The Great War for Civilisation (139 page)

FISK: My father always told me that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was one of the titans of the twentieth century. I believe my father was right. Unfortunately, some of your soldiers at Yasilova did not obey the high standards and principles set by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish nation.

Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. I silently thanked Bill Fisk for all those boyhood history lessons. I'm not at all sure that Atatürk was a titan (or that Bill thought so), but I was quite prepared to become his admirer for the inspector and his friends. They began to talk to one another with great animation. Swooning with tiredness, O'Connor told me they would probably now allow me to return to my hotel. The word “deport” popped up in their conversation. And I knew why. If my argument was going to be a rousing condemnation of the way in which the Turkish army had turned its back on the father of the nation—a man whose integrity I would defend against the army—then there could be no prosecution and no court case. And so it came to pass.

A few hours later, I was solemnly informed that I would be deported, and O'Connor trotted off to buy an air ticket. Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Murat Sungar announced Fisk's imminent departure from the homeland; “his existence in Turkey is no longer needed because of his prejudiced, biased and illintentioned reporting,” he said. It was a bumpy flight back to Ankara and I had to comfort one of the two Turkish cops guarding me because he had never travelled in an aircraft before. But “Captain Hook” 's decision to put me on the Apache was now rippling the pond. The Turks ordered that the British Royal Marines should also be deported and claimed that they had roughed up a local Turkish official. The Ministry of Defence immediately “redeployed” them south of the border and inside Iraq. Journalists' organisations protested. The European Commission demanded an explanation from the Turkish ambassador to the EC in Brussels. One of AP's executives in New York sent me a two-liner: “Hard to imagine the quality of the meals in a jail in Diyarbakir. You're probably envying the Kurdish refugees about now.”

The problem was that the Kurdish refugees had already disappeared from this ridiculous saga. It was the honour of the Turkish army that was now at stake. The Turkish army's chief of staff, General Dogan Gures—who should have been disciplining his soldiers at Yasilova and protecting the Kurds—thundered that my perfectly accurate report was “planned, programmed propaganda.” But what was I supposed to have done? Declined to board the helicopter at Salopi? Ignored the evidence of my own eyes at Yasilova? Censored my own reporting in the interests of Western–Turkish relations? At Ankara, I was put aboard a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. “You're the man who's being deported, aren't you?” the stewardess greeted me. “You must have been telling the truth.”

Which is what I wanted to go on doing in northern Iraq. But how to return there now that Turkey was closed to me? I flew back to Beirut and drove to Damascus, where the former subjects of the Ottoman empire were more than happy to oblige. I explained my predicament to Mohamed Salman, the minister of information—to be disgraced by the Assad regime eight years later—who suggested I visit a certain General Mansour, in charge of Syrian army intelligence in the border city of Kimishli. I drove the length of Syria, back to the Turkish border—I could actually see the Turkish flag outside General Mansour's window—and he arranged for a squad of Syrian troops to take me down to the Tigris River where it flowed out of Turkey and formed the border of Syria and northern Iraq. An old man in a wooden boat was waiting in the dawn light and the Syrian soldiers waved goodbye as he rowed me silently across the great expanse of pale, soft water to the other shore where three
peshmerga
Kurdish guerrillas were waiting for me. Sister Syria—as Assad's nation was called with dubious affection in Lebanon—had friends inside Kurdistan. “Mr. Robert?” one of the Kurds asked. “We are here to take you to Zakho.” And so I returned to the story of the Kurdish disaster.

It was now late spring. The Americans and the British were planning to leave. The United Nations had arrived with their observers to “protect” the Kurds. Yet only by extending “free” Kurdistan farther south could the Americans close down the refugee camps in which the Kurds had eventually been induced to live after leaving the mountains. Soon the Kurds would be attacked again, usually by Turkish troops and pilots who would, in the coming years, bomb Kurdish villages where they believed guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, were hiding. Turkish soldiers would enter Zakho in contravention of all their agreements with the Western allies. And Saddam would strike back against the Kurdish exiles in northern Iraq whose plots to assassinate the wretched dictator—it was all part of a hopeless CIA conspiracy—miserably failed. So while the Americans tried to leave northern Iraq, they had to push farther south to set up more “safe havens” for the Kurds. They approved of new Kurdish negotiations with Saddam. They were now enthusiastic to work with the Baathist regime—or “the government in Baghdad” as they preferred to call it—in order to withdraw. Suddenly, the Americans needed Saddam's cooperation.

