by Hiner Saleem
War or no war, life continued, and I had to go back to school. I was very happy because classes were once again in Kurdish, and I became an active member of the Kurdish Youth Association. A young officer from the resistance gave us political education classes after school. He always wore an impeccable Kurdish suit, and on his hip he sported a gun with a white-plated butt. He began his classes by writing on the blackboard: “1946: creation of the Kurdish Democratic Party, birth of the Kurdish Republic. Capital: Mahbd.” Then he wrote the word democracy, separating each syllable. “DE-MO-CRA-CY” He always repeated, “This is a Greek word which means government by the people.” He would draw a large map for us, with Turkey in the north, Iraq in the south, Iran in the east, and Syria in the west. In the center, with red chalk, he drew a crescent-shaped country, Kurdistan. He explained how the British and French had divided our country into four parts, and in the course of his demonstration he enlarged the Kurdish territory, adding a half inch here and half inch there. Then he drew a blue heart on Kurdistan and cut it into four parts. “This is how the heart of the Kurds is broken apart.” His words were beautiful, and they made me melancholy.
I met Jian. She was even more ravishing than the girls in the Indian films I used to watch on my uncle’s television. She didn’t dress like the other girls. She wore jeans and big sweaters, and she had snow boots. We knew that her father was an important person and that he went abroad often, particularly to America. She was so beautiful that the boys didn’t dare approach her, except for Sertchil. He was also well dressed and had an important father. No one had the courage to compete with Sertchil, who threatened anyone who got near Jian. But I didn’t care because Jian was interested in me. One day Sertchil and I scuffled. I had to change classes, and Jian followed me. I always left for school early to meet her.
One Monday, on the little bridge where the Nauperdan checkpoint had been set up, I heard gunshots and saw a man fall under a hail of bullets. The gunman was immediately arrested and headquarters ordered him killed right then, at the scene of the crime. A man was chosen to execute the sentence. I was convinced the killer was a collaborator and therefore deserved his punishment. But I was surprised to see he showed no fear. Unable to bear his gaze, the fighter who was supposed to execute him told him to turn around. The man refused. “No, I won’t turn around.” The fighter insisted, then ended up firing two bullets, one into the man’s head, the other straight into his heart. I applauded along with everyone else, yelling, “Long live Kurdistan! Long live the general!”
Then I learned that this man had not been a collaborator. He had killed to avenge his honor. For me, only traitors to the cause deserved execution.
I arrived late to my appointment with Jian, regretting that I had applauded.
Jian and I had been selected to sing in a choir that was to accompany the singer Mahmad Shekho, a tall, thin man who wore eyeglasses with thick lenses. His accompanist was a young musician whose name was Timar. They were Kurds from Syria who had joined our movement to champion the Kurdish cause. This was the first time I’d seen Kurds from the other parts of Kurdistan—physicians, engineers, performers, artists, all kinds of people who came from territories occupied by Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Mahmad Shekho repeated constantly that our country couldn’t be liberated just with guns, that we also needed violins and drums. And we recorded many songs for our radio station, Voice of Kurdistan.
Winter arrived, snow began to fall, and I saw more and more wounded and dead brought in on mules and in trucks. And still our planes didn’t fly from our clandestine airports.
One night, we heard low-flying Iraqi planes overhead and our window broke into pieces. We rushed outside. Someone started screaming, “They’re our planes! Don’t fire!” My brother Rostam and his comrades directed hails of anti-aircraft fire at the planes. They knew full well they weren’t ours. One plane was hit and burst into flames. We cheered loudly and the planes disappeared without bombing us.
The sky became calm again; we all went down to congratulate and embrace Rostam and his companions. I was fascinated by this brother who reigned over his antiaircraft battery.
As for my father, he continued to work on Morse code signals in the military office and still waited to be summoned by the general. It didn’t dawn on him that there were now much more efficient operators than he in Barzani’s employ …
The planes returned. I was at school. We all rushed outside and went to hide in the trenches that had been dug in case of air raids. I wanted to hold Jian in my arms and protect her, but I was too shy. I looked at her, I looked at the sky; napalm bombs were falling all around us.
