ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
April 17, 2006

St. Paul native paints bleak Iraq picture in 'The Kurds'

BY MARY ANN GROSSMANN
Book Critic

"Anyone who believes that American policy is prevailing in Iraq is in denial, including the administration. The situation is very bad," photojournalist Kevin McKiernan says.

McKiernan, who grew up in St. Paul, has covered conflicts from Wounded Knee and Nicaragua to West Africa and Iraq. His work has been published by Time and Newsweek magazines and in major newspapers, and his reports have been broadcast on ABC, CBS, NBC and public television.

Much of McKiernan's reporting has focused on the Kurdish people of northern Iraq, whom he has been visiting since 1991. He made an award-winning documentary, "Good Kurds, Bad Kurds," and now he's getting critical praise for his new and timely book, "The Kurds."

In "The Kurds," McKiernan weaves together reporting, personal narrative and the history of this ethnic group whose lineage some trace to 728 B.C. Since the time of the Crusades, he points out, "the Kurds have been used by allies and enemies alike to provide a balance of power" in the Middle East.
Kurds suffered horribly under Saddam Hussein, and McKiernan's book offers important background about Saddam's 1988 Anfal campaign, for which the former dictator was charged with genocide earlier this month. During that campaign, Hussein's military killed at least 50,000 Kurdish civilians with chemical weapons and destroyed 2,000 villages.

With a population of 25 million, McKiernan writes, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own homeland. He describes them as "a loose confederation of tribes with many different dialects."

Although the Kurds are now spread across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, the glue that holds them together, McKiernan says, is that they lived on the land for centuries before these modern states came into being.

NO IMPROVEMENT

Now, Iraqi Kurds are trying to figure out how to share power with Sunnis and Shiites. Despite assurances from the Bush administration about how well things are going, McKiernan doesn't see improvement.

"To say formation of a new Iraqi government is going well is like talking about the emperor's new clothes," he says. "If our objective was to make Iraq a new island of democracy in the Middle East, that objective has been lost."
One major sticking point in forming a government, he says, is what happens to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds want to bring under their authority.

"This is their sacred place. They will go to war over this," McKiernan says of the area that was the focus of Saddam's Arabization program, which drove out thousands of Kurds and Turkmen to make way for Arab settlers.

Still, McKiernan thinks the war has been good for the Kurds. While violence plays out elsewhere in Iraq, the Kurdish area is tranquil, and the people retain their identity.

"No American solider has been wounded in northern Iraq, and there is just a token (U.S. military) force there. Our troops see going there as rest and recreation," he says. "The Kurds are asked to pretend they are Iraqis first and Kurds second. The leaders pay lip service to this, but in Iraqi Kurdistan, people on the street do not talk about being Iraqis. Arabic is not taught in the schools."

McKiernan often put himself into dangerous situations to get stories that make up "The Kurds." He sought out Kurdish refuges in the mountains of Iraq and Iran, visited guerrilla safe houses in Syria and Lebanon and faced hostile soldiers. He interviewed Jalal Talabani, first Kurdish president of Iraq, and visited the camp of militants linked to al-Qaeda.

ST. PAUL ROOTS

Those places are a long way from McKiernan's childhood home in "an old, rambling Victorian" on St. Paul's Osceola Avenue, where he lived with his parents, Eoin and Jeannette, and eight siblings. Kevin's father, who died in 2004, was chairman of the University of St. Thomas English department and internationally known for his promotion of Irish culture and language. Eoin McKiernan founded the Irish American Cultural Institute and established Irish Books and Media in Minneapolis, run now by Kevin's sister, Ethna.

McKiernan graduated from the University of St. Thomas and holds a law degree from Northeastern University Law School in Boston. He lives now in Santa Barbara, Calif., with his wife, Catalina.

After traveling in and out of Iraq for more than a decade and serving as an embedded reporter last year with the U.S. Army's 4th Armored Division in Karbala, McKiernan is not optimistic about that country's future.

He believes that civil war is already under way there and that mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods won't last much longer because there is ethnic cleansing going on.

"When the civil war starts in earnest, the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds will be loyal to their groups," McKiernan says. "There's also no question in my mind that if this civil war reaches a higher pitch, other countries will get involved. Saudi Arabia will be on the side of the Sunnis. The 800-pound gorilla is Iran coming in on the side of the Shiia."

There are not a lot of good options for the United States in Iraq now, he believes, except to put together a multinational peacekeeping force "in great numbers."

"If I were running the show, I would have done things differently at the beginning of the war. The whole thing has been defined in a way which has been defective," he says.

"We should have had more troops there. The reason we put in so few was for political reasons, so we wouldn't annoy the voting base here. Now, we hear from the Pentagon that if there is a civil war, American troops will get out of the way. To me, that is cowardly, to leave millions of individuals horribly exposed. Our responsibility, under international law, is to take care of civilians. We cannot hide."

Mary Ann Grossmann can be reached at mgrossmann@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5574.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING

"McKiernan's engrossing tale — told in the first person — brings to life a population that, despite its geopolitical importance, has rarely been covered so thoroughly for a general audience." — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Title: "The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland"
Author: Kevin McKiernan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Cost: $27.95