Why Kurdistan Matters

Why Kurdistan Matters

Tim Goot-Brennan on Why Kurdistan Matters

I. The Other Iraq

“YOU ARE welcome here,” the cab driver said. I had just arrived in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Conditioned by thousands of news reports, I jumped into the cab with some nervousness. But Iraqi Kurdistan is not Fallujah. Thanks to the U.S. and U.K. armed forces, the Kurds have transformed northern Iraq from the grimmest part of the Middle East into a relatively free and functional society.

Iraqi Kurdistan is home to about six million people, mostly Kurds but also Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arabs, and Armenians. The Kurdish people make up the largest stateless nation in the world, outnumbering the Palestinians, the Tibetans, the Chechens, and the Sri Lankan Tamils combined. According to American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith, there are roughly eighteen million Kurds in Turkey, eight million in Iran, and six million in Iraq. There are, in addition, perhaps two million in Syria, and hundreds of thousands in Western Europe, the Caucasus, and Israel.

Historically speaking, it is the Kurds of Iraq who have been worst treated. At the peak of the persecution, in the late eighties, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime undertook a campaign of extermination against them. The Al-Anfal campaign involved aerial bombings, mass deportations, concentration camps, firing squads, and chemical gas attacks. Nearly every Kurdish village was destroyed. Perhaps 200,000 people were killed.

In 1991, the Iraqi Kurds rebelled. Saddam looked weak, and the Americans seemed poised to overthrow him. But the United Nations had approved only the expulsion of the Iraqi Army from Kuwait, and George H. W. Bush was reluctant to upset the regional balance of power. So the Kurds were butchered again. Christopher Hitchens described northern Iraq at that time as “a howling emptiness of misery where I could catch, for the first time in my life, the actual scent of evil as a real force on earth.” Hundreds of thousands fled immediately to Turkey and Iran. The Turkish government turned most away at the border. Television coverage of families begging for food and dying shamed the American government into establishing a temporary “no-fly zone,” which was maintained—without the U.N.’s permission—until 2003.

“All across Iraqi Kurdistan,” Hitchens wrote in a 1992 essay, “you can drive for miles, map in hand, and mark off each succeeding heap of stones as the place where a village once stood.” Today, walking the streets of Erbil, the capital, you can see thriving restaurants, densely populated parks, and newly constructed malls. On February 14, I found a Valentine’s Day art exhibition in the middle of the busy city just below the ancient citadel. Outside the metropolis, I saw entire villages that have been rebuilt since 2003.

Kurdistan is a Sunni-majority society, but the government is secular. Non-Muslims live peacefully alongside Muslims. Women walk the streets unchaperoned, sometimes without a headscarf, never in a head-to-toe burka. All areas of public life are, in principle, open to females. Kurdish leaders, heavily involved in writing the post-Saddam constitution, have secured for their region a great deal of independence from the central Iraqi government. And, though the Kurdistani sense of patriotism is potent, there is little ethno-nationalist chest thumping.

Kurdistanis have their own flag, their own universities, their own newspapers, and their own police force. They also have their own parliament, in which Kurdish is spoken–something strictly forbidden in the Turkish parliament, let alone in the halls of the Iranian or Syrian administrations. They control their own borders, and their national militia–the Peshmerga (“those who face death”)–has a reputation for exceptional sturdiness.

II. The Kurds and America

IF A shoe-throwing journalist has come to represent the summa of Iraqi opinion concerning George W. Bush, the view from the north is different. In Kurdish eyes, the toppling of Saddam meant liberation. “I like the American army because if the Americans had not damaged the Iraqi regime, anyone cannot damage this regime,” said Zhero, a student at Salahaddin University. He described Bush as “the leader of freedom.” “Generally we are against war, but for making us to be free it was good,” a girl sitting across the table added. I asked whether these students thought killing American soldiers in Iraq was justifiable. They looked incredulous.

In February 2003, while Westerners took to the streets to demonstrate against the war, the Iraqi Kurds held their own demonstration in favor of regime change. As American correspondent Quil Lawrence writes, “The Kurds had trouble understanding why no one in the world’s capitals had ever taken to the streets to protest the gassing of Halabja, or ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan, but now hundreds of thousands took to the streets to stop America from removing Saddam.” The Peshmerga took more casualties in the Iraq War than any other U.S. ally.