When calm returned, we gathered around our teacher. “When will our airplanes be called in?” “They’ll be called in, they’ll be called in …” said our teacher with a sad smile.
When I got home, I asked my father, “Papa, we were supposed to have left for a one-month picnic …” But my father turned his head away.
Soon there were bombardments every day. Our schedules were disrupted: school now started at nightfall. We would huddle around the oil lamp to listen to our lessons; it was very cold. After school, Jian walked home with me in the dark. The ground was covered with snow, and above us the black sky was studded with stars. Jian had a flashlight to light up the road. One night, as I was shivering with cold, she took a bar of chocolate out of her coat and we nibbled on it.
I found my parents at home, warming themselves around the stove. They hadn’t eaten anything and they sent me out to get bread at the peshmergas’ baker. We were entitled to two free loaves of bread per day, per person. My mother prepared tea. Rostam came to share the meal with us, then he retired with his young wife behind my father’s long turban, which had been unrolled and hung up to protect their intimacy.
Jian gave me one of her anoraks and a flashlight. The whole class envied me. Jian loved me, and I loved her as much as I loved Kurdistan. Now, thanks to Jian, at night, during recess, I could take part in the flashlight competition, to see whose light could be beamed the farthest.
Then the school had to close down: there were air bombardments day and night, and still no planes of ours in the sky. We started to lose hope.
The headquarters withdrew even farther north and we had to abandon the house. We went to hide in two huge caves, one for women, the other for men. There were no more days or nights. Between bombings, I would somehow manage to meet Jian. My father sent Morse code messages uninterruptedly from the men’s cave. We were surrounded by wounded people who had to be cared for with inadequate means. Those killed in the bombings were buried immediately. I helped the nurses and slept with my father’s Morse code beeping on one side and the moans of the wounded on the other. As I was getting up to go see Jian, a wounded man next to me was moaning his children’s names, then suddenly stopped. He had just died. I scratched the nape of my neck and found blood on my fingertips. I scratched myself again and realized I was covered with lice. This was even more unpleasant than the worms of the Zab River. I ran to the women’s cave to find my mother and show her what was happening to me. She smiled on seeing me so upset, then I saw her eyes fill with tears. She led me to the edge of a stream and washed my clothes while I shivered, wrapped in a big blanket. She sheared me like a lamb, and I didn’t go see Jian.
Word went out that Iraq and Iran were about to conclude a treaty, at our expense, with Kissinger’s consent.
On the Kurdish radio station, a poem was declaimed describing the heavenly beauty of our mountains and the pure water of our rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. But I was no longer a kid. The mountains I saw were harsh, the rivers full of worms, and the sky saturated with napalm bombs.
We received orders for the women, children, and old people to head for the Iranian frontier. We could no longer think things through rationally or soundly. A mortal solitude swept over our people. We were being betrayed by the Americans as we had been previously betrayed by the Soviets. On a beautiful March day, Saddam Hussein of Iraq signed a treaty w
ith the shah of Iran;8 we were losing our last support. A long letter by General Barzani addressed to Kissinger, begging him to keep his promise, was read over our radio, but Kissinger abandoned us to our fate.
I went to the peshmergas’ baker, but there was no longer anyone there. There was nothing but our clandestine radio station still broadcasting appeals to the entire world—Jesus, Muhammad, Gandhi, Buddha, Abraham Lincoln—to come to the aid of our people. I saw some peshmergas commit suicide in despair. Others wanted to hide in the mountains and resist, but the general understood we were caught in an inescapable net: the choice was between accepting defeat or extermination. We took the road of exile.
Along with other families, we piled into a truck bound for the Iranian frontier; there was no alternative. After several kilometers, we climbed out of the truck, exhausted, our bundles of belongings on our shoulders. We crossed the frontier under the supervision of the Iranian police and were herded up a small hill where we sat on our heels, surrounded by soldiers. I felt as if I were in a cemetery, with all those people around me, the crouching women in their dark dresses, their heads buried in their knees, weeping. We were annihilated, and I started to cry. We were taken to a camp made up of tents. It was a gift from the United Nations. We were refugees.
