C H R I S T O P H E R +H I T C H E N S Remember Halabja    IF THE U.S. REALLY IS CONCERNED ABOUT IRAQ'S "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION," IT HAS A FUNNY WAY OF SHOWING IT. It was interesting to see Tom Clancy, of all people, contributing to the New York Times op-ed page about false alarm elements in all the propaganda about chemical and biological weapons. His barely readable novel, "Executive Orders" -- which like all his others, is supposed to be "authentic," at least in its depiction of weaponry -- has the evil Iranians launching the Ebola virus on an unsuspecting American public. It's also ironic that Clancy's novel is filled with Arab and Japanese bad guys, when in fact the original techniques of such "weapons of mass destruction" were annexed by the British and American military from the Japanese imperial "laboratories" in occupied Manchuria, where they had been tested on live human subjects. It's true of course, as the skeptics point out, that nerve gases and toxins are unstable and hard to deploy, and can easily dissipate far from their target. It's also true that they are a menace to those who are vile enough to make use of them. (The British were planning extensive use of poison gas in World War I until, with indescribable results, it blew back into their own trenches.) Finally, it's true that -- as with nuclear weapons -- their possession has apocalyptic consequences for all concerned. Stockpile the stuff on your own territory, and all a foe has to do is figure out a way of blowing it up. "Mutual Assured Destruction" doesn't begin to describe the folly and criminality of the thing. Nevertheless, if you have a clear day and a relatively undefended target at your disposal, chemical weapons are a devastatingly effective tool in themselves, and also a dandy means of spreading alarm and despondency. In the closing stages of the last Gulf War, I visited the Kurdish city of Halabja, which is located just inside northern Iraq on the border with Iran. This town's name isn't very well known to most of the world; among Kurds everywhere it is like saying "Guernica" or "Wounded Knee" or "My Lai." One woman I interviewed, a school janitor named Amina Mohammed Amin, was still being treated for horrific burns that hadn't healed in over three years. Twenty-five members of her family had died almost instantly, along with 5,000 other citizens of the town, when Saddam Hussein blitzed it with chemical bombs on March 16, 1988. The Baathists have always denied that it was their planes that had conducted the assault, and an Iraqi shock brigade was sent into Halabja to carry away all the missile casings and unexploded projectiles. But I still possess a photograph of myself, sitting queasily next to an undetonated chemical bomb with Iraqi air force markings. It was embedded in the basement of a ruined house, and had escaped the vigilance of the much-vaunted Republican Guard. President George Bush, as part of Operation Desert Storm's marketing campaign, used to bang on a lot about this and other Iraqi atrocities, saying almost correctly that Saddam had "used chemical weapons on his own people." But back at the time of the Halabja bombing in 1988, the declared view of the United States was that the city had been poisoned by the Iranians. Remember, at that time, Iran had been our official enemy and Iraq the unofficial but definite friend. Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., convinced by staff reports to the Foreign Relations Committee that tactics of extermination were being employed in Iraqi Kurdistan, introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act in the Senate, but decisive pressure was employed by the Reagan administration to get the measure killed. Nizar Hamdoon, then Saddam's ambassador in Washington, was one of the most favored diplomats in the city, freely reaping licenses and trade deals from every commercial department and even earning the prized certificate of "moderate" from the bulletin of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. I said that Bush was "almost" correct because the Kurds, of course, are not Saddam Hussein's "own people." Like the Shiite Muslims who form the majority in southern Iraq, and who are centered on the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, they have no allegiance to the regime, which is formed around a core of regional bosses and gangsters from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit (ironically, the birthplace of Salah al-Din or Saladin, the greatest Kurd in history). While it was wonderful to see the Clinton administration get a pie in the face from its own citizens in Columbus, Ohio, the heckling around "double standards" (what about Israel and Indonesia?) was too simplistic. Saddam Hussein does run a quasi-fascist regime, and there is meaning in the old slogan that "fascism means war." And nobody knows this better than the American national security apparat, which gave Saddam a green light to invade Iran in 1980 and at best mixed signals about taking at least some of Kuwait in 1990. In both cases the expendable people included the Kurds and the Iraqi Shiites -- the Kurds because their cause offends our client Turkey and the Shiites because their cause terrifies our client, Saudi Arabia. Since U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, at least temporarily, has thrown a spanner into President Clinton's revved-up war machine, there are two immense opportunities that this latest crisis offers. The first is the chance to inaugurate an international discussion on the all-around abolition of genocidal arsenals, instead of the spasmodic demonization of just one of their owners. The second would be to give free and open support, and not the conditional covert and manipulative kind, to the peoples of a future democratic Mesopotamia. Visiting it with warplanes and missiles every five years or so simply voids any such opportunities. SALON | March 2, 1998 Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor and columnist for Vanity Fair.   