resistance to the Iragi regime and a vast increase in the oppression and repression of the Kurds in Irag. This marked the end of the
It did not, however, mark the end of the Kurdish struggle. Kurdistan is a mountainous region in western Asia that has been the home of the Kurdish people for more than 5,000 years. After the end of the first world war Kurdistan, along with the rest of the Arab East, was divided by imperialism. The Kurdish population was parcelled out among four states: Turkey (2 million Kurds at the time), Iran (2 million), Iraq (1 million), and Syria (1.5 million). Since then, divided Kurdistan has been the scene of continual armed uprisings against national oppression. Historically, the Kurdish movement has been strongest in Iraq, one-fourth of whose population is Kurdish.
The relatively large size of the Kurdish population, the high degree of their organization, the extremely mountainous terrain in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the extended periods of general political instability have prevented the various Iraqi regimes from succeeding in their repeated attempts
On the other hand, the leadership of the Kurdish movement has likewise proven incapable of leoding the revolution to victory. The 1975 defeat, brought on by the betrayal by the Barzani leadership, has given rise to an important process of political debate and recomposition within the Kurdish movement. The interview below, with Noshirwan Amin, a member of the National
Union of Kurdistan (NUK), illustrates the lines along which this process is occurring. Future issues of INPRECOR will publish contributions from other tendencies that have emerged from this recomposition process, as well as the position of Arab revolutionary Marxists on the Kurdish revolution. We regard our participation in this discussion and our efforts to publicize it as part of our tasks of internationalist solidarity with both the Kurdish and Arab revolutions.
The Kurdish Resistance Is Not Over latest phase of the Kurdish rebellion, which had broken out in 1974. to liquidate the Kurdish revolution. QUESTION. WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE REASONS FOR THE DEFEAT IN THE LATEST WAR? ANSWER. The Kurdish resistance in the fatest war was broken neither politically nor militarily. The temporary collapse was brought on above all by the Flight of Barzani, along with the KDP leadership, from the combat zones, the subsequent agreement between the Baathist regime and the shah of Iran, and the "shift" of a good part of the resistance fighters and their families to Iran. This leadership, a tribal leadership, was based on the most backward layer of Kurdish society, the landlords. So if one can talk about a defeat today, it is only a political defeat of the KDP leadership which, because of its tribal structure, was incapable of leading the national struggle and linking the national question with the social questions. In the Kurdish region, as in every underdeveloped country, the agrarian question is of life and death importance. The KDP leadership locked any understanding of the peasant movement and had no faith in the power of the 41 resistance. It had no plans for a sweeping land reform that would have primarily benefited the poor peasants. This leadership thus concentrated on seeking the support of foreign regimes. But a prerequisite for this was to be prepared to make alliances with reactionary, imperialist, and chauvinist powers against the struggle of the oppressed masses in Iran, Turkey, and the Arab countries. This attitude was also reflected in the way the war was conducted: The partisan war was liquidated and in the final clashes, up until the surrender, regular positional warfare came to the fore. The concept that unity in struggle against oppression by the Iraqi regime meant that the KDP itself should be regarded as the only force understanding and embodying unity in action and should therefore not be criticized within the movement was mistaken. But the mistake was not merely in the lack of criticism, but also in the failure to build a vanguard party, that is, an independent organizer of the progressive forces of Kurdish society. Both the objective political bases for this and the subjective prerequisites among the masses existed. I mean vanguard in the Leninist sense of revolutionary vanguard. Because of the backwardness of Kurdish so-
