Page 287 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

284 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

consider renouncing her claim to sovereignty over Kuwait as a whole in return
for the cession of Warbah and Bubiyan islands. In the first week of April the
Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwaiti territory, a withdrawal which was not
wholly unconnected with the subsequent payment to Iraq of several million
Kuwaiti dinars. The Baathist junta had made its point, and if any doubts about
it remained, they were removed by the arrival in Baghdad in mid-April of
Admiral Sergei Gorchakov, the Soviet chief of naval staff.
The Russian grip on Iraq was strengthened in July 1973 when, after more

than eighteen months of negotiations, a ‘national action pact’ was concluded
between the Baath and the Iraqi communist party which admitted the com­
munists to a share in the government. It was the first official recognition of the
party as a legal political body since its foundation in 1934, and it had come
about as a result of Russian pressure. The pact provided for the formation of a
‘national front’, with the Baath in a ‘privileged’ position. The front was to be
open to all ‘progressive’ political groups in the country, including the Kurdish
Democratic Party, a provision which again reflected Russian influence, for the
Russians had encouraged the cause of Kurdish separatism on and off for fifty
years. The inclusion of the Kurds, however, was more easily decreed than
achieved. The bitter war between them and successive governments in Bagh­
dad which had dragged on, with occasional respites, for most of the previous
decade, had been brought to a halt in March 1970 by the conclusion of an
agreement conceding autonomy to the Kurds in those areas of Iraq where they
predominated. The agreement broke down through the bad faith of the
Baathist government, and the Kurds were still in a state of passive revolt at the
time of the drawing up of the ‘national action pact’. New discussions were now
opened with them, and on 11 March 1974, the fourth anniversary of the
original Kurdish compact, the Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad
announced that autonomy would henceforth be granted to the Kurds in those
areas which were wholly Kurdish - but not those where, as in the original
compact, they constituted a simple majority. The Kurds were given fifteen
days in which to accept the settlement. They rejected the ultimatum, and
under their venerable leader, Mullah Mustafa al-Barzani, they broke out once

more in open revolt.
For the Russians the intransigence of their Kurdish proteges was an embar­
rassment. While they appreciated the value of the Kurdish national movement
as a destabilizing force in Iraq, their preferred instrument for turning that
country, if possible, into a Soviet satellite was the Iraqi communist party. The
Russians’ attitude to the Kurds, therefore, was determined, as much as any­
thing, by the fluctuating fortunes of the Iraqi communists. While the latter
were tolerated and even allowed a role in government, as they were by Qassim
and in 1973 by the Baath, the Kurds were made the target of Russian obloquy.
When the Baghdad regime clamped down on the communists, as it did at t e
time of Qassim’s fall and periodically afterwards, the Kurdish strugg c was