TURKEY FEARS INDEPENDENCE FOR IRAQI KURDS 3/26/03 - Turkey already has a few thousand troops stationed in northern Iraq, to defend its border against Turkish Kurdish rebels who seek autonomy. Turkey fears that the battle against Saddam Hussein will leave an independent Kurdish region on its border, encouraging the Kurdish separatists Turkey has battled for years in its southeast. Hundreds of thousands of starving, freezing Iraqi Kurds fled Saddam's forces for the Turkish border after the 1991 Gulf War, creating a humanitarian disaster for Turkey. The United States has told Turkey it need not fear that Kurdish Peshmerga fighters now working with U.S. forces in Iraq would be allowed to establish an independent Kurdish state. Ankara sees a Kurdish state in northern Iraq as first step to a broader ``Kurdistan'' that would claim Turkish territory. Some 30,000 people died in an armed Kurdish separatist campaign in the 1980s and 1990s in the southeast of Turkey around Diyarbakir. Kurdish militia, backed by Washington, fear Turkey might move to crush the autonomy they have enjoyed in northern Iraq since it slipped out of Baghdad's control after the 1991 Gulf War. Turkey has kept a small detachment of troops in northern Iraq since it came under Kurdish control, arguing it must protect the Turkmen minority and root out Turkish Kurdish rebels who have withdrawn to the mountains there. Current estimates put the Turkish detachment at anywhere between 3,000 and 17,000 troops. Ozkok expressed incomprehension at U.S. pressure. ``I have difficulty understanding those on the other side of the ocean who say they are under threat but do not believe Turkey when it says we face those same threats directly across our borders,'' he said. ``If one day these events spiral out of control, I hope our friends will not be forced to ask us to take actions they now oppose.'' Kurdish Forces Prepare to Attack in North Iraq By DAVID ROHDE DOHUK, Iraq, March 25 — Kurdish officials said today that Kurdish guerrillas had been acting as guides and scouts inside Iraqi-controlled territory, helping small teams of American soldiers to enter Iraq for missions behind the Iraqi lines. Larger groups of Kurdish soldiers were seen moving into at least four front-line villages around Kirkuk and Mosul today, feeding speculation that Kurdish forces would be asked to play a significant role in any American effort to open a northern front against the Iraqi Army. The original plan to deploy a large American force was derailed by Turkey's refusal to allow the use of its ports and roads. Kurdish officials also said that American Special Operations forces and Kurdish fighters are within days of launching a ground offensive against Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic movement. The group, which the State Department says has ties to Al Qaeda, controls a small pocket of territory sandwiched between Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq and Iran. Combined with the continued attacks by allied warplanes on Iraqi positions around the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, the pace of activity here seemed to quicken. Senior Kurdish officials in northern Iraq have expressed surprise at what they said was the slow pace of the American-led offensive, not only in the north but also in southern Iraq. "Unless you show some visible gains, people will be emboldened," Hoshyar Zebari, a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said of the Baghdad government and its supporters. "There will be more resistance." Kurds who served in the Iraqi army during the first Persian Gulf war contrasted the relatively light air war in the current campaign with the 38 days of pre-invasion bombardment they endured in 1991. "From early morning until late evening, this intense bombing, I could not even move," said a Kurdish official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. "I myself left my unit and went home." Kurds today also appeared to have negotiated successfully with an Islamic group that posed potential risks to American soldiers in the anticipated battle against Ansar al-Islam. The group, Komali Islami Kurdistan, occupies a town and military positions adjacent to territory held by Ansar al-Islam. American cruise missiles struck Komali military offices and barracks last weekend, raising concerns that the group, which has maintained relationships with both Ansar and the main Kurdish groups, would be driven into Ansar's ranks. Komali is believed to have 700 to 1,200 guerrillas. Komali, a comparatively moderate group that had never declared hostility to the United States, said today that it had no idea why American forces attacked its bases. It said more than 40 of its members were killed, a figure smaller than the Kurdish authorities' estimate that more than 130 Komali fighters died. Whatever the number, today, after two days of talks brokered by Iranian intelligence officials, Komali announced that it was moving to a village away from the front. A senior Komali member, Anwar Mohammad, said the move was not a