ciety, the proletariat is numerically weak; nevertheless, through their insertion into the struggle, the Kurdish workers will be able to assume the ideological leadership of the movement and will be among its activists. The peasant question is also central here, and the solution to it has to be radical, without making concessions to a middle layer of peasants. What we want is an agrarian revolution. The National Union of Kurdistan strives for the organization of the forces of the Kurdish national democratic revolution, whose task is to bring together the progressive tendencies and unite them in a militant way under the leadership of the Kurdish revolutionary vanguard. Q. WHAT HAVE BEEN THE REPERCUSSIONS OF THE DEFEAT ON THE KURDS IN IRAN AND THE OTHER STATES AND ON KURDS WHO HAVE EMIGRATED ABROAD? A. The organized resistance of the Kurds in Iraq represented a strong pole of attraction for the resistance in the entire Kurdish region. Kurds come from other regions to participate in the struggles in Irag. The influence and prestige of the KDP were high. With the flight of the Barzani leadership and its removal from the combat zone, the KDP gave up its role as the leading organizing force. Barzani tried to paralyze the movement and a good number of Pesh Merga fighters left with him to Iran. The majority of them have since returned, but there is no force having as great an influence as the KDP used to. Of course, the outcome of the latest war has also had effects on the resistance movement in the other parts of Kurdistan: disorientation, demoralization, lack of a recognized leadership, fragmentation of forces. As far as Iran itself is concerned, it is clear that Barzani today cannot oppress the Kurds or hand fighters over to Savak (the Iranian secret police). In Iran, as in the other countries, the reorganization of the resistance remains the main task. We of the National Union of Kurdistan have a policy of return to the country. Q. WHAT IS THE PRESENT SITUATION IN IRAQI KURDISTAN ITSELF? WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE KURDISH MASS MOVEMENT? A. The situation in Kurdistan provides striking proof of The incapacity of the bureaucratic bourgeois regime in Iraq to solve the national question. The promised appearance of autonomy is merely a means by which to intensify the repression and split up the Kurdish movement. The war and the repressive policy of Arabization have led to a flight from the land and a rise in unemployment. The chauvinist policy of Arabization, which leaves no social area unaffected, aims at driving the Kurdish population out of the mountains and deporting them. The map of Iraq is to be altered; new administrative regions are being established (for example, the partition of the rich mixed Arab-Kurdish province of Kirkuk into a number of Arab provinces). The aim is to eliminate the basis for the establishment of indigenous industries and economic development in Kurdistan. The elimination of the Kurdish names of villages and cities in the new administrative areas goes hand in hand with the Arabization of hundreds of Kurdish schools. The resettlement policy, which was previously directed primarily against the Kurdish working class, is now being extended to the peasants. After a so-called land reform, 60 percent of the land in the Kurdish regions was taken over by the central state; 40 percent is left to the Kurdish peasants who have not been driven out of the mountains. Some 400,000 deported Kurds are now living in camps in the southern and western parts of Iraq, without land or jobs. The organization of a resistance movement among these refugees is correspondingly difficult. The Iraqi regime is going to be responsible for creating a second Palestine. The regime's forced resettlement policy is combined with a policy of replacing Kurdish peasants with Egyptian ones. About 50,000 Egyptian peasants are now living in Kurdistan. The plan is to transfer a total of 1 million Egyptians to Iraq, a means of pushing forward the decimation of the Kurdish minority. One of the arguments advanced in support of the chauvinist population policy is that it is necessary to increase the population of future generations of Arabs in Iraq. These Arab peasants are either integrated as agricultural workers into the state-run cooperative agricultural enterprises or else granted land as private property, which will strengthen political backwardness and chauvinist tendencies in the newly Arabized, previously Kurdish regions. The greater part of the oil and raw material resources of Iraq are in Kurdistan. But only 7-12 percent of Iraq's industrial product between 1970 and 1975 went to the Kurdish region. The oil refineries have been shifted to the Arab region of Hammam Ali, even though this meant a 20 percent increase in the cost of construction of new oilfields. The metal industry was shifted to Basra in the south, even though the iron and copper has to be brought in from Kurdistan. The official trade unions, linked to the Progressive National Front (the Baathist-controlled ruling group) includes representatives of the official Arab and Kurdish parties. Nevertheless, we do not boycott these trade unions, because there is some possibility of carrying out political discussion within them, in addition to fighting for some economic demands. There are seminars of union members, for example, so we send representatives into the unions to try to win the members to support of the Kurdish resistance. As far as students, high-schoolers, teachers, and women are concerned, the resistance movement has independent underground organizations that function only illegally. Fewer and fewer Kurdish students are admitted to universities, the University of Sulaimaniya, for example, in the heart of the Kurdish region, in an attempt to make way for more Arab students.
