A Kurdish Friend Voices Cautious Hope From Iraq

My phone rang Tuesday and an old friend was on the line from Iraq, telling me how happy he’ll be when Saddam Hussein is dead and gone.

I met Hasan Slevani, an Iraqi Kurd, in the spring of 1991 while chasing stories on the border of Turkey and Iraq. At the time, it was the darkest corner of the world I’d ever visited. Iraqi soldiers told me they hated Kurds even more than Americans, and would love to crush them like cockroaches.

A hundred miles away in Turkey, in a camp filled with Iraqi Kurds who’d been herded into the mountains by Hussein’s troops, Kurdish men would emerge from tents each morning carrying children or elders who didn’t make it through the night. They lowered them into muddy graves, turned their bodies toward Mecca, and said goodbye.

It was in that camp that I met Hasan. Surrounded by all this suffering, he had found something to celebrate.

In Iraq, he and other writers had been censored by Hussein’s thought police, so they wrote in the shadows and met in secret. But in that refugee camp, as wretched as it was, with Turkish rifles on one side and Iraqi troops on the other, they were free. Free enough, at least, to meet each night around a campfire and read their work aloud.

“Books are my life,” Hasan told me back then, the pages of his unpublished novel under his arm. “And I love them as I love my wife.”

Hasan returned to northern Iraq after the war and we stayed in touch for a while. But we lost track of each other and hadn’t spoken for 10 years until he found me on the Internet, e-mailed me Monday and called Tuesday.

“I’ve published six books,” he said proudly, and he told me life has been good in the “no-fly zone” of northern Iraq, an autonomous area under Kurdish control. He has six kids, his wife is a teacher, and Hasan works as a government accountant. He writes for a magazine on the side.

It sounded like the heaven he had talked about on the mountain. But I worried about him all over again, just as I did when we said goodbye 12 years ago, his fate unknown.

At the end of this war, if not before, there’s going to be a mad sprint to take control of the oil fields to the south of where Hasan lives, and it could get ugly.

Kurds, Arabs and Turks will all claim that history itself is their title to the underground riches, and all of them will be armed and dangerous. U.S. forces will be in the middle of it, if not legions of corporate operatives chasing petrodollars.

Keeping everyone from one another’s throats may require the best work the Holy Land has ever produced. And if chaos comes, it won’t necessarily be limited to the north.

“The problem is going to be to avoid a civil war not only between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, but within each of those communities,” says Steven Spiegel, professor of political science at UCLA.

It’s not just the country’s resources those groups will fight over, Spiegel said. They’ll each want a certain level of independence. That may be especially true of the Kurds, who now have a semiautonomous state. They also are divided into two major factions that have set rifle sights on one another at times, although there’s relative calm between them now.

“The Goldilocks answer is some kind of federal system that’s provincial in nature,” Spiegel says. “But getting the balance right, given the history of violence, authoritarianism and internal conflict, is going to be tricky.”

Many Kurds believe the United States sold them out in the last Gulf war, encouraging them to finish off Hussein and then standing back, leaving them to slaughter. And leaving them to be herded like animals through icy mountain passes to the north, where so many are buried.

But now here’s Hasan on the phone from Iraq, his voice filled more with hope than worry. He’s telling me he can hear American bombs falling on Iraqi troops to the south, and it gives him faith. Whatever follows in Iraq, it can’t be worse than the murderous Saddam Hussein, he says.

“Every day and night, the Air Force is bombing him,” Hasan said of Hussein’s northern army.

The Turks worry him most, Hasan tells me, and if they pour across the border and into northern Iraq before American troop strength is built up, there could be trouble. The Kurdish military is game, but it isn’t the most sophisticated fighting force the world has known.

Hasan tells me he trusts the Americans to do it right this time and secure the relative freedom and democracy his people have known for the past decade.

“All the people of Kurdistan will support the American forces, and our wishes are with Mr. Bush,” Hasan said. “The first Bush, he made a big mistake when he let this regime go on.”

For Hasan’s sake, and for the world’s, let’s hope the second Bush hasn’t made too many mistakes of his own.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes. com.