surrender so much as a practical necessity "so we don't give another excuse for the Americans to attack." Four militants from Ansar al-Islam infiltrated Kurdish front lines near Halabja on Monday night and attacked a Kurdish post in the village of Anab, not far from where American soldiers have been meeting Kurdish commanders. The Ansar guerrillas threw a grenade into a bunker, killing one Kurd and wounding several others. Three of the attackers were killed. One was a Kurd. The others were Arabs from either Jordan or Syria; a Kurdish security official said they appeared to have been Taliban fighters who fled from Afghanistan during the American offensive there in 2001. Bahman Ghobadi Interviewed by Jamsheed Akrami Your short films and your first feature were about children. You have mentioned your childhood as your biggest source of inspiration. What made you abandon the subject for your new film? I haven’t quite distanced myself from children in this film. You see them in a few scenes and in some other scenes main characters display carefree and comical behaviors typical of a child-like mentality. Where did the idea for Marooned in Iraq come from? I spend two or three months in Kurdistan every year trying to discover the uncharted corners of the land. As I travel, I come into contact with a wide variety of people. The characters you see in this film are some of those people and their stories. How long did it take you to shoot the film? It was a difficult shoot that lasted just over three months. What made the shooting difficult? Well, I had to switch my director of cinematography halfway through the film. This made us lose 25 days of great snowy weather. Also, a great deal of the support I had been promised never materialized. What kind of support? I had planned to re-create scenes from the war, and I needed support from the military and the government to do that. In Iran, we don’t get any free assistance from the government. To finance the film, I had to sell my camera and the domestic rights of the film to Farabi Cinema Foundation. You have shot the film in a harsh and inhospitable terrain. The locations and the inclement weather must have made it hard to shoot the film? We were determined to shoot the film in real locations, so we knew we had to deal with harsh weather conditions. What we did not expect to happen was for the winter weather to precede the fall weather, which is what happened last year! This was so bizarre. It really complicated our planning and seriously set us back. In both your films, we rarely see urban environments. You have a clear proclivity toward rural and mountain areas. I am not terribly fond of living in Tehran because of all the air and noise pollution. Also, strange behaviors and complicated relationships, which come with living in the big cities, make me run away and seek refuge in the nature any chance I get. I find the villages of my homeland to be the best shelter for me. I cannot think of anything more desirable than living close to nature among simple and kind-hearted people. And again you have several scenes staged in the snow. I cannot picture Kurdistan without cold and snow. All my memories of Kurdistan are somehow winter memories, maybe because all the wars and political turmoil in the area have happened in the winter.  Do you use snow as a symbolic motif in your films? I see snow as a cleanser. To me, the white purity of snow symbolizes the innocence of the suffering Kurds. I have always viewed Kurdistan’s nature as somewhat treacherous. The wheat fields seem to produce a harvest of mines. It is so easy to step on a mine and blow yourself to pieces. In the border areas, one or two people die every day from stepping on mines. Who have planted these mines? The neighboring countries like Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The mines are made in countries like Germany, Israel, and the United States. You shot all your shorts and features in Kurdistan. What is the main attraction of Kurdistan as a setting for you? My interest in Kurdistan is so deep-rooted in my heart. Images of Kurdistan are etched in all the corners of my mind. It pains me to see how other people have always shown Kurdistan in their mindless action movies as a land where its people don’t engage in anything but war and bloodshed. I want to erase those negative images with my films. How was the film received in Iran? The reception in the Kurdish towns was tremendous. The film ended up being one of the top three box office hits ever shown in Kurdistan. Most of the Iranian film critics also liked the film better than my first feature. Have you shown the film in Iraqi Kurdistan? Yes, and it was well received there as well. Did you use mostly non-actors again? Yes. Most of them had never seen a movie camera before. The only exception was Saeed Mohammadi who plays the young teacher, who had appeared in other films and already garnered a reputation in Kurdistan as the Iranian Al Pacino! Did you use any Iraqi Kurds in the film as cast or crew members? If so, how did you work with them? I did, especially in the camp scenes where a lot of the kids are Iraqi Kurds. There was really nothing different about working with them. Your actors have comical physical features. Is that what you were looking for when you were casting them? The physical characteristics of the cast were quite important to me. I searched hard to find these people. Are your three leads real life musicians? Yes, they were well-known musicians in Sanandaj. How are they doing now? Mirza is over seventy years old and is retired. Barat and Audeh are in their fifties. They are reluctant to play at weddings anymore because people look down on wedding musicians. Barat and his family earn a living now by making daffs (the instrument Audeh plays in the film). Audeh used his salary from the film to buy a cab and start a new career, though he recently called me to say he was determined to do more acting, too! You have made a very crowded movie. Was crowd control a problem during the shooting? The nature of the script required the extensive use of crowds. The extras were quite cooperative.  