If war's reason is justice, then remember the Kurds

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, April 13, 2003 By: Willy E. Gutman

Veteran journalist Willy E. Gutman writes: One way of erring on the side of justice is to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, the forgotten. Behind barbed wire. In camps and gulags. In mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom have been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth.

War. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing ... they've all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony.

In-your-face prime-time images of man's inhumanity to man don't lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered at the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts.

"Past in prelude," we declare with scholarly condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- the Crusades, the "Holy" Inquisition, Shoah, the massacre of native Americans, the wholesale slaughter of Armenians, Biafra, the killing fields of Cambodia, the inter-tribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis.

Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities help intellectualize other peoples' suffering. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each infamy. "You can't change human nature," we philosophize, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will put our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.

New convulsions overshadow old ones. In one remote corner of the world, the Kurds, a people of about 30 million, wander between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria in search of nationhood. Eventually, cameramen will have to aim their lenses at them. Simmering in the shadows, eclipsed if not trivialized by the current conflict, their struggle is real, their claim for sovereignty legitimate. Failure to address their grievances is another path to apocalypse. When the smoke lifts from the bloodied sands of Iraq, will the world press rush in droves to the aid of Kurdistan?

Habitual victims of Turkish and Iraqi brutality, Kurds live in the worst of all possible worlds: They are hated by their enemies, unloved by everyone else. Constantly at each other's throats, unable or unwilling to adhere to the most basic international protocols, they've never managed to elicit much sympathy. All instinct, they have no couth. Yet, their cause remains unchampioned, willfully ignored by the world, damned by official proclamations and lofty pledges.

Signed by the Turks and the Allies in 1920, and signaling the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sèvres explicitly provides for "local autonomy in regions where Kurds predominate."

Because it is sensible ... and just ... that the Kurds have a nation to call their own, it is essential that this 83-year-old covenant be honored.

Will the United States heed the challenge, turn its back or mongrelize its policies to suit the shifting winds of global geopolitics? Eventually, the US must tell the world what matters most: erring on the side of justice or keeping its alliances intact and opening new markets for America's bulimic corporate juggernaut?

Willy E. Gutman WEGUTMAN@cs.com

• Willy E. Gutman is a veteran journalist. He lives in southern California.

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