Not far from the Iranian border, in the guarded compound of the secular-leftist Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, the eloquent Secretary-General Abdullah Mohtadi told me he believed that the Western left “discredited itself” by siding with “the anti-democratic forces” on the question of Iraq. “But I must say, I also blame the Arab intellectuals. Because many, many of them are very silent when it comes to despotic regimes, when it comes to human rights, when it comes to women’s rights in their own society. But they’re very outspoken against the United States.”

There is, it should be said, a healthy degree of cynicism about American interests in Kurdistan. At Koya University, a girl complained to me that the Americans had not found any “atomic bomb” in Iraq. “Don’t forget Halabja,” my local guide, Sarbaz, admonished her. At the other extreme, local activist Aras Abid Akram told me that the attack on Halabja—in which he was the sole survivor of his family—was “the main justification for the removal of Saddam.” He blames the Americans for not doing more to help with the reconstruction of his city.

There is also a hint of conspiracy-mindedness: some Kurds, accustomed to unrestrained brutality in the region, refuse to believe that certain tactics are considered too harsh to be used in the struggle against Al-Qaeda; if America doesn’t wage total war, there must be a sinister motive.

But the most common reason for lingering resentment is that the intervention did not come earlier, before the slaughter of 1991, or to protect the Kurds from genocide in the eighties. To this day, every Kurdish schoolboy knows about Henry Kissinger, who betrayed the Kurdish rebels in 1975. “No friends but the mountains” is a well-worn Kurdish aphorism.

Political recognition from the West is now considered vital. Further, Kurdistanis want a long-term, unobtrusive American military presence. “If America withdraws now, this situation of ours will be under threat, and all of Iraq will be under threat,” said Abdullah Haji Mahmood, a social-democratic politician whom I met in the city of Sulimaniya. An American alliance is seen as the necessary defense against meddling from Turkey, Iran, and the central government in Baghdad, as well as an important check on the Kurdistan government’s power. In Kurdish politics, only hardline Islamists and communists seem to be seriously anti-American, and neither faction has much support.

Few Kurds I spoke to expected much of a change in American policy under the Obama Administration. The new president, like his predecessor, is popular in Kurdistan. “Yes, We Can Change It” was the slogan of the major opposition list in this year’s election. Yet it is noteworthy that President Obama has been publicly silent on the Kurds. And, if he wishes to renew good relations with the Arab states and Turkey, protecting Kurdistan might become even more difficult.

III. Statehood

THE WEST has disappointed Kurdish aspirations before. With the death of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, and with President Wilson trumpeting the principle of self-determination, Kurds thought their time had come. Ultimately, however, Turkish anger and Western lethargy meant that the promise of a Kurdish state, enshrined in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, was discarded.

The Kurdish people now have another chance, and the entire region is watching. Dispersed throughout the region, Kurds are, by definition, enemies of hardline Kemalism in Turkey, of Shia-Persian fanaticism in Iran, and of Baathism in Syria. Few see themselves, in anything other than a nominal sense, as Turks, Iranians, or Syrians.

Though an independent state of Kurdistan does not exist, some Kurds speak romantically of “Greater Kurdistan,” an area that encompasses huge swathes of southeastern Turkey, a sliver of northeastern Syria, a good chunk of western Iran, and the bulk of northern Iraq. Iraqi Kurdistan is the size of Switzerland; “Greater Kurdistan” is almost three times as large as the entire United Kingdom. Nationalist parliamentarian Ghafour Makhmouri actually insisted that I refer to Iraqi Kurdistan as “Southern Kurdistan.” That was wishful thinking: Only a few Iraqi Kurds—and no senior officials—take “Greater Kurdistan” seriously. Nonetheless, the very idea is enough to spook the neighbors, who see Iraqi Kurdistan as “the first step.”