As Kurds, they felt they had a natural interest in helping this film. Compared to A Time for Drunken Horses, which was a bleak account of Kurdish life, this film is lighter and has a good dose of comedy, though it turns grim at the end. I wanted to take a different look at the Kurds in this film. That is why I rendered it less grim and used humor throughout the film. Humor is the new weapon used by the Kurds. They wear it on their weary bodies and minds to survive the hardships better. I had to bring back a sad and sobering tone at the end so the people would not leave the film thinking that Kurdish life is all fun and games. I wanted to remind them that agony and misery are inevitable facts of life in Kurdistan. According to your script, Hanareh left Mirza some 23 years ago. That is when the Islamic revolution broke out in Iran. Are you implying any connection between the two? Yes, there is an oblique reference to the banning of women singers from performing after the revolution. Hanareh can no longer sing in Iran. What is the exact time frame of the film? Right after the Gulf War when Saddam used chemical weapons on the Iraqi Kurds? Correct. The story unfolds after the Gulf War and Saddam’s bombing of Halabcheh. How do you see the current situation in Iraq? There is a huge bomb ticking under Iraq, which threatens the Iraqi Kurds more seriously than anyone else. Not having quite recovered from the earlier wars, they are now being forced to enter another one. Saddam is a criminal and should be eliminated, but he could be eliminated without an all-out war. Do you think the war is inevitable now? If so, how is that going to affect the Iraqi Kurds? Yes, I do. I think it will determine the fate of the Iraqi Kurds one way or another. The film is broken down into two almost equal halves; with the first set in Iran and the second in Iraq. By giving equal time to the Iranian and Iraqi parts, I wanted to try to blur the distinctions between Iranian and Iraqi Kurds, except that the Iraqi Kurds have been massacred by the Iraqi government. The Kurds are Kurds no matter where they are. There have been a number of other Kurdish films made by Kurdish filmmakers living outside of the Kurdish territories over the past couple of years. Do you see the signs of a burgeoning Kurdish film movement? I guess it is too early to say a movement is in the making. We need to wait a few more years to see if the trend continues before we can claim a Kurdish Cinema has taken roots. What was your artistic inspiration for the film? The film has the chaotic combination of comedy and drama, as well as anger and humor, typical of Emir Kusturica’s films. I love Kusturica’s films. I love the energy and the music of his film. I see a lot of common characteristics between his characters and the Kurds. But you don’t see the magic realism of his films in my work. Pure realism is still more appealing to me. Some of the best moments of the film happen on the margins of the plot. They are moments of people’s lives going on in the background, scenes like Audeh taking a shower and women making bricks or setting up tents…. The journey of Mirza and his sons in search of Hanareh was only an excuse for me to take the viewers on a trip deep into the heart of Kurdistan and show them how the Kurds live. Hanareh’s story does not necessarily stand out among the millions of stories of the Kurdish people. You can find amazing stories in every corner of Kurdistan.  In the very first shot of the film, we hear the frightening roar of unseen bombers immediately followed by music. This odd combination of horrifying and pleasant sounds dominates the sound track throughout the film. The roar of the bombers and explosions has become part of the Kurdish music. We are so used to it that it does not terrify us anymore. When they discover mass graves in Kurdistan, no one is shocked. Everybody has a tragic story; every family has lost someone. War has turned into a melody for me. It used to be a sad melody, but now we have heard it so often that we have learned to dance to it. We have become intoxicated with war. The old man referred to as the doctor in the film explains AIDS as a disease affecting mules. Is there any truth about that kind of perception of AIDS? I did not intend that as a commentary on people’s ignorance of AIDS. I was interested in the humor of the scene. But it is also true that the government has not paid any attention to this problem in our region. You have re-constructed the scene from A Time for Drunken Horses where the smugglers are attacked by Iraqi bombers as they are crossing a mountain path. Why did you decide to re-visit that scene? I wanted to show the lives of the characters of the earlier film had not changed at all. I also wanted to point out that every one in that group of people has a unique story. We followed the story of Ayoub and Madi in the first film, and Mirza’s and his sons’ here. When the trio comes across a group of kids being taught by