Posted on 03/13/2003 8:51:24 AM PST by a_Turk
(KRT) - This muddy, fear-soaked village in northern Iraq has a cautionary tale to offer the United States - and especially the American generals planning to oust Saddam Hussein.
Like hundreds of other farming communities under the thumb of Saddam in northern Iraq, tiny Pirbub was once majority Kurdish. But under a Stalinesque forced migration program, Iraqi troops chased the Kurds into an adjacent autonomous Kurdish zone and replaced them with thousands of loyalist Iraqi Arab families.
Today, a rare unsupervised visit to the government-controlled area revealed that this deeply loathed Iraqi version of "ethnic cleansing" is a humanitarian time bomb.
Villagers say that thousands of southern colonizers who have streamed into oil-rich northern Iraq under Saddam's infamous "Arabization" campaign appear to be stripping their homes of everything but mattresses, fearful of a U.S. invasion from neighboring Turkey to the north.
But they cannot run away yet. Baghdad's pervasive security forces see to that. So instead they tremble under the gaze of thousands of wrathful Kurds who are poised across the border in their self-ruled enclave, eager to seize back their houses, fields and towns even before the first U.S. tank appears on the scene.
For U.S. commanders, the chaos of conducting a military operation amid the swirl of fleeing and advancing civilians conjures a logistical nightmare.
Roads leading to Mosul and Kirkuk, the two strategic cities that are the targets for any northern U.S. offensive into Iraq, likely will be clogged by tens of thousands of frightened, displaced people, humanitarian experts warn.
And, worse, destabilizing vendettas between Kurds and Arabs may explode behind advancing U.S. troops. Although some Kurdish leaders are counseling against the use of violence in retaking their stolen lands, pent-up passions, pumped up by expectations of U.S. intervention, boil along the tense ethnic frontier.
"How can we ever live together?" spat Mohammed Salih, 40, a police guard with the Kurdish autonomous government who looks out every morning at his Arab-occupied home in Pirbub. "Saddam brought these people in from the desert. We will make them leave."
Clad in their distinctive djellabas, or Arabic gowns, the Iraqi Arab colonists in Pirbub anxiously waved off interviews, mindful of an Iraqi military checkpoint only 500 yards away. Even Arab traders who still crossed a rickety bridge into the Kurdish zone to peddle gasoline seemed too overwhelmed by the prospect of war to talk. With blank faces they timidly praised Baghdad, while Kurdish onlookers, some of them heavily armed, glowered and snorted in disbelief.
This tinderbox of ethnic grudges is just one danger spawned by Saddam's penchant for relocating entire populations of minorities he considers troublesome, a ruthless strategy that could haunt any U.S. occupying forces for years to come.
In southern Iraq, for example, Saddam has waged a brutal campaign for years to wipe out political opposition among marsh-dwelling Shiite Arabs by drying up their swamps, burning their villages and driving them into refugee camps.
But in the northern Kurdish area, the potential for postwar instability is even greater because the Iraqi government has subjected the hapless region to a chillingly named "nationality correction" policy.
Partly to punish the Kurds for rising up against him twice in the last quarter-century, and partly to consolidate his grip on the strategic northern oil reserves around Kirkuk, Saddam has drained the region's Kurdish villages and towns of their original populations for decades, limiting all local jobs and land ownership to Sunni Arab immigrants, the main faction that supports Saddam.
Displaced Kurds tell how they were obliged to officially change their identities to "Arab" merely to register their children at school. Arab colonists, meanwhile, are paid a bonus for relocating their dead to Kurdish lands in order to cement a historical claim to abandoned farms and villages.
Just how many Kurds have been forced to leave the oil-rich swath of territory stretching between Mosul and Kirkuk is unknown. Various human-rights reports put the number at roughly 100,000. Smaller numbers of Turkmen, Assyrian and Yazidi minorities also have been pushed out of the area.
"This is something the world saw last in the former Yugoslavia," said Hiram Ruiz, a spokesman for the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a human-rights group that is monitoring the forced population shifts in northern Iraq.
"It is going to be extremely hard for U.S. forces to mediate all the score-settling that will go on once they enter the area," Ruiz said. "It will get even wilder if Turkey gets involved."
Turkey is under extraordinary pressure to allow U.S. troops to use its bases for any northern offensive against Iraq. Should that happen, and should war commence, Ankara would seek to send in tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers to tamp down any Kurdish independence movement.
Even more uncontrolled migrations could result, as well as fighting between the Turks and Iraqi Kurds - two U.S. allies who despise each other.
"The Pentagon definitely plans to discourage the mass movements of refugees," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va. "But this isn't a problem that can be left to soldiers. They need to get civilians in there fast and keep people from panicking."
The boggling complexity of the internecine battles that may face any 19-year-old GI driving a Humvee in northern Iraq is woefully clear in raw, unhappy outposts such as the border village of Pirbub.
On a recent afternoon, a few Arab families were discreetly loading up their belongings in pickup trucks.
The Kurdish tribal leader of the area, whose clan's territory is sliced neatly in half by the front lines between the self-ruling enclave of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Baghdad regime, said that if the Americans liberated the area, he would let the Arab colonists go peacefully.
"If Kurdish soldiers become involved, I believe there will be a disaster," said Farhan Hariri, whose family has ruled the green rolling hills around Pirbub for 500 years. "I am urging my people to give the Arabs time to leave. It must be done without blood."
But down by the narrow border bridge where a brisk trade in smuggled fuel is carried on between the erstwhile enemies, the opinions were less measured.
"In 1975, Saddam's men came to Pirbub," said Salih, the Kurdish border guard. "The next morning they brought army trucks, loaded us in like garbage and threw us into the fields with just the clothes on our backs. My mother was screaming."
Toting a modified assault rifle on his shoulder, he strode defiantly over the bridge into Iraqi government territory - his former home - and scowled at the passing Arab traders.
They were hurrying past on donkeys and in battered taxis on the road to Mosul, an early target of U.S. troops should they invade. None of the traders returned Salih's hard gaze.
Does this mean we should just forget the whole thing?
I long ago gave up assuming that the media knows everything thats going on. Freedom is a precious thing, and I am sure that the people of Iraq will agree with that when they begin to experience it.
I'm sure there will be problems, we have problems everywhere on earth but:HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
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