Azad Dewani, former president of the Syrian Kurdish Yekiti Party, told me that the Kurds of Syria have been inspired by the example set by their Iraqi cousins. “After the collapse of the Iraqi regime Kurdish people celebrated everywhere, and 2004 was the uprising of Kurdish people in Syrian Kurdistan,” he said. “We called for democracy in Syria, respecting human rights, and as I mentioned we highly called for Bush and his health and for his success.”

Displays of Kurdish pride are swiftly and brutally put down in Syria, as in Iran and Turkey. None will tolerate having its own Kurds break away. “Like no event since the 1948 creation of Israel, a declared Kurdish state within the borders of Iraq will unite the entire region in opposition, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf,” writes Quil Lawrence. Given the relative weakness of landlocked Iraqi Kurdistan, declaring independence in the near future would be extremely imprudent.

Some argue that the increasing economic ties between Kurdistan and its neighbors will make war impossible. This Kantian vision, pushed by the Kurdistan government, has a certain plausibility. But little of the Kurdish experience in the Middle East encourages the view that homo economicus runs the show. The Kurds need Iraq to hold together as a constitutional republic more than anyone else.

IV. Not Another Gaza

IT IS often asserted that poverty and oppression cause fundamentalism and fanatical violence in the Middle East. Kurdistan has been one of the most impoverished and thoroughly violated places in the Islamic world, yet it has succumbed to neither of these supposedly ineluctable temptations.

There are fundamentalist Islamic parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, but they have scant backing. For most Kurds, the first allegiances are to family and country, not the abstract ummah. Many Kurds are “cultural Muslims” rather than strict pietists; they drink and smoke freely, even if their mores are relatively conservative. Necessarily, the flavor of Islam is different here than in, say, Saudi Arabia: “Islam says that every minority has the right to independence,” insisted Islamist leader Ali Bapir, as we sat in his party’s Erbil headquarters. Though he spent 22 months in an American-run Baghdad prison, accused of cooperating with Al-Qaeda, Mullah Bapir earned a reputation for ruthlessness as an anti-Baathist Peshmerga, not as a Mujahid. By Kurdish standards, he is an extreme fundamentalist, but even he will not endorse bin Ladenism.

The examples of Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan have also been instructive for the Kurds. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban have not exactly brought boom times to their host countries. Radical Islam is therefore generally distrusted. The local authorities keep an eye on the imams. At a political meeting I attended, a mullah complained: “Before these Islamic parties came to Kurdistan, the mullahs were respected by the people. But these parties made the people hate Islam and mosques.”

If terrorism is one of the natural responses to injustice, the Al-Anfal campaign ought to have led Kurds to attack unarmed Arabs and blow up buses in London. After all, Saddam Hussein relied on Western diplomatic and commercial ties to carry out the mass killings. But a decision to eschew terrorism was made by the Kurdish leadership in the seventies, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was garnering so much attention with its violence. Kurds do not lightly excuse the targeting of civilians.

In part because “Zionist” is the worst insult in the local fanatics’ lexicon, the Kurds have built a special relationship with Israel, and they seem more or less immune to anti-Semitism. Just as Saddam Hussein used to call Kurds “Zionist agents,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi once described the Kurds as “a Trojan horse” for Jewish domination. With its secular authority and moderate Islam, Kurdistan is despised by Islamic terrorists. “They are our great enemies,” a twenty-three-year-old student named Daban told me. “I think that terrorism or terror movements should be uprooted. Okay? By military actions.” Another student, Fikry, added: “You make jihad when you have a rightful case, but Al-Qaeda didn’t have a rightful case.”

The Kurdistanis have proven extremely effective at scotching the chances of the Zarqawiites. In the cities, you are only a short drive from Al-Qaeda-infested Mosul and turbulent Kirkuk, but you can safely walk the streets alone. Suicide attacks have succeeded in the official Kurdistan region only a few times, which is why you don’t see any coalition soldiers around. At checkpoints, Arabs are scrutinised by the Peshmerga; sporting a large beard brings extra attention. Kurds think this profiling is basically reasonable. And, for the most part, non-Kurdish Kurdistanis are treated with genuine decency.

