The hapless pawn in a bitter border war

Press, 13 April 1982, Page 21

The hapless pawn in a bitter border war

By

PETER WILSHER,

foreign

editor, “Sunday Times”

Michael Powell is a young British water engineer. For the last 423 days - almost as long as the United States hostages in Teheran were held captive — he has been a prisoner in the icy. jagged mountains on the border of Iraq and Iran. His captors, the Socialist Party of Kurdistan, have attempted to use him in ways that have become only too wearily familiar: to extract money; to demand the release of political associates; and to seek expressions of support from distant governments. Now. having failed, they have decided to give the screw a further agonising twist. They have announced, to the helpless distress of his family and friends, that they "reserve the right to bring him to trial."

What they could conceivably want to try him for is unclear. He was hardly being treated as a dangerous spy when the London-based writer. Gwynne Roberts, trekked through the snowcapped Zagros Mountains to find him last December. Indeed the place was so remote and escape-proof that he was allowed to go off on his own with a horse and a gun.

Perhaps he helped himself, without the necessary permission. to a piece of bread baked by one of the women in the camp. Nothing can be excluded in a situation which its puzzled victim describes as "quite surreal." But to talk in terms of trials, with their ominous overtones of sentence and even execution, is just cruelty. Any sympathy enjoyed by its perpetrators' — and the sad thing, from the point of view of the beleaguered Kurds, is that they have garnered quite a lot down the years — should now be forfeit until they cancel the threat and let their hapless pawn go free. There is no question that the Kurds themselves have suffered. With their distinctive language and culture.

they have been trying to carve out an independent existence in their craggy valleys since the time of the Assyrians. But for two millenia and a half the forces of geography and world politics have conspired against them. The victorious allies in the First World War gave them auton-. omy in one treaty and then cynically snatched it away with another when Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk entered a dissenting vote. Stalin gave them a short snatch of freedom in the 1945 carve-up of Iran. Atlee and ■ Bevin stopped that in short

order when oil was discovered at the foot of some of their more formidable peaks. And since then Kissinger, Nixon, the Shah, the Kremlin, Israel, and half the Arabs in creation have found it momentarily advantageous to play big-power games with these mountain men whose territory so awkwardly straddles the corner of Iran, Iraq. Syria. Turkey, and the Soviet Armenia. There is plenty in their history to excuse ruthless tenacity and an eye to national self-preservation. An endless list of leaders has been tricked, misled, hanged.

shot and sent into exile by neighbouring governments and their allies, and there can be little doubt that generations spent under the more or less explicit threat ot genocide concentrate the mind. But that cannot excuse the kind of inhumanity now threatening Michael Powell — and three Frenchmen who seemed to have been scooped up into the same situation. Powell, now just 30. comes from Fawkham in Kent. After an uneventful period m the army, he looked for a job which would help him support his widowed mother, and found work with a dam contractor in North Iraq. A lorry got stuck on a frozen road, he went out to free it, and the Socialist Party of Kurdistan picked him up and marched him away into the mountains. There he sits, with his family, his M.P.. the British Foreign Office, his employers, Amnesty International. the London-based Committee Against Racial Discrimination and Repression in Iraq, and numerous Middle East middle men. unable, or in some cases unwilling to help him. There has been some contact, but most of it has been either fruitless or distressing. Powell's family met Kurdish representatives in London, only to be told that the price of release was a $1,000,000 ransom. A promise of freedom was made in Paris (recorded in a Thames Television film) on condition that the Foreign Office arranged the route. The British embassy in Damascus tried to fix things, only to be told finalisation must take place in London.

Visas, travel tickets were made available but the key man on the Kurdish Socialists' "politburo” has been sick for several weeks and cannot fly. Meanwhile, Powell rots in the Zargros while his mother, who fears they may keep him for ever, agonises’ over his fate at home. And now there is the trial bombshell. Many travellers and expatriate workers have fallen into Kurdish hands down the years, hut mostly their ordeal has been temporary. Three Austrians, picked up by the Kurdish Democratic Party, were released recently after epic efforts byDr Ferdinand Bennepischler, the press attache at their London embassy (including a freezing night on the frontier

where he was holding off wolves with nothing but burning branches from his fire).

Two Frenchmen, held by the outlawed Iraqi Communist Party, which shares the same mountains, were released after 100 days, after "fraternal intervention" from Georges Marchais. the leader of the French Communist Party, in Pans. The West German ambassador in Teheran bought-out five of his countrymen in exchange for $1.2 million in "aid" for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (in these hills there are many parties). But for Powell, the days are beginning to lengthen into years and his suffering is surely a sufficient price.