[link|http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040216/D80OIOMG0.h|So much for the right of conquest]

Excerpt:

With Saddam's regime crumbling in April, Mohammed Abu Khomra, an Arab, fled his home in the village of Daqouq fearing Kurdish revenge.

"Federalism amounts to ethnic cleansing," said Abu Khomra, 29, who now lives in Tuz Khurmatu, 20 miles south of Daqouq. "Kurds are now staying in our house and say they will not leave."

Like Abu Khomra, thousands of Arabs are moving out of formerly Kurdish villages in which they were settled in a campaign by Saddam to "Arab-ize" Kurdish regions.

Saddam's military destroyed more than 4,000 villages in a 1987-1988 campaign to crush Kurdish rebels. The operation included the bombing of some of the Kurdish areas with chemical weapons.

Saddam's forces killed some 182,000 Kurds, by human rights groups' estimates, and tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes. Since then, the regime moved Arabs into Kurdish villages. Abu Khomra, for example, was given a furnished house when he moved into Daqouq in 1997.

Now, as Arabs pull out, Kurds are moving back to the towns and hamlets they fled over the past decades, bringing the ethnic makeup closer to what it was before Saddam's campaigns.

Soon after Saddam's fall, Mohammed Abdullah Salehi, a Kurd, returned to his home village of Sangoor. He and his family now stay in a house first owned by a Kurd but then occupied by an Arab family that fled in April.

Salehi said he wasn't interested in settling scores. All he wanted was to farm his land and tend his goats. "Now I am at peace. I've come back to my home," he said.

Kurds are insisting on retaining - or expanding - the system of self-rule they enjoyed under U.S. protection after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, fought alongside U.S. soldiers last year and now expect a political payoff for that support.

I say:

"Ethnic cleansing" right. Cry me a river.

Until the Roman Empire kicked them out.