There is a sense of realism about the Kurdish people. They do not demand vengeance against Arabs, or waste time dreaming of “Greater Kurdistan,” or insist that all action is useless until the UN sends aid. The year after the no-fly zone was established, the Kurds held a parliamentary election. They rebuilt the villages that had been destroyed by Saddam, and they restored agricultural life. Within a decade of self-rule, they set up more schools and universities in Kurdistan than the Baghdad authorities had established in the region in seventy years.

V. Promises to keep

NOT ALL is rosy in northern Iraq, of course. The press is relatively free, though there have been some incidents of government strong-arming. According to Halabjan journalist Khabat Nawzad, the situation “would be much worse” without pressure from the United States and NGOs. But in 2008 the government passed some of the most liberal free-speech legislation in the region. Farhad Awni, President of the Kurdistan Journalists’ Syndicate, heaped praise on the new legislation, saying that journalists are now essentially “free to express their point of view as they want.” The journalists’ union in Iraq used to be run by Uday Hussein.

The conflict over Kirkuk, outside the official Kurdistan region, is more worrying. Kirkuk was once a Kurdish-majority city, but it became a focus of ethnic cleansing in the Al-Anfal campaign. The city is today home to Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, Chaldeans, and Assyrians. Suicide attacks against Kurds are relatively common there. The Kurds describe the city as “our Jerusalem.” However, no state in the region wants to see Kirkuk become part of official Kurdistan, lest its oil wealth underwrite independence. Indeed, Turkey has said it would militarily intervene to prevent Kurdistan claiming Kirkuk. Article 140 of Iraq’s constitution requires a referendum to decide the city’s status, but it has been repeatedly postponed. The issue seems unlikely to be resolved without much more bloodshed. My driver audibly exhaled, only half-joking, as we left the city limits.

Perhaps the greatest concern is corruption. The political elite has squandered fantastic amounts of money, and cronyism is endemic. Many jobs are tied to the big political parties, so pushing for reform can be risky. Politicians have become overly attached to the perks of office.

In the nineties, the Kurds suffered a civil war because of the petty divisions between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P.) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.). Now, they are faced with too much unity between them; what once looked like encouraging comity has come to seem like base collusion. “If there were no American pressure on the political parties of Kurdistan, the K.R.G. [Kurdistan Regional Government] would become dictatorial,” said Rebin Rasul Esmail, Regional Director of the American Society for Kurds.

Still, a lively election campaign has just concluded, with 509 candidates competing for 111 parliamentary seats. The rallies were bigger and more boisterous than ever before, and the voting turnout was around 80 percent. In past elections, only relatively unpopular minor parties ran against the K.D.P. and P.U.K. But this year Nawshirwan Mustafa, a PUK co-founder, formed an independent, anti-corruption list called Gorran (Change). With well-respected leadership, widespread popularity, and independent financial clout, Gorran is an authentic opposition.

Before the election, it was unclear how the major parties would respond to an electoral blow. There were serious allegations of voter fraud in the 2005 election, and some observers feared the governing parties would become increasingly autocratic. “I am ready even to sacrifice my blood for the people of Kurdistan,” said Mam Rostam, a genial Gorran leader and celebrated Kurdish warrior, when I met him in Sulimaniya. The major parties have their owned armed forces; Gorran does not.

The full picture is not yet clear, but Gorran has apparently won the vote in Kurdistan’s second city, Sulimaniya, which is the home of Jalal Talabani’s P.U.K. All counted, Gorran candidates may have won more than 25 parliamentary seats. In any case, the KDP-PUK majority has been drastically reduced. This was not one of the Middle East’s rubber-stamp elections. On the other side of the coin, the election has been tarnished by incidents intimidation and ballot tampering. Without the intervention of American representatives on the ground, there might have been serious government-sponsored violence in Sulimaniya.

Victory for Gorran was always extremely unlikely. The leaders of the P.U.K. and K.D.P. are genuinely admired, and they have far greater budgets at their disposal, as well as the normal advantages of incumbency. But the existence of a muscular parliamentary opposition should help to clear the air around a stagnating political class.

We must not idealize Kurdistan. There are, so to speak, miles to go before it sleeps. But nor should we belittle its achievements. