ORDERS KURD FORCES TO RETAIN ARMS
President Abdul Salam Aref of Iraq and Mullah Mustafa Barzani, leader of the Kurds, announced February 10 that a ceasefire had been agreed upon and that peace negotiations would be opened up. Aref said that all Kurdish prisoners would be released and that the Kurds in return would lay down their arms,
. The resumption of negotiations was widely held to be a victory for the Kurds, They had agreed to negotiations last spring, but these were broken off in June when the government suddenly opened military operations in the Kurd area with the announced intention of crushing the nationalist rebellion.
Government operations, however, failed to lead to the desired results and the Aref government faced the perspective of an endless conflict which could utterly undermine its stability as the same struggle with the Kurds hed undermined. the Kassem regime.
During last year's negotiations, ‘one “of the key demands of the Aref government was that the Kurds lay down their arms, Barzani refused to do this unless Kurdish rights were fully guaranteed, In — face of this stand, the negotiations collapsed and Aref sought to des~ troy the Kurd rebellion with bombs and machine guns,
It now appears that the Kurds are still cautious about laying down their arms,
The Committee for the Defense of the Kurd People issued a press release in Geneva February 22 stating that the froeing of prisoners was going ahead but that Barzani had not given any order to the Kurds to lay down their arms. On the contrary on February ll, the high command of the Kurd revolution issued the following order:
"(n) The revolution will not come to an end before the reali~zation of all the national rights of the Kurd people, above all auto~ nomy for Iraqi Kurdistan, ,
"(b) The Kurd revolutionary forces as a whole are to remain in a state of alert, in order to prevent the government forces from taking advantage of the new situation and proceeding to possible milin tary operations, . _
"(c) No government force must be authorized to advance, even a meter, in the free territory of Kurdistan.
"(d) All leavés are cancelled,
"(e) This order is to be circulated in all military zones as well as among the revolutionary committees,"
As.to the reconstruction of areas destroyed by government forces,
~ Da
the release said that "the solution of the Kurd question cannot be achieved by simple measures of reconstruction, As important as they may be, these plans are secondary compared to the fundamental objective of the autonomy of Kurdistan,”