The Kurds saw the implications of this. They could not stop the Americans leaving, but they could purge what was left of Baath party rule from the towns that were to be included in the “safe haven,” and this they did with their usual ruthlessness. Many of Saddam's acolytes were murdered or driven from their homes, their police stations taken over and their torture chambers opened for the first time in more than two decades.

Deep in the underground dungeons of Dahuk secret police headquarters, the young Kurdish women who were raped and murdered by the Iraqi
mukhabarat
had left their last record on the filthy walls. One drew a portrait of herself with large eyes and long hair flowing over her shoulders, a pretty girl wearing a high-collared blouse. Another drew a rose, above it the words: “I am going to die. Please tell the others.” Yet another, whose name appears to have been Nadira, wrote on her cell wall just four words: “This is my fate.”

The Kurdish
peshmerga
and several hundred of the local Dahuk population had stormed the police station, almost too late to prevent the Iraqi plain-clothes men burning files containing the names of the prisoners—and their tormentors—in a concrete sentry box at the main gate. They were still smouldering when we arrived there, watched uneasily by twelve Iraqi policemen who were now, in effect, hostages of the Kurds. The last young woman to be imprisoned here had died in these foetid cells just two months earlier. The
peshmerga
said they found three of the women's bodies, naked and with their hands bound, in the cells. One of the girls was twelve years old. Another, older woman had been gang-raped and died later. Anyone who wanted to know why a million and a half Kurds fled their homes in March 1991 had only to visit the Dahuk police station.
¹⁵²

On the face of it you might have expected the Americans to have taken a look at this evidence of Saddam Hussein's barbarism. The Dahuk secret police offices, housed in a large two-storey villa, stood only a few kilometres from the new U.S. military headquarters. Here at last was proof that the servants of the dictator so often compared by President Bush to Hitler really could behave like Nazis. Were not some of the Allies once demanding war crimes trials?

Not any more, it seemed. At least two of the most senior police officers in Dahuk—men who must have known of the terrible secrets beneath that villa— were now meeting daily with senior U.S. army officers to discuss the return of Kurdish refugees to the town. Colonel Moakdad and Colonel Jamal were now instrumental in ensuring there were no clashes between armed Iraqis and allied troops in Dahuk. Each morning, driven by chauffeurs in Oldsmobile limousines, they would turn up at the new hotel which the Americans took for their headquarters, occasionally saluting the U.S. troops.

How much longer could this hypocrisy continue? On 25 May, Colonel Moakdad even arrived with a
peshmerga
representative, turning to an American colonel who greeted him and twining his two forefingers together. We are friends now, the gesture said. The Iraqi police and the Kurds were supposed to be in alliance while their leaders negotiated in Baghdad. Once those talks were complete, the Iraqis would guarantee democracy to the Kurds, or so we were supposed to believe. And then, of course, the Western allies could go home. Any price, it seemed, was worth paying for a withdrawal, even indifference to the secret police headquarters.

There was a neat perfumed garden in front of the building, rose bushes neatly planted beside the path. The portico of the headquarters had been tastefully decorated with small brass Arabic lamp shades. It was as pretty as the garden outside the Savak torture chamber in Tehran in 1979. But a few metres to the right were some stairs. With the local
peshmerga
leader, Tassin Kemeck, we pulled open a steel door nine inches thick and descended. Water dripped down the staircase. At the bottom were a series of narrow cells and several large rooms. They were strewn with excrement and dirty blankets. “This is where they brought the women,” Kemeck said. “They were not wives of
peshmerga
, just pretty women. They tortured them, raped them and killed them. Some were very young. The Iraqi army used to come to the women in this cell”—here he pushed open a heavy iron door— “and rape them one after the other.” On the floor was a stained mattress and some women's clothes. The walls were covered in graffiti. “Sometimes they wrote their names in blood,” Kemeck said.

