Washington.-- When the United States encouraged revolt in Iraq for its own reasons, then changed its mind and abandoned the Kurds to massacre and deprivation, it was only the latest event in an ancient pattern of exploitation, betrayal and tragedy that is the life story of the Kurds.
They are a people as old as history who have never been united as a political entity and whose land, known as Kurdistan, has more claim to nationhood than does Iraq itself, though it lies in a broad crescent across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and a small corner of Syria.
Like their neighbors, the Armenians, they were promised a nation-state then betrayed to great power interests when nation-states were being handed out at the fall of the empires after World War I. In that betrayal, too, the United States was a player, having encouraged a Kurdish state then dropped the idea.
The story of the Kurds is less known but longer, and to that extent more tragic, than that of the other great homeless people of the Middle East, the Palestinians. Like Palestinian Arabs, their loss of a modern state was the byproduct of Britain's division of the Middle East to suit its interests. But the Kurds' domination by others goes back to waves of Turk and Mongol invaders from the 6th to the 10th centuries A.D. and a historic division of their territory between Turks and Persians early in the 16th century.
Though historically ruled by Turks, Arabs and Persians they are none of these. They are an Aryan people with an Indo-European language distantly related to Persian and a culture -- dress, music, poetry, cuisine, marriage customs -- entirely their own. Yet, in Turkey their very existence as a people has been denied -- since the 1920s they were referred to only as "mountain Turks" -- while Iraq and Iran alternately supported and suppressed Kurdish minorities as a tool against the other.
There are varying estimates of Kurdish population. The Kurdish Library of New York says there are about 28 million Kurds -- about half in Turkey, a quarter in Iran, a sixth in Iraq and small fractions in Syria and the Soviet Union.
Respected in the Middle East as brave and stoic fighters, good shooters and horsemen, Kurds have a tradition of self-reliance, living as they have in remote mountainous regions where individual villages have their own isolated economies and national borders counted for little.
Though they have a centuries-old reputation for uprisings and revolts against local rulers -- one Kurdish authority cites over 50 insurrections during the 19th century -- Kurds have often been divided among themselves. Anthropologist William Beeman of Brown University says "there is nothing inherently fractious in Kurdish society." Their tribal rivalries are largely the result of pressures imposed on them by the West, he says.
The stirrings of Kurdish nationalism began late in the 19th century with the disappearance of the last Kurdish principalities in Turkish territory and the Turkish revolution of 1908. A Kurdish newspaper appeared in 1897. But their situation changed radically in the blooming of nationalistic spirit after World War I.
Kurdish committees were formed everywhere. A Kurdish representative to the Paris Peace Conference presented two memorandums of Kurdish claims and a map of "Kurdistan integral." And when President Wilson presented his Fourteen Points for peace to Congress on January 8, 1918, point 12 called for the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman empire to be "assured of an absolute unmolested opportunity of autonomous development."
Thus, when the allies concluded the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey on August 10, 1920, there was provision not only for a separate Armenia but "a local autonomy for the land where the Kurd element predominates" in eastern Turkey, about 20 percent of the whole of Kurdistan.
If it were later determined by the League of Nations that "a majority of the Kurd population of these regions desires to be independent of Turkey and if the [League] then thinks that this population is fit for independence," Turkey was obligated to give the area and the allies agreed not oppose a voluntary union between the Kurdish state and the part of northern Iraq where Kurds predominate, then called Mosul province.
That agreement was Kurdistan's best chance to join the new class of young nation states that included Iraq, Transjordan and Syria. But it was as close as the Kurds ever came, and it was fatally flawed.
Britain had little intention of allowing Mosul province to become independent because it contained more than half the oil reserves of what is now Iraq. It had taken for itself the League of Nations mandates of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan, turned over the Syrian mandate to France and offered to the United States two mandates: Armenia and Kurdistan.
Despite President Wilson's implied promise of independence for these two states, there was little sentiment in the U.S. Senate for the undertaking, and Herbert Hoover, representing the United States, believed that Britain's mandates would produce profit while the United States' mandates would cost money.