45
KURDS Administrative functions in the Kurdish region have been taken over by Arabs; the Kurds are "permitted" to assume subordinate functions, which they fulfill under the threat of prison sentences of up to ten years. The organs of the structure of fake autonomy established by the regime have been occupied by the three legal Kurdish parties, which exist only on paper; their function is that of political police. The Kurdish resistance to Arabization thus remains directed against the state apparatus itself. As for the peasants, if will be our task to organize illegal peasant leagues from which to break up the official leagues as soon as there is a basis for liberated areas. Today, however, there is no movement encompassing the Kurdish masses. The resistance is still limited to the underground organizations, Whether or not there will be some open manifestation of the resistance will depend on the relationship of forces. At present, even where it would be possible to hold a strike or demonstration, such attempts will not be made, because even if the masses followed the call to action, the movement is not yet strong enough to stand up against the inevitable repression without suffering excessive losses. The masses are not yet moving into action. But there have been some forms of open resistance in whole regions. These are carried out through things like poetry readings. This kind of expression of resistance, of the independence of the Kurdish people, does not leave any open traces - except on the Kurdish masses themselves. Q. IN THIS SITUATION, WHAT PERSPECTIVES DO YOU SEE AHEAD? A. The armed struggle should be launched in those regions that have not been reached by the Arabization policy. The resistance in Iraqi Kurdistan is sufficiently organized so that we can say that the phase of propaganda octivity and the establishment of an organizational structure has been closed. The phase of the launching of armed struggle must now be begun; only in this way can the gains of a future mass movement be guaranteed and consolidated in any real way. Here I would like to note the preconditions for the victory of the Kurdish liberation struggle, for which the National Union of Kurdistan will strive:
*national unification;
*the building of a vanguard party;
*common struggle of Arabs and Kurds in Iraq;
*common struggle of all Kurds;
*common work of the Kurdish resistance movement together with all progressive forces and all forces striving for the international socialist revolution. Q. CAN YOU TELL US SOMETHING ABOUT THE SITUATION OF THE LEFT IN IRAQ AND IN KURDISTAN? WHAT ORGANIZATIONS EXIST AND WHAT ARE THEIR POLITICS? A. I'll speak of the opposition parties in general and the revolutionary organizations in particular. All those 46 parties that do not belong to the Progressive National Front (PNF) are classified as "opposition. " This includes the illegal Boath party. The PNF is composed of the official Boath party, the Communist party, and the three paper Kurdish puppet parties (the Kurdish Democratic party, which uses the same name as the old KDP, the Kurdish Revolutionary party, and the Movement of Progressive Kurds). The verbal recognition of Kurdish autonomy, which was granted in March 1970 under the pressure of events and the struggle of our people, was nothing but a smokescreen for the rank anti-Kurdish chauvinism of the Iraqi regime. The fake autonomy law of August 1974, which only further intensifled Arabization, was presented as a model solution to the national question, and the puppet parties today are trying to act within that framework. But they have no function, apart from spying. When the regime granted apparent autonomy, these parties approached the leadership of the KDP and sought to draw it into the PNF. At that time, Barzani refused. The illegal Boath is not qualitatively different from the right wing of the Baath, which is in the regime. But it is an opposition party that tries to draw support from all layers of society. For example, it is possible today to publish articles that correspond to the interests of the Kurdish resistance in the organs of this party. Although we have no illusions in this party, the NUK participates in a union of parties that includes, in addition to the NUK and the illegal Baath, the Arab Socialist Movement, the leadership of the former Central Command faction of the Communist party, and some Nasserite groupings. The central slogan of this union of parties is "Democracy for Iraq, Autonomy for Kurdistan, " Unlike in the past, the Kurds in the other parties today (with the exception of the NUK) no longer see themthemselves as part of the Arab world. This party union also has a project for a central regime in which the Kurds would have proportional representation. Now, as to the groups 1 mentioned earlier:
* The Marxist-Leninist party was in the Central Command CP in 1969-70. It had strong points of support in southern Iraq and Baghdad and also held some positions in the trade unions. Like all the small revolutionary groups in Iraq, it commanded only minimal forces in Kurdistan and upheld the necessity of building an Iraqwide CP. The group has no newspaper, In leaflets it calls for the overthrow of the Boath regime, which it characterizes as fascist, and for the seizure of power by the working class. It advocates the necessity of armed struggle in Iraq and believes the time is ripe for the destruction of the regime. It thus substitutes itself for the working class.
