The news today is that the Kurds are struggling to achieve some accommodation with Saddam Hussein in order to avoid a continuation of the genocide. U.S. policy must do nothing to undercut Kurdish aspirations--and I urge President Bush to do everything he can to make Saddam understand that the Kurdish positionselfdetermination and multiparty pluralismis our position. In the meantime. amid the horror and the anguished pleas for help. we should not act as though Kurdish refugees realistically can return to their villages. The fact is that Saddam Husseins forces leveled those villages at a time when the ReaganBush State Department was cozying up to the Iraqi dictator. Theyve wiped the villages out like Hitler wiped out the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice during World War II. The United States and its allies ought to be expanding the refugee safehaven zone in northern Iraq. We should step up the pace of relief efforts to an estimated 800.000 Kurds living in fields and camps near the Turkish border. And we should not be turning a blind eye. using the most specious arguments. to the plight of another 1.5 million refugees on the border with Iran. Mr. President. for years the democratic. partisan forces fighting the Saddam dictatorship have looked to the United States for help and for support.
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