06/21/2000 - Wednesday - Page A 6
  INSIDE IRAQ
Rebuilding on Ruins
Kurds reclaim homes lost in war, but Iraq still a threat

By Matthew McAllester. MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT

Northern Iraq-"If we went over there, they would slice us in half," Lt.
Abboud said as he stared at the checkpoint a kilometer up the road. An Iraqi
army officer, Abboud stood at his roadblock looking north into a part of his
homeland he can no longer visit.

It was the pleasant beginning of a warm night, and he could see the green
mountains of the north and the evening lights of Kurdish villages and cars
traveling along single-track roads. Above the plain and the distant
mountains, the clouds turned quickly from purple to dark blue. Abboud had a
fine, broad view of a piece of sovereign Iraq that has not been under
President Saddam Hussein's control for nearly a decade.

The 3.5 million Kurds in the region have a name for the land of cool breezes
and oddly shaped mountains that Abboud looked out on. They call it
Kurdistan. The UN, on the other hand, calls it Northern Iraq. The government
of Iraq calls it Iraq.

Largely forgotten since the end of the Gulf War, when Hussein put down a
Kurdish rebellion and caused a million Kurds to flee into the Turkish
mountains, Northern Iraq has since become an unofficial but highly
precarious state within a state.

It was in late 1991 that the Iraqi army and government apparatus pulled out
of the region, leaving Iraq's northern garden in the hands of two
heavily-armed rival Kurdish parties and under the impermanent protection of
the United States and its allies. Aid workers poured into the region once
the Iraqi army and allied troops left. UN agencies took over the
revitalization of the region on behalf of the Iraqi government in 1997 after
the inception of the Oil for Food program in late 1996. What remains now is
a land whose future is hostage to the whims and political calculations of
many players: Hussein, Kurdish leaders, the UN, Iran, Turkey and the United
States and its allies.

For the people of the region, their greatest fear is that Hussein and his
troops will regain control of the region.

In the tiny village of Ashawa, only 25 families of the 170 who were cleared
out on a Friday in the spring of 1987 by uniformed Iraqi soldiers and their
yellow bulldozers have so far returned. Many still live in temporary camps
and in apartments in the nearby town of Dohuk.

Those who have returned are haunted by the memories of the day the Iraqi
president's men showed up at noon to tell them their boss had decided to
build one of his palaces where their homes then stood.

"I will never forget that feeling," said Ashrafi Suleiman, 50, who sat with
her daughter one recent afternoon making dozens of flat circles of
unleavened bread over a fire. One of Hussein's roughly 20 presidential
palaces stood 20 yards away, now a shell of a building full of rubble. The
shed that gave her shelter from the midday sun was built from Hussein's fine
stone.

"At that time, I had only one cow and no money," she said, as hot air
bubbled the thin, browning dough. "I had to sell that cow to get flour for
my kids. That's what Saddam Hussein wanted for us. We are still afraid that
maybe he will come back." As Suleiman spoke and helped prepare her family's
food for the day, the men of the village were down the road starting work on
the foundations of a mosque.

They plan to build it with manila sandstone blocks from another of Hussein's
palaces that sit in heaps of rubble. When they came back to Ashawa, the
villagers blew up the palaces with dynamite, shattering the president's
bedrooms and splintering the elaborate Moroccan plasterwork that adorned his
dining room.

"It's a sort of revenge because Saddam Hussein destroyed our village and
made us refugees for 11 years and occupied all our land," said a neighbor of
Suleiman's, Musla Ali Ibrahim, 27. He had put down the pickax he had been
swinging into the ground of Northern Iraq. "When we came back, we wanted to
destroy all the things Saddam left behind." Building in the ruins of
Hussein's palaces, Iraq's Kurds live with the knowledge that their fragile
peace and relative freedom could be over in a day.

"I am 99 percent sure that Saddam Hussein will not come back to the region,"
Ibrahim said, "because there are some decision-makers including the
Americans who will protect us." Ibrahim is banking his future on a promise
the American government has never directly made. The United States, from the
Incirlik airbase in Turkey, enforces a no-fly zone in Northern Iraq,
designed to protect the Kurds from Hussein's air force, but Iraqi ground
forces are not specifically forbidden to venture into the north.

"We've made it clear that if [Hussein] moves against the people of the
north, we're prepared to use force," said a State Department official who
requested anonymity. The official would not say whether the United States
would in fact use force to protect the Kurds. The Kurds are living with an
American threat, not a promise, of retaliation against Hussein should he
venture into Kurdistan. After the Gulf war, the U.S. did not intervene with
troops to support rebelling Kurds.

As for the UN, its role in the north of Iraq is purely humanitarian. There
are no UN troops there to keep the peace.

Armed though they are, the Kurdish militias would be no match for the Iraqi
army in a fight. However, Iraq's army appears weakened at the moment because
of the war and the sanctions, and to start a new war in the north of the
country to regain control over the region could jeopardize the key crutch of
the Hussein regime, the Iraqi military, most diplomats in Baghdad said. The
long-term aim of the Iraqi government, however, remains clear.

"The north part of Iraq is Iraq and is going to be part of Iraq," said Abdul
Razak Hashemi, a minister in the Iraqi government.

It is a beautiful land. While the north doesn't have the economic value that
so many patches of flat, yellow Iraqi desert do-those patches that conceal
huge lakes of oil below the surface-the north is Iraq's Arcadia. Rivers
tumble through the mountains towards valleys of apple orchards and vines. A
gentle wind will ripple the surface of a cornfield that follows the curve of
the rolling land. It's little wonder that Hussein wants to return to the
land that was once his vacation retreat.

That prospect terrifies the Kurds who live in thousands of villages with
newly rebuilt homes with flat, low roofs. In his earlier campaigns of the
1980s and early 1990s to suppress rebellions in the north, Hussein had his
army level villages by the thousand. Millions were made refugees in their
own land or fled over the northern peaks to Turkey. Tens of thousands of
people died. Hussein used chemical weapons on a town called Halabja in 1988,
killing 5,000 people and leaving a legacy of birth defects, high cancer
rates and fear.

Helping to heal the wounds of Kurdistan is a vast aid program administered
by the UN. The UN aid agencies are everywhere. Food, medication, water
facilities, sewage systems, agricultural programs, reconstruction-all of
these things are supervised and paid for by the UN.

"We're spending over a billion to a billion-and- a-half dollars a year,"
said John Almstrom, the head of UN operations in the north. "Some agencies
are spending more money here than they do in the rest of the world." All of
that money comes from the sale of Iraqi oil under the Oil for Food program,
not from the regular UN budget.

What the UN cannot spend money on, according to Security Council
resolutions, is the maintenance of the local governments run by the rival
Democratic Party of Kurdistan and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
Supporting these authorities would mean a de facto recognition of a Kurdish
state and such a state could destabilize Iraq and possibly fuel Kurdish
separatist movements in neighboring Turkey and Iran.

Officially, then, the UN does not recognize the local authorities,
acknowledging only the Baghdad government. On the ground, it doesn't quite
work that way. The UN works with the Kurdish population and authorities so
they can become self-sufficient rather than reliant on the UN.

"When we get out of here, we have to try not to have left behind white
elephants," Almstrom said. "There's been no point if we walk out of here and
nobody knows how to run things." In Ashawa, the villagers are relearning how
to run things their own way.

They have received no help from either the UN or their local Kurdish
authority.

And they seem to like it that way. They survive by cultivating the land that
was once Hussein's garden. Small boys collect twisted bits of metal from the
ruins of the palaces in wheelbarrows and sell the scrap to passing truck
drivers. But in spite of the efforts they are making to rebuild their lives,
they face an insecurity born of experience with Hussein.

"If the world doesn't protect us when he next comes, we know what we will do
again," said Krait Hassan, 29, Ashrafi Suleiman's son. He pointed to the
Turkish mountains.