the old straw man trick. Three weeks ago, when urged to order Saddam Hussein to freeze all movement of aircraft and armor -- which could have saved thousands of innocent lives without a single U.S. casualty -- Bush chose instead to go fishing.

London. -- The Kurds won't let us forget the Kurds. It's almost exactly a year ago that Saddam Hussein, defeated in war, a despot set on genocide, turned his guns on the Kurds. To forestall a massacre, the U.N. Security Council authorized an unprecedented military intervention in the internal affairs of a member country. Yet today Mr. Hussein's economic squeeze on the Kurds continues.And now it's Turkey's turn. A week ago the Kurds of eastern Turkey, close to the Iraqi border, clashed with security forces; at least 60 died.

CIZRE, Turkey -- Clashes in southeastern Turkey have left six soldiers and four Kurdish separatists dead, the Anatolia news agency reported yesterday.The soldiers were killed in an ambush near Cizre on Monday. Earlier in the day, the separatists were killed in a clash with an army patrol.The Turkish government's reluctance in early April to accept thousands of Iraqi Kurds fleeing President Saddam Hussein's repression has put further pressure on Turkey's already strained relationship with its own Kurdish minority.

BAGHDAD - The Iraqi parliament broke for summer vacation yesterday without passing a law that would have allowed provincial elections to be held this year, dealing a blow to hopes for bringing alienated Sunni and Shiite voices into the political process any time soon. The parliament, which tried during a four-day special session to pass the legislation under pressure from the United States and United Nations, could not resolve differences over Kirkuk, an oil-rich mixed area that the Kurds wish to annex to their semiautonomous northern region.

BAGHDAD - Three Iraqi soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing yesterday in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, where relations remained frayed among Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen after a suicide bombing and ethnic clashes earlier in the week. The bomb targeted a convoy of Iraqi army vehicles, killing three soldiers and wounding two others, the military said. Iraq's government warned local factions that it would not allow any party to decide unilaterally the region's future, in reaction to a threat by Kurdish provincial council members to declare Kirkuk a part of Iraqi Kurdistan.

SULAYMANIYA, Iraq -- Turkey unleashed air and artillery strikes against Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq yesterday, officials here said, five days after the Turks completed a major ground offensive in the mountainous border region. Turkey declared at the time that it had achieved its goal of denying the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a free hand to attack its territory from sanctuaries in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region. But U.S. and Turkish military analysts were skeptical that the operation would have more than a temporary effect.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraqi lawmakers approved a new flag yesterday, defusing a long-simmering dispute with the country's northern Kurds who had refused to fly the national banner because of its connection to Saddam Hussein. The temporary flag, a one-year stopgap until a more permanent design is selected, no longer will bear the three green stars representing the "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" motto of Hussein's Baath Party. The former leader's handwritten "Allahu akbar" (God is great) will be replaced with an old-style Arabic font.

BAGHDAD -- Several Shiite and Sunni political factions united yesterday to pressure the Kurds over control of oil and the future of the city of Kirkuk, which Kurdistan wishes to annex to its self-ruling region in the north. The budding front, which include one-time enemies such as Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's secular faction, says the country should have a strong central government. In contrast, the Kurds and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a major Shiite party, have championed a federal system that would give a limited role for the national government and greater powers to the regions.

BAGHDAD -- Kurdish lawmakers agreed yesterday to a six-month delay in a referendum on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk should join the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan or remain under Iraqi central government control. The delay had been expected because of problems in arranging logistics for the vote, which was supposed to have been held by the end of the year. A census to determine who would be eligible to vote, for instance, has not yet been done. But by putting off the issue, the lawmakers highlighted what has become a constant in Iraq: the inability of leaders to settle disputes whose resolution are considered key to ending ethnic and sectarian strife.

The camps that U.S. troops and allies are building on the Iraqi side of the border with Turkey may alleviate the starving and freezing of hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees on the mountainside. Those camps may alleviate the pressure of more Kurds on a nervous Turkey that suppresses the cultural freedom of its own Kurds for fear of losing the southwestern quarter of its territory. But the camps are only a Band-Aid, and could, like many a festering bandage elsewhere, become part of the problem.

BALOKA BRIDGE, Iraq -- Sweating from the weight of their tents and tea kettles, Kurds plodded down a mountain path yesterday as their return from Turkey grew into a human wave.British Marines in khaki uniforms handed the returning Kurds cups of sugar water as they took the last 90 steps across the bridge into Iraq after the long, taxing walk from a Turkish refugee camp.The refugees rested in the shade for a while, then climbed aboard American-leased dump trucks for their free ride back toward an allied-staffed "way station" seven miles farther inside the allied-occupied security zone of northern Iraq.

ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq have killed more than 150 rebels and hit more than 200 targets in recent days, the Turkish military said yesterday, countering Kurdish claims that only a handful of people were killed in the attacks. The air raids, on Dec. 16 and 22, were the first large-scale assaults on Iraqi territory since the Turkish parliament approved cross-border operations in mid-October against hideouts of the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK. According to a statement by the Turkish army, Turkish fighter planes hit 22 targets in the Metina, Zap, Avashin and Hakurk regions in Iraq on Dec. 16, after intelligence confirmed a rebel presence at the sites.

BASRA, Iraq -- During a low-key ceremony yesterday, Britain formally handed over control of security responsibility for Basra province to Iraqi authorities, marking a significant step toward Iraqi sovereignty. "This day is a big day in the history of Basra and the history of Iraq," Iraq's national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubai,e told a group of at least 100 dignitaries and other guests gathered in the arrival lounge at the Basra airport. "It is a huge test for the Basraris to be in charge ... to determine their own fate and to rebuild the city."