Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (58 page)

“Kurdistan has traditionally been the least developed part of Iraq, economically, politically, and socially,” Salih reflected. “If we could achieve this in Kurdistan, we could easily achieve it in the rest of Iraq.”

Yet Kurdistan also reflected a core tension within Iraq and the wider Middle East. Two often-rival forces—traditional clans and modern parties—shaped local politics. They were not always a good fit. Despite their unity in opposition to Saddam Hussein, they divided Kurdistan into two halves for a reason.

Politics in the western sector—which bordered Turkey and had its capital in Irbil—was dominated by tribe and clan, specifically the Barzani clan.

Mustafa Barzani, a charismatic, dagger-wielding fighter, launched the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq. He founded the Kurdish Democratic Party in 1946. In 1961, he led an armed struggle against Baghdad to win autonomy from Arab-dominated Iraq. In the 1970s, the United States initially encouraged the uprising to pressure Baghdad, only to turn around and negotiate a deal between Iraq and Iran in 1975 that pulled the rug from under the Kurds. Baghdad crushed the rebellion. Barzani was forced into exile; he died four years later in Washington, D.C. His son Masoud, who still wore the traditional Kurdish baggy pants and turban, inherited power.

“Until 1975, the Kurds looked at the West as saviors,” Salih told me. “But after the Kurdish rebellion collapsed, the United States became synonymous with the notion of betrayal.” Henry Kissinger, who crafted both sides of the policy flip-flop, was still a dirty word in northern Iraq almost three decades later.

“We’re afraid the United States will get involved, make promises, and then betray us again,” Salih said.

Politics in the eastern sector—which bordered Iran and had its capital in Sulaimaniyah—was defined by Kurdish intellectuals who broke away from the Barzanis after the 1975 Kurdish rebellion was quashed. They formed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a modern, leftist, and less clan-based party. It was led by Jalal Talabani, a portly and congenial lawyer with wavy hair who preferred Western suits.

The two sectors collaborated when Saddam cut off north Kurdistan in 1991. Yet they remained serious political and economic rivals. Both also had their own branches of the Peshmerga, a Kurdish militia whose name means “those who face death.” In 1995, tensions erupted into open clashes between the two parties over disputes about land and revenue sharing from their taxes on smuggling. Fighting continued sporadically for two years. Barzani finally turned to Baghdad. Although Iraqi troops had earlier killed three of his brothers, twenty-nine family members, and some 8,000 Barzani clansmen, he invited Saddam’s forces into the north in 1996 to regain territory lost to Talabani’s militia.
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Talabani damned Barzani as a traitor to the Kurdish cause.

It took years to really patch things up. The month before my visit, the Kurdish legislature had held its first meeting in six years. The driver who took me from Sulaimaniyah through the stark, brown mountains to Irbil had never been to the western sector. For him, it was like going to a foreign capital. He was quite nervous.

I called on Barzani at his scenic mountaintop villa overlooking Irbil. I asked him if fighting among the Kurds was really over.

“Yes, it was an unfortunate thing to happen,” he told me. Born in 1946, Barzani is short and still rather cherubic looking, although he is widely reputed to be stubborn and tough. He also prefers to speak in Kurdish and rarely leaves Kurdistan.

“Because of confidence-building measures,” he said, “trust has come back to people. The rank and file of the Kurdish parties have been convinced that war leads to the destruction of their people.”

With peace among the Kurds and U.S. intervention looming, the bigger question had become whether the Kurds wanted out of Iraq altogether.

On the eve of a war likely to determine Iraq’s fate for years to come, one way or the other, I asked Barzani if Kurdish leaders were willing to give up his own father’s dream of an independent Kurdistan and remain in a new Iraq. The answer could also determine the future of Iraq.

“We do want self-determination,” he replied, sitting back against a brocade settee in an ornate reception hall. The Kurds wanted a “voluntary union” in a federal framework. “There is a desire and will to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of this country within the state of Iraq. We never asked for an independent Kurdish state,” he added.

“These are only accusations of neighbors.”

