Spring Brings Hope, Election Fever to Iraqi Kurds : Minority: A year ago, they scrabbled for food in squalid refugee camps. Today some scramble for votes.

One year ago, nothing moved in this drab, dusty city, bloodied by Saddam Hussein and abandoned by its people, like nearly all the rest of Kurdish Iraq. Today, rookie traffic cops blasting bright whistles are no match for the tangle of cars, buses, tractors and horse carts knotting Main Street here.

A year ago, flights of American helicopters trampled a wheat field in Silopi, just across the border in Turkey, ferrying supplies to Kurds trapped in desperate mountain perches. Today there is a crop in that field again, bright green, ankle high and unmolested.

A year ago, 2 million or so Kurds scrabbled pathetically for food in squalid refugee camps in Turkey and Iran. Today some of those same refugees are pridefully scrambling for votes. Elections are coming.

It is a spring of rare peace and civic excitement in northern Iraq. Farmers are planting, villagers are rebuilding, shops are well supplied. Water and electricity, radio and television have returned to Zakho, even if most telephones have not.

Uncertainties abound but they pale before allied-enforced tranquillity. There is always the chance of new violence, but its threat can never match the memory of the violence with which the Iraqi army crushed a Kurdish revolt after the Persian Gulf War.

After a tough winter when allied helicopters came back to drop 115 tons of food to snowbound villages, the north is throbbing with new life and an unprecedented sense of self. About 3 million of Iraq’s 4 million Kurds now live in Kurdish-controlled areas; as many as 1 million of them may vote to choose their own leaders.

“There’s no work and lots of people are hurting economically, but the Kurds have made remarkable headway. They have a right to be proud; they’ve restarted their lives with some dignity,” said Col. Richard M. Naab, the American who commands the small allied Military Coordination Center here.

Aid flows through Kurdish, international and private groups to quicken resettlement and jump-start development. “People are back on their feet again, really starting to organize themselves,” said Catherine Mason of San Diego, who is helping a private British relief agency distribute seed and agricultural supplies.

John Leaf, a New Zealander who works for a Wisconsin-based aid mission that is helping the reconstruction, observed, “The key thing is that people are moving back to their destroyed villages.”

Chris Studham, who works with a medical aid group based in Cornwall, England, added: “The farmers are taking back their fields. They are even lifting mines themselves.”

Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas once relentlessly hunted by Iraqi forces now guard the frontier between Iraq and Turkey. They are immigration and customs officers of what must be one of the world’s most bizarre economies: With the Iraqi north under economic blockade from Baghdad, the Kurdish area pays its teachers and soldiers with hefty duties collected on cross-border traffic.

The other day, 877 Turkish trucks, forming miles-long lines on both sides of the frontier, crossed the damaged Habur River bridge. Inbound to Iraq, they carried light general cargo. Heading back to Turkey, they scraped along with huge fuel tanks slung under the chassis.

The truck drivers buy the gas cheap in Iraq and sell it dear in Turkey. The drivers make money, Iraq manages to sell some of its internationally blockaded oil and the Turks and Kurds collect the customs duties. It is a violation of the United Nations embargo against Iraq that nobody talks about.

More riveting around the revived coffeehouses of Zakho is speculation about the first free election in Kurdish history. It is scheduled May 17 to elect a leader and a 100-member legislative Assembly for Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Eight parties are running, but tribal loyalties will probably prove most important.

In a contest of chieftains, Masoud Barzani is expected to beat Jalal Talabani for the leadership post, although Barzani’s supporters may fall short of a majority in the Assembly.

The elections have already been postponed twice, and preparations are still fuzzy.

There is, as yet, no registry of up to 1 million voters or any lists of candidates. Campaigning is mostly by word of mouth. But 18 tons of multicolored ballots donated by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia are ready. Enthusiasm and optimism are as infectious as the thirst for central authority.

“We need laws. After the elections everything will be OK,” said Zakho high school Principal Abdulaziz Rajab, who spent three long weeks in the mountains a year ago.

Like the peace in Iraqi Kurdistan, the election is made possible by an allied security umbrella that is a legacy of the Gulf War. Spearheaded by the United States, the allies rescued the Kurdish refugees last year with aid and the creation of a safe security zone in northern Iraq that encouraged them to return home. Today, U.S., British and French planes patrol the Iraqi north daily.

Meanwhile, Iraqi President Hussein glowers in impotent rage. Forbidden to operate aircraft north of the 36th Parallel, Hussein has withdrawn most state authority there, leaving a broad swath of Iraq in the hands of Kurds against whom he has warred uncompromisingly for more than a decade, with 180,000 Kurds killed and 80% of 5,000 Kurdish villages systematically destroyed.

“I Love Kurdistan,” says a jaunty bumper sticker in Zakho. Kurdistan, an independent state for 20 million Kurds now divided among Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and the ex-Soviet Union, is the old, quixotic dream of Kurdish nationalists everywhere.

But it is not an election issue: The United States, Britain, France and Turkey all oppose an independent state, calling instead for a self-governing region within a democratic Iraq.

That is what pragmatic Kurdish politicians say they want too--whatever their secret dreams.

“All we are asking is for autonomy within Iraq. People want stability after more than a year of anarchy. The Assembly will fill the vacuum,” said Safin Dizai, a spokesman in Ankara, Turkey, for Barzani followers.

A senior European diplomat in Ankara notes that even if the election does not represent a step toward an independent Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurds have taken some mighty steps toward nationhood. “They have their own forces, Western guarantees against a new Iraqi attack and an open road to the West through Turkey. It may be the best they can hope for,” he said.

If the international climate will not tolerate Kurdish independence, neither could Turkey and the allied powers stomach renewed Kurdish flight. Which makes the allied umbrella necessary for as long as Hussein remains in power in Iraq.

“If you go, we go,” said Hussain Sinjari, an official in the Talabani camp. Turkey says flatly that it will not tolerate a new refugee disaster, and the prospect is not any more acceptable to London or Paris than it is to election-year Washington.

What all of that means on the streets of Zakho now is that this is a spring of precious, guaranteed safety. It offers time for scars to heal and rebuilding to begin toward the day when Hussein’s departure allows the Kurds of Iraqi to strike a new deal with his successor.