By Jonathan C. R and
PARIS, OCT. 15 -- Kurds from around the world met here this weekend in the first international conference devoted to their often tragic history. The forum, organized with the help of Danielle Mitterrand -- wife of the French president and a human rights campaigner -- was intended to focus attention on the plight of an estimated 20 million Kurds who now live in communities scattered across six countries from Lebanon to the Soviet Union. More than two dozen speakers provided details on what Jeri Laber, executive director of the U.S. human rights group Helsinki Watch, termed a staggering list of human rights abuses: arrests, torture, murder, assassination, chemical warfare, mass deportations, expulsions, appalling conditions in refugee camps, refusal of political asylum by the West, denial of ethnic rights to language, literature and music, and destruction of villages, towns and cities. In terms of the severity of the problem, the Kurds should be near the top, not at the bottom, of our human rights agenda, said Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who spoke at the conference. Too many governments are too concerned about alienating the oil-rich or politically powerful nations where the Kurdish people reside. Pell was unsuccessful last year in efforts to enact legislation to impose economic sanctions on Iraq after charges that it used chemical weapons on its Kurdish population. But the senator expressed optimism about the chances of a new bill aimed at punishing governments using such internationally banned arms. The object, he said, was to send a message to the government of Iraq and that message is 'never again.' Sponsored by Danielle Mitterrand's human rights foundation and the Kurdish Institute of Paris, the conference focused on cultural identity and human rights. Kurds have fought for decades to win an independent Kurdistan in the mountains of eastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northern Iran. Last year, after a cease-fire halted the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, about 65,000 Kurds fled into Turkey to escape an Iraqi offensive against their villages that they charged included poison gas attacks. The Iraqi government has denied the charges. At one point today, delegates led by Jalal Talabani, a veteran Kurdish nationalist, threatened a walkout if the chairman of the Iraqi government's Kurdish autonomy zone, Bahdeen Ahmad, spoke to the conference. The French government tried unsuccessfully to persuade the conference to hear Ahmad, who is considered a collaborator by Kurdish nationalists. Talabani scolded the Socialist-led French government for having a double-faced policy and what he called a readiness to sacrifice all rules of humanity, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and socialism for commercial policy. France, a major arms supplier to Iraq, recently agreed to reschedule $1.35 billion in overdue payments on a $4 billion debt. The influential Iraqi lobby in France hopes to persuade Paris to sell the Baghdad government Mirage 2000 fighter-bombers. Aside from Bernard Kouchner, a junior minister in charge of humanitarian affairs, no French official or legislator attended the conference. In what delegates privately described as an acknowledgment of the fragility of Middle East states and their fears about secession in such a volatile region, resolutions adopted by the conference avoided mention of self-determination for the Kurds. Acting on a suggestion by Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, the resolutions asked U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to organize a special U.N. General Assembly session on the Kurdish problem and for similar treatment by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The resolutions, which many delegates privately acknowledged stood little chance of immediate acceptance, also called for: the formation of a single umbrella group to represent the traditionally divided Kurds; the granting of observer status at the United Nations to the Kurds and invitations to the 12-nation European Parliament and the Council of Europe; an international agreement to ban manufacture of chemical weapons and to seek diplomatic and economic sanctions against governments using them; and the creation of a permanent mission of legislators from democratic countries to keep tabs on Kurdish human rights. Thomas Hammerberg, a former president of the human rights organization Amnesty International, announced plans for another conference next July in Stockholm. An interim meeting may be held in London. A Kurdish delegate said that the Paris conference has saved us from {embarking on} terrorism for another year by demonstrating the world's concern to despairing Kurds. Outside the conference hall both Saturday and today, hundreds of hard-line Turkish Marxist Kurds of the Kurdish Workers Party chanted their disapproval of the meeting and their belief in armed struggle. Since 1984, more than 2,000 Marxist insurgents and a similar number of Turkish security forces and Kurdish civilians have lost their lives in an ever fiercer civil war.[1]