a teacher on the mountain paths, one is reminded of Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards, in which the scene you are depicting is the central subject. The characters loudly wonder about a question that many viewers of Samira’s film might have had in mind. “What are those kids doing in the middle of bombing and mountains alone with no parents?” Is this an inside joke? No, it is not about that film. When I was shooting the school scene of A Time for Drunken Horses, where they are reading a lesson about airplanes, one of the kids asked me if I had ever flown on an airplane. The whole class seemed fascinated about the issue, and I ended up  talking to them about airplanes for couple of hours. Later, when I was flying over Kurdistan one day, I was reminded of the curiosity of those kids about airplanes and I decided to do a scene with kids and their teacher talking about airplanes on top of a mountain. The character of the teacher is inspired by an uncle of mine, who was a dedicated teacher and would always take his rural kids to the city to show them around and satisfy their curiosity. In an interesting scene, you use the bombers sound effects on paper airplanes flown by the kids. Is that a commentary on the futility of war? True, and also how war has turned into something as ordinary as a children’s game for people. Music plays an important role in the film. Is the kind of music played by the trio in the film typical Kurdish music? The music you hear in the film is Kurdish folk music, which is exactly what the characters in the film play in real life. It is a kind of primitive, high-energy music that the players just acquire from their communities without any formal studies. You have cast your mother as the pivotal but unseen Hanareh? Why don’t you show her? Was she okay with that? My mother had no objection, because she is the real filmmaker in my films. She never lets me get away with doing anything less than my best. I needed six hundred women for four shots in the film. I found out it was very difficult to find all those women and I was content to do the shots with sixty women. But my mother got some of her friends to help her and found me six hundred women! By not showing Hanareh, I was trying to say our homeland is full of Hanarehs. You can think of the young woman Barat falls in love with as another Hanareh, or Hanareh’s own daughter. You show the woman whose voice Barat falls in love with either as shadow or in silhouette the first time they meet. Why? She proves to be an elusive presence. Is this a veiled reference to women’s singing being banned in the Iranian media? Absolutely. I also wanted to draw a parallel between her and Hanareh so we can see them both in the same light. Did you have any difficulty with the Iranian censors? Their only objection was to the original title of the film. They thought it smacked of Kurdish nationalism. I just laughed at them, and fought off their insistence to change the title. They gave me more problems in distributing the film. They booked it in only one theater in Tehran without any advance publicity. This happened at the same time the U.S. government refused to give me a visa to come to the U.S. Borders feature prominently in your films. At the end of A Time for Drunken Horses, the main character crosses the border into Iraq; in this film the main character crosses the same border back to Iran. In both scenes the characters are carrying another person.  Borders have created the worst problems in the Middle East. Because you have borders, you also have mines to reinforce the borders. Borders are a legacy of the big foreign governments in the area. You can travel all over Europe with a bicycle without worrying about borders, but in our region you cross a border, and you end up with eight years of war. Unfortunately, even the Kurds have confined themselves by borders. In Iraqi Kurdistan, there are two different Kurdish areas with two different governments, and you need permission to go from one area to another. To me, a border is where all the other problems-- like wars, mines, and cultural depravation-- come from. The film ends with a note of optimism. Failing to see Hanareh, Mirza takes back her little daughter - whose name, Sanooreh, means “border”.  If Hanareh has lost her voice in the chemical bombing, Barat has found a younger woman with a magic voice. Kurdistan is full of Hanarehs. Everywhere you turn, you can find one. Hanareh means pomegranate in Kurdish, and to me, it symbolizes Kurdistan.  Despite all the hardships, hope remains an inseparable part of our lives. Although you are still quite young, you have started your own company, and you are planning to produce and distribute other young filmmakers’ films as well. I hope to be able to produce a few short and feature films in this company every year. I am planning to also start a traveling school for teaching filmmaking and showing films in different parts of Kurdistan.  Recently, we bought twenty thousand children’s books for distribution in deprived parts of Kurdistan. The idea is to encourage rural kids to read so they can develop a better understanding of themselves and the outside world. Your next film? I am working on a script that will have the title of either Zoroaster or Satellite. It is about the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey and somehow relates to the U.S. – Iraq war. It will be a very different film, and I’ll be shooting it in the spring for a change! * Jamsheed Akrami is a professor of film at William Paterson University.