- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 2 2003 01.28 GMT
The appeal was the idea of women's groups in Arbil, the de facto capital of the semi-autonomous state carved out in northern Iraq by the Kurds after the 1991 Gulf war.
The letter is part plea, part defiant protest. 'We are afraid of nothing but we have the right to defend our country,' it reads. 'We are not going to give up this independence we have won.'
Last week, it was not the likelihood of war that was dominating conversations in northern Iraq - most locals believe conflict is inevitable - but its aftermath. Hundreds of delegates from the disparate elements of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein met in the mountain town of Salahaddin to discuss the postwar government. The questions were: how long will the Americans stay after the fighting? What will the Iranians do? Who gets what representation in Baghdad? And, most pressing of all, what are the Turks planning?
On Friday, when football teams from Arbil and Baghdad played in the Kurdish city, the packed crowd chanted slogans against Turkey, not against Saddam.
The Kurds' fear of the Turks is not new. For 400 years, Iraq was a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire. When the Middle East was remapped after the First World War, the Kurds were split between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. Since 1991, the Iraqi Kurds have governed themselves. Now they are worried that the Turks will try to dismantle their fledgling state or even invade their territory. They point to the repression suffered by the 13 million Kurds within Turkey, where the army has killed an estimated 30,000 and displaced up to one million people. 'Turkey is worse than Saddam,' said Jwan Kamal Baban, of the Women's Union of Kurdistan.
But the Turks have already arrived. In the mountain village of Zewa in northern Iraq, 20 Turkish tanks were yesterday parked in a military base.
The Turkish military presence was established more than five years ago as part of a campaign against guerrillas from the Marxist Kurdish People's Party (PKK) based along the Turkish-Iraqi border. But although the activities of the PKK have largely fizzled out, the troops remain.
Many Kurds fear that such units will act as a vanguard for a Turkish occupation of northern Iraq in the event of a US-led war against Saddam. Last week, they refused to allow buses of international journalists to cross from Turkey into their territory if they were accompanied by any Turkish security officials.
Tensions have been exacerbated by US plans to base up to 62,000 troops in 'Kurdistan' ready for an invasion of Iraq. The troops would be able to strike quickly into Baghdad, Tikrit, Saddam's home town, and the oilfields around Kirkuk. The Turks are thought to have negotiated aid worth more than $25 billion and the right to send troops into northern Iraq.
Ankara is desperate to stop Iraqi Kurds seizing Kirkuk, historically a Kurdish city. Its oil would allow Iraqi Kurds to declare a viable independent state. That might tempt the 13 million Kurds living in Turkey to try to secede. Kurds in the south-eastern Turkish cities of Cizre and Diyarbakir told The Observer that they would welcome a 'united Kurdistan'.
But though senior Kurdish officials have threatened resistance to Turkish intervention, political leaders are keen to play down tensions.
In an impassioned speech last week, Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, sought to allay Turkish fears: 'If we were planning to announce independence we wouldn't be ashamed to say so.' However, he warned that Kurds 'were people who have struggled'. Hoshyar Zubari, the foreign relations secretary of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), said that US war plans should 'not be at the cost of the poor Kurdish people'. Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's envoy to the Iraqi opposition, has been trying to reassure the Kurds. His task has been made harder by the distrust of the Americans. In 1991, Washington called on the Kurdish tribes to rise up and then stood by as Saddam brutally crushed their rebellion.
'We [will] not accept any unilateral move by any country into Iraq,' Khalilzad told The Observer. 'There is an unfortunate dynamic of worst-casing peoples' intentions. We have made great strides towards understanding and agreement.' However, the nightmare scenario is that, following a successful campaign to depose Saddam, Iraq will slide into a civil war with factionsmanipulated by neighbouring powers. There are claims that 5,000 Iranian-backed paramilitaries have slipped into northern Iraq.
Nowhere are the tensions more palpable than at the Arbil office of the Iraqi Turcoman Front. The Turcomans, a Turkish-speaking minority, have lived in Iraq for 1,000 years but find themselves labelled 'fifth columnists'. In January, one of its leaders was arrested and accused of being a spy for Saddam. Though they deny links to Baghdad, Turcoman officials admit they would welcome a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq.
While no one doubts the difficulties of forging a new administration, what is clear is that almost everyone in northern Iraq wants Saddam ousted as soon as possible.
The letter sent to Blair and Annan has little chance of arriving. Post out of land-locked Kurdistan relies on the goodwill of neighbours. 'We have learnt that we can trust no one,' said Baban.