In the Senate, the arguments against the undertaking were very much like President Bush's argument today against supporting Kurdish independence. It would require an army of 100,000 men, a subsidy of $100 million a year for a generation, and the likelihood of involvement in foreign rivalries and conflicts that would "weaken and dissipate our strength." Ultimately the United States declined the mandates.
Moreover, the Treaty of Sevres had been signed under duress by a feeble Ottoman government of Turkey, and it was quickly rejected as punitive by the new and strong government of Mustafa Kemal, known popularly as Ataturk. By 1923, Ataturk's forces had defeated the Greeks in the Turkish war of independence and Turkey came to the Lausanne Conference a major force in the region.
When Turkish representatives made it clear to this conference that "Kurds differ in nothing from the Turks and that although speaking different languages, these two peoples form a single bloc as regards race, faith and customs," the deed was done. The new Treaty of Lausanne, which superseded the stillborn Treaty of Sevres, made no mention of Armenia or Kurdistan.
That was only the first of four major and many smaller betrayals of the Kurds in this century, usually ending in a bloody massacre.
The next was set up December 24, 1922, when, under the League's mandate, His Britannic Majesty's government and the Iraqi monarchy it had installed recognized "the right of Kurds living within the frontiers of Iraq to establish a Kurdish government within these frontiers, in the hope that the different Kurdish elements would reach agreement as soon as possible on the form to give this government and the extent of its frontiers, and that they would send to Baghdad some responsible delegates to discuss their economic and political relations with His Britannic Majesty's government and the government of Iraq."
But when the British mandate ended in 1930, the Iraqi government tried to replace local Kurdish officials with Arabs and suppress the teaching of the Kurdish language. Unhappiness led to open revolt, Iraqi forces fired on Kurdish civilians, and the British Royal Air Force intervened on behalf of Iraq. It continued such interventions as late as the revolt of 1945 ,, which ended with the execution in 1947 of four Kurdish leaders.
When Iraqi republicans overthrew the British-installed royal family in 1958, the Kurds welcomed the revolution, and the republicans welcomed the Kurds. Their leader, Mustafa Barzani, representing the third generation of Barzanis to pursue Kurdish nationhood, was invited back from Soviet exile where he had gone after the failure of an 11-month Republic of Mahabad in Iran.
Though Kurdish leaders were reinstated and Mr. Barzani, known as Mullah Mustafa, was set up in a house in Baghdad and made a counselor to the the Iraqi leader Abd al-Karem Qassim, the honeymoon soured within two years. When Iraqi promises failed to materialize, the Kurds took up arms and the response was devastating: massive bombardments with napalm; villages and harvests burned; and women, old men and children shot.
When Mr. Qassim was overthrown and killed in a Baathist coup in 1963, the Kurds were kept informed, assured the new government of their neutrality and offered a detailed memorandum of their wishes. But as soon as it established itself in strength, the Baathist government imprisoned Kurdish members of parliament, issued an ultimatum and resumed hostilities with renewed violence.
A later reconciliation with Kurds was again undone by a second Baathist coup in 1968, and as Kurdish fighters pressed their military advantage Saddam Hussein concluded a 15-point agreement with them. When the agreement was ignored the Kurds resumed fighting.
When Iraq signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in 1972, the United States joined Iran and Israel in backing the Kurds against the Iraqi government, and by 1974 the Kurdish resistance blossomed into all-out war.
But once again, the Kurds were abandoned when Mr. Hussein suddenly reached an agreement with the Shah of Iran conceding half the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway to him, and the shah and United States just as suddenly dropped their support of the Kurds.
Laurie Mylroie, in a paper to be published soon by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that the shah and the Nixon administration only supported the Kurds to pressure the Soviet-backed Baghdad regime and never anticipated that the Kurds would succeed in their rebellion.
In a bitter exile outside Washington, where he died in 1979, Mullah Mustafa, as quoted by Ms. Mylroie, said he had never trusted the Shah but believed the United States would not betray him.
Now his son and comrade in arms, Massoud Barzani, is back in Iraq as commander of Kurdish forces, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party and co-chairman of the Iraqi Kurdistan Front. He contends, as his predecessors often have, that Kurds are not seeking a separate state, only autonomy within Iraq and a share in its government.
But if history is a guide, that assurance is no guarantee of his safety.
Frank Starr is chief of The Sun's Washington bureau.