TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 196 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 40

Mission of Mercy


By dispatching U.S. troops to set up camps for the Kurds in
northern Iraq, Bush undertakes a humane but risky endeavor

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Dan Goodgame and Bruce van
Voorst/Washington and William Mader/London


    The Kurds were dying. Starvation, exposure and disease
were killing as many as 1,000 a day. And that brute fact
overcame the nervousness about being sucked into an endless
political and perhaps military quagmire. Prodded by distressed
allies, by outraged U.S. and European public opinion, and not
least by his own conscience, George Bush last week finally did
what he should have done long before: set in motion an
unprecedented and bold operation that might at last bring
effective succor to the Kurds -- at least to the 850,000 or so
squatting along the Iraq-Turkey border and possibly to the 1.5
million who are seeking asylum in Iran.

    To that end, American, British and French troops over the
weekend began moving into northern Iraq, an area the allies had
largely left alone throughout the gulf war. Over the next two
weeks or so, these soldiers will build on relatively flat land
as many as seven tent cities, each housing up to 100,000 Kurds.
The idea is to bring the refugees down from the barren,
freezing and almost inaccessible mountain slopes where they are
perched and relocate them where they can be given adequate food,
water, shelter, sanitation and medical care. And, of paramount
importance, safety: the camps will be protected by as many as
10,000 soldiers from the U.S., 5,000 from Britain, 1,300 from
France and 1,000 each from the Netherlands and Italy. from any
attempt by Saddam Hussein to exact bloody vengeance for the
Kurds' failed revolt.

    But for how long? And what follows the supposedly
temporary relocation? Nobody can say, but at minimum it seems
that Bush will have to bid farewell to his hopes for a quick and
clean American military withdrawal from the Middle East. The
risks of the new effort, dubbed Operation Haven, may not have
justified the President's long dithering in providing effective
relief. But those risks are real, not chimerical.

    Immediately, there is a danger that U.S. and other allied
troops involved in Operation Haven will become enmeshed in a
long-running battle between Baghdad and the Kurds. Few think
Saddam would be so mad as to order a deliberate attack on the
camps and their allied protectors. That would expose what
remains of his army to more of the allied bombing that proved
so devastating during the gulf war. But the allied soldiers
could easily get into unplanned and escalating shooting
incidents with the 30,000 or more Iraqi troops in the area.

    U.S. Army Lieut. General John Shalikashvili, commander of
the relief effort, met with Iraqi officers near the border town
of Zakhu to warn them to keep their troops away from the camps;
at further meetings Americans and Iraqis will try to work out
some ground rules to keep the two forces apart. But it is by no
means certain that they can succeed, especially if allied
soldiers decide to seize Iraqi military airstrips to land
construction materials and relief supplies for the camps. The
Operation Haven troops could also get caught in cross fire
between Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas using the camps
as bases from which to stage raids. The allies say they will not
allow guerrilla activity in the tent cities, but are not at all
clear about how they intend to stop it.

    It is also difficult to see when and how the allies can
wind up Operation Haven. The U.S. and its friends insist they
do not intend to let the tent cities become a second Gaza
Strip, home to generations of embittered, stateless and
disruptive exiles. Washington and London hope to turn over
protection of the refugee settlements to a United Nations
peacekeeping force in one to three months, and eventually to
resettle the Kurds in their old homes under the eye of U.N.
observers.

    But that may be wishful thinking. U.N. Secretary-General
Javier Perez de Cuellar insists that a new Security Council
resolution would be required to empower the organization to take
part in Operation Haven. Any such resolution might well be
vetoed by the Soviet Union or China. They would be afraid of
setting a precedent for intervention that one day could be
applied to the Baltic republics or Tibet.