Then the men arrived, heads lowered, defeated—among them my two brothers and my father, General Barzani’s personal operator. Out of fear of Savak, the Iranian secret police, we couldn’t cry out against the Iranians’ betrayal of us.
Dozens of refugee camps stretched along the Iranian border. We were forbidden to go out without a Savak safe-conduct. And yet this land, too, was Kurdish; it was one of the quarters of our heart according to the sketch of our young teacher in Nauperdan. I set about looking for Jian, without success. Passing by a tent, I heard a man moan: it was Timar, one of the Kurdish musicians from Syria. It started to rain; our camp became a field of mud.
The summer went by with its blazing heat, and then winter came, bitingly cold that year.
We were moved to another camp. We now lived in long sheds with small square cells giving out on a central passageway; each family was assigned a cell. Time stood still; we had nothing to do. A few boys and I would leave the shed and walk around and around inside the camp, like dogs. Once, I spotted my brother Dilovan standing apart with some friend. I wanted to go up to him, but he signaled me to keep away; they were getting drunk.
That evening, when I returned, I saw Dilovan stretched out in his cell. He was hiccuping, and tears streamed from his closed eyes. He howled continually: “I want to go back and fight in our mountains.” He threw up in a saucepan and his wife wiped his mouth. Day in, day out, this was a recurring scene, for him and for others.
Classes started again. I still wanted to be a judge or a lawyer, and I was still looking for Jian. But deep down I knew I would never see her—or Kurdistan—again.
Passing in front of the corner of the shed where my uncle Avdal Khan and his family lived, I heard someone singing and playing the saz, the beautiful Kurdish lute. I went to look, and found Mahmad Shekho, the other singer from Syria with whom Jian and I had recorded songs for Voice of Kurdistan. He was scrawnier than before, but his voice hadn’t changed; it was still just as beautiful as ever. He smiled at me, and I went out of the room, haunted by the words of his song: “The more time goes by, the more my heart beats slowly, my beloved …”
My father gave me a bit of pocket money. I and a slightly older friend got passes for a few hours and went to Mahbd: Mahbd, the city that had been the capital of the Kurdish Republic, where Mustafa Barzani had become general in 1946; but also the city where the Kurdish president Qazi Mohammed had been hanged by the Iranians barely one year later, in March 1947.
Everyone spoke Kurdish in Mahbd, but no one ever discussed politics; fear reigned. A banner read, “The shah’s orders are God’s orders.” We stopped to eat a kebab and the owner of the little restaurant wouldn’t let us pay; he understood we were refugees, defeated Kurds. My friend, who was very talkative, asked the owner, “Why don’t you fight against the shah to liberate this part of Kurdistan?” After a long, thoughtful pause, the owner answered, scratching his head, “If the shah orders us to, we shall obey.” The owner told us there was a movie theater in town, so we decided to go. They were showing an Iranian film. When I saw the image appear on the screen, I got very excited, and once again I vowed to myself that, someday, I would bring Kurds to the screen.
Savak summoned all the Kurds in the camp to come and listen to an Iraqi minister who had arrived by helicopter to tell us that an amnesty had been granted and we could go home. We didn’t believe him; we thought it was a trap. Who could possibly trust the Baghdad putsch leaders? The Baathist minister was booed, then everything degenerated: his leg was broken and soon he was covered in blood. I was in a rage, and I punched the minister along with the others. Then the Savak men fired into the crowd and killed twelve people. Helped away by his bodyguards, the minister took off in his helicopter, in a cloud of spit and insults. After this visit, everyone did start to wonder: what indeed were we doing here, closely watched refugees, in this camp, with no future?
Some families managed to obtain visas to the United States, others to Canada. Why wouldn’t we emigrate as well? My father held a family council to consider the question. Each of us imagined himself already in America—my father a journalist, my mother a supermarket manager, my brother a general, and I making a great Kurdish film. Then my mother started talking about her brothers, her orchard, and her pomegranate trees; my father brought up his fortress-house, his friends, his land; and I thought about my partridges, my cousin Cheto’s pigeons, my school, and my river. Soon we were all weeping.