Separately, when we had crossed paths in Tehran, I had also asked Talabani if the Kurds felt they would be better off on their own.

“No,” Talabani told me. “That’s very shortsighted. What we have is not stable or permanent. We need to…reunite with Iraq for a permanent democratic life.”

Landlocked, economically stranded, and politically hostage to the demands, quirks, and preferences of neighboring countries, the Kurds had learned the exorbitant costs of going it alone during a dozen years of isolation, he said. The Kurds needed the clout and seaports of Iraq. They also needed a share of Iraq’s resources.

The leaders, however, seemed to reflect a minority view.

Everywhere I traveled in northern Iraq, the overwhelming majority of students, shop owners, government employees, Peshmerga fighters, and people on the streets expressed a preference, even a yearning, to live in their own Kurdish nation. Many acted as if they already had one. With sixty-five percent of the Kurds under twenty-five, many had no memory of the days under Baghdad’s control. For them, Saddam had ruled far away and long ago—even though he was still in power.

“I only know about him from stories my father tells,” Sawsan Ali, a University of Irbil freshman, told me, virtually dismissing one of the region’s most powerful dictators. “We were just children when he ruled here.”

After Saddam cut off the Kurds in 1991, the Kurdish language made a full comeback in government, schools, and workplaces. The Kurds flew their own flag, a red, green, and white tricolor with a big yellow sun in the middle. School curriculum was “Kurdicized.”

What the Kurds do will determine whether Iraq can move beyond the primordial instincts that have defined the Middle East for millennia and ultimately hold together as a country. Iraq’s fate may ultimately be decided in Kirkuk. A multiethnic city of almost one million people, Kirkuk is claimed with equal vehemence by the Kurds, the Arabs, and minority Turkomans backed by Turkey.

Kirkuk is the Jersualem of Iraq.

The city’s importance was hinted at in the Old Testament. King Nebuchadnezzar cast the Jews of Babylon into a “burning fiery furnace,” a site some Middle East scholars believe was the endless flame from Kirkuk’s natural gas, a clue to oil deposits discovered twenty-five hundred years later that gave modern Iraq its economic and strategic importance.

Kirkuk holds the second largest oil fields in Iraq. The area has produced up to one million barrels a day; it has another ten billion barrels of proven reserves. Oil analysts believe other rich fields have yet to be discovered nearby.

Saddam Hussein went to imaginatively ruthless extremes to secure Kirkuk for the Arabs. His Arabization campaign—many Kurds called it ethnic cleansing—began with mass Kurdish deportation from the city. After the outside world protested, the regime used more subtle tactics: Employers were coerced into firing Kurdish staff. Landlords were squeezed into turning out Kurdish tenants. Kurdish children were detained until parents agreed to leave the city. Kurdish food-ration cards were confiscated to cut off access to UN aid. As Kurds fled, their homes and jobs were filled with Arabs brought up from the south. In a “nationality correction” scheme in the late 1990s, the Baghdad government also forced minorities applying for anything from school enrollment to marriage licenses and car registrations to sign a form changing their national identity to Arab. Newborns were not allowed to be registered with non-Arab names.
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The regime then adopted bizarre tactics to erase the Kurdish presence. To provide a false sense of how long Arabs had been there, tombstones with non-Arab names were rubbed out and Arab names engraved in their place. In 2002, local relief groups told me, the government offered Arab families an extra incentive, including land, if they would dig up the remains of ancestors and rebury them in a Kirkuk graveyard.

More than 120,000 Kurds had been expelled since 1991, UN officials and human rights groups told me. I drove to checkpoints in both the eastern and western Kurdish sectors and saw more families walking across. Many had been dumped at the frontier, with virtually no possessions, clothing, or furniture. The United Nations had set up tent camps with communal water and toilets, but waiting lists were long. Thousands of evicted Kurds ended up homeless. I saw one newly arrived family with six small children scouring the ground for rocks to build a hovel in a mountain clearing where other families were living under roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting. In Kurdistan, the brutal winters can sink to twenty degrees below zero.