* Ae for the former Central Command CP, the leadership of the organization preaches defeatism and abstenfionism. In recent times, a good part of the leadership has left the country, among them four members of the central committee in Kurdistan, who stayed with Barzani. The Boath party has initiated talks with the Central Command leadership and has offered either that they
work legally within the CP (with an official paper of their own) or that they adopt a policy of abstaining from any struggle ogainst the regime. The leadership has agreed to discuss the second possibility. Nevertheless, the Central Command's underground urban cells have remained in existence and the Rank-and-File Union, which represents a part of the membership of the organization, has split and is putting out a paper, also called Rank-and-File Union.
* The Arab Socialist Movement, which was formerly Nasserist, now defines itself as Marxist and includes both genuine Marxists and nationalists. Its newspaper is entitled Workers Call. It has an agrarian program and stands for the right of the Kurds to self-determination in the form of autonomyNone of these groups claims to be a sole representative, and unity efforts are now under way, the aim being to build a united revolutionary party in Iraq; they do not stand for an independent Kurdish communist party. In Kurdistan itself there are the three paper parties 1 referred to earlier and the Arab and Kurdish sections of the CP, both of which have suffered heavy losses in the recent period. They participate in both the central regime and the fake autonomy structures. The aim of all the other groups is to organize a common armed struggle, for we see the armed struggle as a form of political struggle and we understand the impossibility of a peaceful solution. The old KDP, whose leadership is now sitting in Teheran, is trying to establish new points of support. But there are new groupings that used to belong to the KDP and are now discussing the betrayal of the KDP. They do not go as far in their political critique as the NUK, because they do not trace the defeat of the leadership back to this leodership's inherent inability to solve the national question. These groups lack a newspaper or a centralized leadership. The NUK represents an initial attempt to reorganize and unify the divided forces of the Kurdish resistance. People of various political orientations belong to the NUK today: Marxist-Leninists (myself among them), socialists, democrats, and patriots. The NUK cannot take the place of a communist party, nor can it develop into a communist party. The point today is to assemble the revolutionary forces of Kurdistan along with all progressive forces and the nationalist left in Irag in order to accomplish the tasks of the national-democratic revolution, tasks which lay before our Iraqi people including both its nationalities, Arabs and Kurds, as well as the minorities. These tasks are:
1. Final liberation of Irag from the economic and political yoke of neocolonialism.
2. End to the bloody dictatorial regime.
3. Creation of a national-democratic coalition regime capable of guaranteeing democracy for the entire people.
4. Recognition of the right of the Kurdish people to genuine autonomy within an independent republic of Iraq.
5. Implementation of a fundamental agrarian reform in the interests of the peasant masses, Industrialization of the country, utilization of oil and mineral resources for the development of Iraqi society in order to lay the basis for the transition to the building of socialism. The NUK today has two press organs. One is in Arabic, called Spark, which answers all charges that the Kurdish resistance is chauvinist and which provides information primarily for Arab and world public opinion. Three issues have appeared so far, The Kurdish organ is called The New Way.
KURDSTAN PALESTIN KURDISA ONE 31RU50 self- CHOICE determinalion OSE FUCKT FIGHT
OR BE ING for ANNIHILAID KURDISTAN Q. WHAT CONTRIBUTION CAN THE REFUGEES IN EUROPE MAKE TO THE KURDISH LIBERATION STRUGGLE? WHAT ARE YOUR RELATIONS WITH THE EUROPEAN LEFT? A. The various Kurdish organizations abroad maintain their own independent character. The NUK, For example, is an organization only for Kurds from Iraq. But the student organizations in which all the groups participate contribute to the movement in Europe. There are now two Kurdish leagues in Europe. One includes those who still support Barzani; the other pursues common aims with us in terms of the reorganization of the resistance in Kurdistan. There is a preparations committee for return to Kurdistan. Our orientation for the Kurds in Europe is toward their return to the combat zone; this also applies in the case of students after they have completed their studies. As far as links with the left in Europe are concerned, we have no concrete proposals in mind. The main thing is that the European left support the struggle of the Kurdish people, on the basis of their internationalist duty. Up to now we have made no analysis of the various left and far-left organizations in Europe. Our position may be summed up as follows: Our main alliances are with the Arab revolution, the national liberation movement of the third world, and the forces of socialism, workers power, and the revolution throughout the world. We strive for firm relations of solidarity, for common work to consolidate our links in struggle. We thus greet all forms of solidarity from the progressive forces, from simple aid in the fight to improve the living conditions of the refugees in Europe all the way up through participation in our armed struggle. D
47
SYRIAN TROOPS
On May 31, 1976, the