The Kurdish-US Dialogue: Najmaldin Karim explains how it began
It is, perhaps, useful to place that very ill-advised US policy in historical perspective and contrast it with events of 28 years ago. It is far from the first time that the US has made a poor decision with regard to the Kurds.
In the late summer of 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, the US refused to meet with Kurdish representatives, although a war with Iraq seemed likely.
Kurdistan 24 asked Karim to recount those days, and he took the story back to 1988 when he helped to found the Kurdish National Congress.
“We started having meetings with the State Department, particularly the Human Rights Bureau” after that, he said.
In addition, Karim became the first Kurd to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Some six weeks before Saddam invaded Kuwait, Karim told the committee of Saddam’s atrocities, including his genocide against the Kurds, and warned of his ambitions.
After Iraq’s August 2, 1990, assault on Kuwait, Karim continued, we spoke with “Mam Jalal,” as Jalal Talabani was known then, “and told him that it was important that he come here,” which he did.
“We tried to arrange a meeting at the State Department,” Karim explained, but “they wouldn’t meet with him,” although the Iraq desk officer did see Talabani, unofficially, outside the building.
In February, when the Gulf War was well underway, Talabani returned to Washington. A second delegation from Iraqi Kurdistan also came to Washington and included the late Sami Abdul Rahman and Hoshyar Zebari, Karim explained.
“We asked for a meeting at the State Department” and we were supposed to meet with Richard Schifter, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.
“We were at a conference,” Karim continued, and we got a call from Schifter’s chief of staff, who said, “There has been a mistake.”
“The Assistant Secretary cannot meet with them, but if they would like to meet outside the building, we’ll be happy to sit down and have coffee.”
“Mam Jalal got upset” and refused, Karim explained. “So I went with Hoshyar Zebari and Sami Abdul Rahman,” and we had coffee.
“He tried to pay for the coffee,” but, “I said no, this is not an official meeting, so we paid for the coffee.”
Karim stressed that the US would not meet officially with the Kurdish leadership, “even when US forces were fighting to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, because they had this unitary Iraq policy.”
It took another two months—after the Iraqi population rose up against Saddam, the Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south, and after Saddam had crushed those revolts, “with one and a half to two million [Kurdish] refugees on the borders with Iran and Turkey”—for the State Department to agree “to meet officially with a Kurd for the first time, and I represented the Kurdish National Congress at that meeting,” Karim explained.
Afterwards, we called on the State Department to invite a delegation from Kurdistan, “because they are the true representatives,” he continued. “We are just American Kurds here,” although “we are happy to help.”
“That’s when they asked me for the names in the delegation, and I remember that I had to get their CVs, when they were born, their education, and everything.”
“The first meeting actually happened in early April,” Karim concluded, and “things started rolling after that.”
And roll they certainly did. Somewhat over a decade later, the State Department would receive two of the men—as the President and Foreign Minister of Iraq—with whom it had refused to meet in February 1991.
Editing by Nadia Riva