The Kurds were intent on getting Kirkuk back. The process of Arabization, Barzani made a point of telling me, would have to be reversed.

“It doesn’t mean that apart from the Kurds there should be nobody else in Kirkuk. It’s an Iraqi city like Baghdad or Basra. There could be Arabs, Turkomans, and Shiites living there,” Barzani said. “But what we are not ready to compromise on is the city’s identity. Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan.

“For others, Kirkuk’s importance is that it lies on a sea of oil,” Barzani added. “For us, Kirkuk is important because it lies on a sea of our blood.”

Change in today’s Middle East is likely to succeed only when all major players—not just the majority—believe they have a stake in the new order. Rival identities will otherwise derail it. The sense of common nationhood is still too fragile. Suspicions run too deep.

Iraq is a telling, and tragic, precedent.

In September 2003, five months after the fall of Baghdad, I flew back to Iraq with Secretary of State Colin Powell. It was the first visit by an American secretary of state in a half century. There was still freedom of movement in Baghdad back then.
The New York Times
correspondent and I walked out of the Green Zone, met
The Washington Post
Baghdad bureau chief, and wandered around the sprawling capital. Powell, too, left the Green Zone for a meeting with Iraqi leaders. We stayed for a couple of nights in the legendary al Rashid Hotel. I visited Iraqis and former exiles who had moved back to the capital. I meandered around the Green Zone oasis of palm-fringed streets and villas. And I stopped by Vendors’ Alley, where dozens of Iraqis flogged memorabilia from Saddam Hussein’s rule. A military medal, hung from grosgrain ribbon in the red, white, and black colors of Iraq’s flag, went for ten bucks.

For the Bush administration, from a great distance, Iraq had seemed a logical candidate for change. Neoconservative theorists called it “Iraqi exceptionalism.”
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Saddam Hussein had been so ruthless at home, they argued, that “liberation” would be welcomed. The Iraqi leader was also vulnerable because he was in violation of more than a dozen United Nations resolutions spanning a dozen years. So, they concluded, Iraq would be an exception to all the dangers of a foreign army overthrowing a Middle East government.

Iraq generally also seemed to have appealing requisites for change.

It had the allure of past greatness. A cradle of early civilization, advanced cultures flourished in ancient Mesopotamia long before the empires of Egypt, Greece, or Rome. They invented writing. They figured out how to tell time. They founded modern mathematics. They were the first people to build cities. For centuries, they wrote some of the greatest poetry, history, and literature in the world.

Abraham, the father of the three great monotheistic religions, came from the Mesopotamian city of Ur. Some four thousand years ago, the Code of Hammurabi introduced the world’s first codified laws. It included trials and witnesses and judges accountable for their decisions; protection for the weak, widows, and orphans; an eye-for-an-eye punishment; and contracts, deeds, and receipts for ownership.

Iraq also had a comparatively literate society. The area along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had long been a center of education. For more than a millennium, Baghdad was considered one of the world’s most civilized cities. It had the first school for astronomers. In the ninth century, its universities imported teachers from throughout the civilized world to teach medicine, mathematics, philosophy, theology, literature, and poetry. Until Saddam drained the country’s coffers, Iraqis had the largest percentage of well-educated people in the Arab world.

Slightly larger than California, modern Iraq also had economic riches. It had the third largest proven oil reserves in the world. It had rich agriculture. And as home to the two holiest sites in Shiite Islam, it also had tourism. Hundreds of thousands of religious tourists poured into Iraq even in the worst of times. Najaf was the burial site of Ali, the first Shiite imam, after whom the sect is named; Karbala was where his son Hussein lost his battle against the Omayyad dynasty. Iraq was flush with wealth when Saddam Hussein seized the presidency in 1979. By Middle East standards, it had well-equipped hospitals and new industries. New apartment blocks and housing complexes offered modern standards of living. The arts, heavily subsidized with petrodollars, were thriving. The middle class was robust and rapidly growing. Iraq was flooded with luxury goods, from Mercedes-Benz cars to imported Camembert cheese and the latest technology.