[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 120 (Thursday, September 5, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H10091-H10092]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      SECURITY OF KURDISH MINORITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Porter] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PORTER. Mr. Speaker, the Kurdish people are an ancient people. 
There are 30 million of them. They live in Turkey, in Iraq, in Iran, in 
Syria, and they are an oppressed people within each of those societies.
  None of those countries wants the Kurdish people to be united. They 
see it as in their interest to keep them divided and fighting. Whenever 
possible they supply arms to various sides and take advantage of them 
through propaganda and other means to manipulate them.
  Today the media may be focused on what has been done with cruise 
missiles, but innocent Kurdish people are being killed and the 
situation in northern Iraq is extremely grave, Mr. Speaker. That 
situation was precipitated, I believe, by our State Department's 
failure to take seriously the need to bring the Kurdish sides, the 
Kurdish factions, together and to stop their exploitation by all sides 
and to respect their rights as human beings.
  Mr. Speaker, when I sat down with representatives of the State 
Department in July, they had no information that Iran might attempt to 
cross the border in northern Iraq to attack the KDPI bases there, and 
when Iran in fact did so, less than a week later, no protest was heard 
from our Government, no action was taken. Yet at that time when Iran 
crossed the border, it was inevitable, Mr. Speaker, that the Iraqis 
would see that incursion into their territory as violating their 
sovereignty and would move north.

  They have done so obviously in great force, but the fact that they 
had not done so during the previous 5 years, since the beginning of 
Operation Provide Comfort, is clear evidence that the reason that they 
did so at that time was the incursion of Iran into northern Iraq.

[[Page H10092]]

  We did nothing about it, to head it off. We did nothing to take the 
division of the Kurds seriously between the PUK and the KDP, and I 
believe that was the beginning of the problems that we are now 
experiencing in that area.
  Today the Iraqi Republican Guards, many of them dressed in Kurdish 
garb, are in Kuysangaq, they are in Sulaimaniya, they are going door-
to-door looting Kurdish homes, and innocent people are being killed and 
dying and we are doing nothing about it.
  On the northern border, the Turkish border, Turkey has taken 
advantage of the situation to declare a 3- to 6-mile wide zone, not in 
Turkey but in Iraq, that they are presently clearing, with 35,000 
Turkish troops and armored personnel carriers in that region, moving 
out people who are living in villages, killing those that resist and 
creating a no-man's-land along their border.
  Mr. Speaker, this situation is a grave and serious one for which the 
United States has great responsibility, and it is not enough just to 
send cruise missiles to the southern part of Iraq and say that we are 
stopping aggression. The aggression is continuing to this moment. It is 
continuing almost on all sides. And the people that are caught in the 
middle are innocent people who have been taken advantage of for 
centuries by the places where they are found within societies where in 
each case they are in the minority and are being severely oppressed. It 
is time that the President of the United States and that this country 
stand up for the rights of these people who need our help as perhaps 
never before.

                          ____________________