Truce for Two Nationalisms

It was a sight all too familiar to turbulent Iraq, which generally averages at least two revolts a year. Automatic rifles cracked through the streets. Seven Iraqi air force MIG-19s whined low over the presidential palace, peppering it with rockets. Tanks took up positions at the Baghdad radio station. For the second time in ten months, former Premier Aref Abdel Razzak, 42, was up to his old tricks, launching a coup in the name of Nasser-style socialism. The bulk of the army rallied to the side of the government, quashing the uprising. The difference was that last week President Abdel Rahman Aref decided to take no more chances with Razzak. He was captured, and "legal action" was promptly taken. Was that a polite term for execution?

The thing that apparently spurred Razzak to action was the imminent implementation of what could be Aref's biggest achievement in office. Over nationwide television the day before, Iraqi Premier Abdel Rahman Bazzaz announced a twelve-point peace program for ending the government's bloody, five-year war with the 1,000,000 fiercely independent Kurdish tribesmen living in Iraq's mountainous northeast. For years the Kurds have been demanding a measure of autonomy from the Baghdad government, and Razzak realized that a settlement might well make Aref and Bazzaz so popular as to be almost invincible.

Under the terms of the agreement, Baghdad promises to observe "two nationalisms in Iraq, Arab and Kurdish," decentralize government down to a local level and thus guarantee limited Kurdish autonomy, recognize the Kurdish language "on equal terms with Arabic" in Kurdish areas, guarantee proportional representation of Kurds (10% to 15% of the population) in government jobs and the military. "It is only fair and practical," Bazzaz said over television, "to recognize that the Kurds have their own nationalism. God willed that they be Kurds, and we Arabs, and after all, we are all descendants of Adam." Bazzaz read a message of support from the Kurdish leader promising to "undertake whatever is necessary to fulfill the program."

In the long, bitter Kurdish war, an agreement is one thing, honoring it another. Twice in the past three years similar truces vanished in the hot, humid air because both sides could not agree on the fine print. Though the new agreement goes into more detail than the older truces, only time will tell whether it has a chance of success.

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