    Even getting the Kurds to come down from the mountains in
the first place may not be easy. Some Kurds fear precisely what
the allied governments hope -- that the U.S., British and
French soldiers will leave in a month or so. If so, many Kurds
believe, Saddam's forces will massacre them all, U.N. observers
or no. Enticing the Kurds to return to Kirkuk, Sulaymani yah or
the other cities from which they fled looks impossible as long
as Saddam is in power. Already Administration officials assume
that the U.S. and allied forces will have to stay until the
dictator goes. But since Washington has no strategy for forcing
Saddam out, that could mean maintaining garrisons for years in
a country perpetually on the brink of explosion. "Going in is
easy," sums up a high-ranking officer attached to the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. "Getting out may be the problem."

    It was exactly this fear of an open-ended commitment that
for weeks kept Bush from organizing any effective relief
effort. As late as Saturday, April 13 -- only three days before
he finally ordered Operation Haven -- the President declared in
a speech at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama: "I do not want
one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq
that's been going on for ages." But while Bush was still in
Alabama, where he had gone to fish for largemouth bass,
Secretary of State James Baker phoned to report growing pressure
from Congress and allies to save the Kurds. British Prime
Minister John Major had already publicly proposed several
versions of a plan to establish "safe havens" for the Kurds
inside Iraq, and France had sent senior diplomats to the State
Department to plead for U.S. participation in some such effort.

    The Turkish government, Baker reported, was especially
agitated. Turkish President Turgut Ozal confirmed as much in a
phone call to Bush on Monday morning. Turkey could not take in
the refugees, said Ozal, and American efforts to get aid to them
in the mountains by airdrop or helicopter were insufficient;
more were dying every day.

    Bush reported this to his top national-security advisers
at their regular Monday morning meeting, and the group assigned
Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates to devise a plan.
Gates convened a "deputies committee" of the second-ranking
officials at State, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the CIA.
By Monday afternoon they sought their chiefs' approval for
Operation Haven, which Bush announced Tuesday afternoon after
telephoning Major, French President Francois Mitterrand and
Turkey's Ozal.

    Some advisers were unenthusiastic to the end. Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell "were
not crazy about this idea" of sending troops into Iraq, says
one high official. (A Pentagon source puts it more forcefully:
"Colin got steamrollered.") National Security Adviser Brent
Scowcroft had argued since long before the gulf war that the
U.S. should set two limited objectives -- drive Iraq out of
Kuwait and break Saddam Hussein's offensive military power --
and once they were accomplished, get out quickly. But Bush, says
a senior official, decided that "we simply could not allow
500,000 to a million people to die up there in the mountains.
And that's precisely what might have happened."

    The Administration has also decided to come to the aid of
the Kurds who are stranded near the Iran-Iraq border.
Initially, Bush suggested that the strain in American relations
with Iran would limit U.S. assistance for the refugees. But late
last week Iran made a formal plea for U.S. help through Swiss
intermediaries. The Administration replied that it was prepared
to send relief supplies once the Iranians detailed exactly what
they needed. Said an Administration official: "We are
comfortable doing it for humanitarian reasons."

    The relief operations for the Kurds, however, do nothing
for 50,000 Shi`ites who have taken refuge in the occupation
zone of southern Iraq, from which coalition troops are rapidly
withdrawing. The allies plan to place these refugees in camps
within a nine-mile-wide demilitarized zone along the Iraq-Kuwait
border that will be patrolled by a U.N. force.

    Seen in this light, Operation Haven looks less like a bold
venture and more like a minimum effort that is long overdue.
Certainly the U.S. could, and should, organize a major relief
effort for the Kurds fleeing toward Iran and try to ensure the
safety of the southern Shi`ites. And it has bargaining levers
to use with Saddam. Following the requirements of the cease-fire
that ended the gulf war, Baghdad last week meekly asked the U.N.
Security Council for permission to sell almost $1 billion worth
of oil and use the money to buy badly needed food, medicine and
other necessities for the populace still under Saddam's control.
The U.S. and its allies, which have veto power in the council,
are in a position to trade consent for some satisfactory
arrangement bringing relief to the refugees.

    Even then, the long-term stationing of military forces
inside Iraq entails very genuine risks. Bush's worries about a
Vietnam-style "quagmire" are not at all unrealistic. But the
risks will just have to be borne. The alternative would be to
abandon the Kurds to their fate, and no humane nation can do
that.