That settled the matter; we would go home. And my father concluded, “It’s more honorable to die on our own land than to become American immigrants or militiamen working for the shah.” We gathered our meager belongings. I went to pick up my school certificate and we set off for the border.
On the road there were many families, like us, going to give themselves up to the Iraqi authorities. Our small truck came to a stop; we climbed out and, after loading our skimpy bundles on our backs and walking past the Iranian soldiers, we crossed through a no-man’s-land of about a hundred yards between the two armies. In the distance we heard the Iranians bid us farewell, but we didn’t have the courage to turn around; we were already under the watchful eye of the Iraqi army. At the frontier a large banner awaited us: “Welcome to the land of the Mother Country.” Iraqi officers and soldiers awaiting us approached and helped us carry our belongings. Behind us, our people still on the Iranian side of the border watched attentively to see how we were being welcomed, and turning around furtively, I saw several of them follow in our footsteps. Still escorted by the soldiers, we made our way down a small hill, and Iran disappeared from our view. Instantly the behavior of the soldiers changed. They threw our bundles into a military truck and ordered us to get in. Two soldiers flanked us, their weapons cocked at us. And I thought of the image of partridges used as hunting bait to attract their fellow creatures. This is what we had become, and I felt guilty. We had served as bait; the others would follow us and suffer the same fate. After about a half mile, the truck pulled over and we were ordered to get out with our hands on our heads. We had to jump from the high floor of the truck; my mother fell to the ground and a soldier yelled at her to stand up at once. Then, surrounded by military personnel, the men and women were separated. We were taken to a building where we were ordered to undress. We were embarrassed, but under threat of the soldiers, we had no choice. I ended up next to my father, naked, with my hands on my head. I didn’t dare look at him. While the soldiers were searching every fold of our garments, my father, humiliated, was hiding his genitals with his hands, his legs trembling with shame. A soldier forced him to put his hands on his head; then, using his bayonet, he made him spread his legs apart and, jabbing him with his weapon, made him pivot. When the search was over, we were allowe
d to put our clothes back on. Filled with shame, I thought about my mother, my sisters, my sisters-in-law, and what they were being subjected to, and I began to think it might have been better to die in the Iranian camps than be reduced to this. In the next building, an officer waited for us with our papers, which he seemed to ignore. We had to state our names, and our dates and places of birth. When it came to “profession,” I was curious to see what my father would say. For the first time, he didn’t give his usual proud answer, “I’m the general’s personal operator.” He said, “Baker.” Then it was our turn to state our occupations: student for Rostam and me, teacher for Dilovan, my older brother. Full of contempt, the officer called us asses for having believed in America and for having challenged Baathist Iraq.
And for our crazy dreams of Kurdistan.
We went into another room for identity photos. We were all together again, men and women, and I saw my mother in front of the camera, her face under the lights. She sat in profile, presenting her right side. The military photographer ordered her to face the camera, but she didn’t move. He repeated his command, in vain: she didn’t understand Arabic. He went up to her and turned her head: she was blind in her left eye, which had a spot in the shape of a white cloud. Her face was pale and expressionless. When the photo session was over, we returned to the first officer. He took fingerprints of each of us, on the bottom of a blank sheet, and we were ordered to wait outside.
We sat on the ground, under the triumphant gazes of the Iraqi soldiers. In my mind’s eye I saw the barbed wire at the frontier, behind the hill, and another family crossing it, as we had a short while ago. My father, turning unobtrusively to my mother, whispered in her ear, “And what if we escaped to the United States?” My mother didn’t even bother responding. Rostam, glancing at the soldiers around us, asked, “How?” “It’s still possible; the border is right in front of us,” said my father. “Once we get there, we go to Tehran, straight to the American embassy.” My older brother Dilovan, who was sketching in the earth with a twig, head down, said only, “It’s over, Papa, we’ve lost everything.” My father took out his tobacco pouch and rolled himself a cigarette.