But America's desire to call Saddam to account had receded as its desperation to withdraw from Iraq increased. No one was more clear-cut in his determination to get out than the commander of the 15,000-strong coalition army in Kurdistan that now controlled 13,000 square kilometres of northern Iraq, Major General Jay Garner. Twelve years later, Garner would be the first of the American proconsuls in occupied Iraq—a man who so alarmingly mismanaged the task that he was replaced within months—but in 1991, no one could have been keener to negotiate with the Iraqi authorities. “We've told the Kurds from the first day that we're here for two things,” he said. “To stop the dying in the mountains and to create an environment in which they could resettle. We never signed up to be a north Iraq security force . . . We were sent here to do one thing and we've done that pretty well. I don't think the Kurds will go back to the mountains unless they're under attack. And if they are, that's a problem for the United Nations and world leaders, and they'll have a tough decision to take. That's what leaders get paid for—tough decisions.”

Garner, a short, stocky man who talked in clipped, carefully punctuated sentences, was deputy commander of the U.S. Fifth Corps in Europe. But in Kurdistan, he was playing politician. “I don't think you should keep forces here. The Kurds are Iraqi citizens. I don't think you should keep forces to protect citizens from their own government. I agree this is a vicious leader [in Baghdad], a vicious regime. But if you want military forces to stay here, you've got to change the mission and got to change the rules . . . They [the Kurds] were dying at four hundred a day in the Turkish mountains. They weren't Turkish citizens so something had to happen there. Right now, their own leaders are close to signing an agreement with Saddam . . . they live here. The fact that we came here gave them a better bargaining position.”

Garner was a little like an unhappy policeman who has to invent his own laws while walking the beat. If UN Security Council Resolution 688 allowed humanitarian intervention in a foreign country, it afforded few guidelines to the U.S., British, French, Spanish and Dutch staff officers who met the general each evening for their daily briefing. “My worst fear,” Garner confided, “is getting our people in the middle [of a battle] and then getting hurt. The Iraqis and the
peshmerga
have been fighting ever since we got here . . . We're not an occupation army. No one's under martial law. There's no legality . . . ”

In the corner of Garner's office was an old bolt-action rifle bearing on its stock the coat of arms of the Pahlavi dynasty. The bolt was rusted and the wood had cracked but the Shah's lion was plain to see on the royal insignia. For Garner, the Iranian firearm—turned in by an Iraqi soldier when the Western armies arrived in Kurdistan—was a souvenir of the “civil war” that Garner's president believed had been going on “for ages,” the conflict which the two-star general intended to keep out of. It all seemed so simple. The Kurds would patch things up with Baghdad. The Kurds were Iraqi citizens, not Turkish citizens—clearly, Turkey's concerns were high on Garner's list of priorities—and if Saddam came back to persecute them, well, that was the UN's problem.

Garner did admit to a private uneasiness in talking almost daily to Iraqi officials who might well have been responsible for torturing civilians before and during the Kurdish uprising in Dahuk. But he said that his job did not involve such emotions. “In meetings with me, they are polite. You have a few who're tough. They're pretty hard. Those who come to the meetings in civilian clothes have been a bit more direct. They'll stand up and give you a long political lecture and reflections on the way you do things. We listen to them and say: ‘Thank you for your comments.' ”

So this is what it had come to. Thank you for your comments. The Beast of Baghdad was no longer to be feared. He was to be placated, worked with, relied upon to treat his Kurds—“Iraqi citizens”—fairly. The end was surely not far away. Summer was coming to northern Iraq in a lazy way, a warm breeze rippling the hundreds of square kilometres of wheat fields around Dahuk. Anticipating the effects of United Nations sanctions in 1990, Saddam had ordered Iraqis to plant wheat on all available land. The American humanitarian groups, the U.S. military and the UN were now encouraging the Kurds to harvest the crop that was sown to beat UN sanctions.