War on the Kurds
The Sun (1837-1985); Sep 16, 1979; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Baltimore Sun, The (1837-1986)
pg. K4
War on the .Kurds
The Iranian army driving the KurCIlab insurgents to
mountain redoubts, and repressing the Kurds In the
towns, Is winning hollow victories. The Ayatollah
Khomeini is trying to reconstItute the armed forces as
a toot without which his regime cannot survive. But
colonels who had to accept that It was wrong to battle
c lvllIans for the Shah now find themselves unhappily
dofng It for the Ayatollah,
Thisis only one more In a series of Kurdish r
that have flared on and off in Turkey, Iraq an
since World War! without result, But it must rekindle
Kurdish aspirations in those nations, where the Kurds
are In the millions, and In Syria and the Soviet Union,
where they number In the hundreds of thousands.
But because the Ayatollah Is Imposing a Shia Mus-
lhn theooracy and most ICurds are Sunni Muslims, the
fighting also fans the growing tensions between these
iects. Kurds have been victimized by violence in west-
ern Turkey. In Iraq, a Shia majority newly Ins $Ired by
the Ayatollah lives under a Sunni ruling class. in Syria.
yhere communal outbreaks have occurred, the people
are Sunni and the regime Shia.. -
a;.. The ten million or so Kurds are a people with a lan-
guage and tradition who have never had a state. There
were many such in the world a century ago. Many na
tionalisnis were accommodated however imperfectly
In the neane Iollowlna World War L One treaty of the
t1n e , to dismember the vanquished Ottoman Turkish
empire, called for a ICurdish state, Never ratified or
implemented, it went forgotten by all but the Kurds, a
piece of paper that endorsed and frustrated their us.
tiona] hopes.
KurdIsh revolts since.the 1920s have been aided by
anti-regime conservatives In Turkey, by Imperial Brit-
ain in Iran, by the Soviet Union lafran, by Iran I .Iraq,
and now, according to the AyaWllah , bjlraq II fran.
The Shah maintained and then abandoned the Kurdish
cause In Iraq. Kurds and Iraqi Arabs In Iran helped the
Ayatollah to overthrow th Shah, in return for which
they expected autonomy or sovereignty. But the Aya-
toliahhasfoundh1mselfhei toaflemptrea5n1UChaSa
nation, dedicated to ruthless repression along the bor-
ders to protect Its integrity from voracious neighbors.
It Is a role that suits his own intolerant zeal against fel-
low Shin Persians who stray.
So long as the Kurdish revolt rages out of control, it
menaces a cruel fundamentalist dictatorship that
would probably be succeeded by a Marxist dictator-
ship. It raises the threat of war between Iraq and Iran.
It foments,confllct between the Muslim world's equiva-
lents of Catholics and Protestants. How much wiser the
Ayatollah would be to allow a large measure of cul-
tural and regional autonomy, and to challenge other
states with large Eurdish minorities todo the same.
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