Kurds get reward for trusting a superpower Put not your trust in princes ... Psalms, 146-3 in whom there is no help. THE KURDS have not one problem but two. First, they have no oil or, apparently, anything else that the rest of the world wants. Second, they are slow learners. If they had oil, a superpower such as the United States might not have permitted the Iraqi helicopter gunships to machine- gun the women and children in the mountain passes as they fled from the soldiers. Both the American and Russian governments expressed moral outrage when the Kuwaiti royal family was chased cut by Mr. Saddam's soldiers and had to bivouac in luxury hotels in other states. The American government pro- fessed to be so shocked about the Kuwaitis’ plight that it led the rest of us into a war against Iraq, that trust, justice and the right should reign again among the Gulf States. What reigns is Saddam Husse‘n. His army didn’t fight against the Americans or other coalition forces, but it’s p- tty handy at killing its own people. At the time this is being written, more Kurdish women, children and old people are dying of cold and hunger every hour than all the allied forces lost Curing the entire war. Canada didn’t have a single ca- sualty in fraq. You can’t ask for a better war than we had. The American army and air force did almost as well. They lost about the same number of dead to enemy action as are murdered in New York on quiet Sunday after- noons. They are now coming home in clouds of glory. The Kurds, brave, foolish, sim- ple people of the hill country, re- mained to die in the name of freedom. After several thousand of them had been killed, some to strafing from Iraqi helicopter gunships which the Amenican government specifically permitted to fly over the refugee columns, a relief effort has finally been mounted. This is being done for one reason and one only. Television brought this appalling tragedy into American living rooms and the American common man, as always decent as his rulers are not, insisted that the Kurds get food and medicine. The ordinary American doesn’t know what that war was about, any more than we do. Years will Donations sought for relief effort SAVE THE Children is seeking donations for food, tents, blankets and clothing to help Kurdish and other cross-border refugees. Supplies have already been dropped from planes over the border areas. “*A team of four is now assisting in Iran to get supplies to sourthern Iraq while another team of three is co-ordinating relief ef- forts in Turkey’ says Vernon Reimer, executive director for Save the Children Fund of B.C. Donations for this emergency effort can be sent to the Save the Children Fund of 8B.C., Main Floor, 325 Howe St., Vancouver, BC, V6C 1Z7.— For further in- formation, call 685-7716. Paul St. Pierre PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES elapse before historians will discover the truths now hidden behind the pious humbug of Mr. Bush. We can only be sure what it was not fought for. It was not fought to save democracy. Kuwait didn’t have any to be saved. Yet there remains one lesson for us to learn today, any who have not yet been instructed: super- power governments do not have ethics, they only have appetites. And although all governments lie, superpower governments do it more than the governments of small nations. The Kurds have had more than enough time to learn this lesson, but with them it just never seems to take. They should have rememtered that when Saddam Hussein killed them with poison gas, neither the United States nor Russia found it worthy of protest or of comment. POWER STEERING They should have remembered that the American government supported them in an earlier uprising against Baghdad in a most shameful way. The Ameri- can government supplied help to the rebels but told its own people, secretiy, that the insurgents should never be allowed enough help to win. Neither were they to be told that they were to die in vain. Why, with the taste of betrayal so fresh in the mouth, did they take the American president at his word when he urged the Iraqi people to rise up and throw out Saddam Hussein? Why did they imagine that the president would commit soldiers to bring liberty to their barren mountain homeland? In more elemental terms, how could they forget that superpowers act only in their own national in- terest? The Kurds have been trying to be free for thousands of years and have invariably been sacrificed. After the First World War, when they expected to get autonomy, they and the rest of the Mesopotamians went under the British mandate instead. And when the Arab tribes in the Euphrates region rebelled in 1920, the British Army under Sir Aylmer Haldane used poison gas on them. ‘*With excellent moral effect,’’ as the army report states, Winston Churchill, when he became Colonial Secretary in 1921, recommended that the Royal Air Force use mustard gas on what he called the ‘‘recalcitrant tribesmen.”’ Nine thousand Iraqis died, one way or the other, during that uprising. The world little noted nor long remembered. A superpower, American, Brit- ish, Russian or any other, behaves according to its nature, like any elemental force of nature. Small nations that forget this must pay with blood and tears. TESTE TT TES OD World Campaign for HE Victims of War. May 8, '91 § Sign the appeal when it comes to your door. BRENDEN SHERWIN ~ MODEL 33 SJS e POWER MIRRORS AMeoFM CASSETTE WITH 4 SPKR SOUND SYSTEM Notthshore Friday, April 26, 1991 Handwriting seminar set THE B.C. 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