Film

Kurds in the way

by Dan Kennedy

Although they've been featured in a couple of low-profile recent movies -- A Time for Drunken Horses, The Wind Will Carry Us -- the Kurds aren't nearly as trendy a cause as, say, the Tibetans. Most people became aware of them 10 years ago, after the Gulf War, when the Bush administration encouraged them to rebel against Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq. Of course, both the administration and the American public soon forgot about them, leaving them to their fate. Thousands were slaughtered.

Yet the Kurds' struggle for a homeland goes on. Kevin McKiernan's compelling and deft documentary Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends but the Mountains, which screens on November 8 at Boston College, points out that of all the world's ethnic groups, the Kurds are the largest without a homeland. The problem is that they live in Turkey as well as in Iraq. When they fight our enemies the Iraqis they are good; but it's a different story when they fight the Turks, our strategically crucial NATO allies. US manufacturers have sold billions of dollars in arms to the Turkish military, which has quelled the rebellion through tactics such as leveling Kurdish villages and uprooting the population.

"Nobody knows about this subject," says McKiernan. "For example, did you know that last month US-made planes flown by Turkish pilots bombed a group of shepherds and their families in northern Iraq, in the so-called safe haven for Kurds, and killed over 50, mostly kids? It wasn't in the paper. No one from the media is there, despite the fact that so much American money is involved, so many millions of dollars. These villages are being wiped out and no one is covering it."

McKiernan first became aware of the Kurds' plight when, as a freelance journalist, he covered Saddam's atrocities against them around the time of the Gulf War. "I was doing stories on the Iraqi Kurds on CBS and NBC and The Today Show," he says. "They had a great appetite for stories about Saddam's badness. But Turkey was doing exactly the same thing, and I couldn't get that on mainstream television. It used to be that reporters were the people who went over the hill and said something important is going on. But that's changed. The television networks are saying to the public, `What is it you want to know, and we'll give you more of that.' "

McKiernan spent nine years making the documentary to get out the story that he couldn't get aired in the press. Much of the material was shot during surreptitious visits to Kurdish guerrilla units in the disputed territories. But the film didn't gel until he decided to frame it through his own personal view. The movie "used to be objective in the way that we all have learned to be objective: you put the information out there and you step away," he says. "But I couldn't get anybody interested in it. So I added this thread of my inability to tell the story, and I put in the first `I' . . . I worked the structure out [so that] the arc that I went through in my own development from '91 until this year parallels the audience getting the information. So that as I found things out, they would find things out. That was the big difference. "

Good Kurds, Bad Kurds screens November 8 at Cushing Hall 001, Boston College, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free. Call (617) 552-4295.

-- Peter Keough During President Bill Clinton's presidency, Massachusetts became an important source of Democratic fundraising. Now Representative Harold Naughton of Clinton, who is battling Phil Johnston of Marshfield for the chairmanship of the state Democratic Party, wants to transform the way the party raises money. The two are facing off in a November 15 election, to be decided by the Democratic State Committee, that will determine who will head the state party during the 2002 gubernatorial election.

"Our party in the last several years has paid too much attention to holding fundraisers for Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore," Naughton says. "There's been too much focus on $1000-$2000 fundraisers. I'd rather see a day with 50 small-dollar fundraisers around the state."

Johnston, himself a former state representative and Clinton-administration Health and Human Services official, says he'll make fundraising a key part of his job. "I'm one of those rare people who enjoys raising money," he says. "It's important we have the resources to have an effective fundraising operation. We really need to raise a million dollars above what we usually do to be successful."

Although he has strong links to the Kennedys -- he was an aide to Robert F. Kennedy and is close to former congressman Joe Kennedy -- Johnston says he's not a Kennedy plant. He notes that the former congressman has signaled that he is not running for governor in 2002. In fact, Kennedy "discouraged me from running," Johnston says. "He thought I should focus on business."

Both candidates say they will remain neutral in the Democratic primary and try to position the party to defeat the Republicans in 2002.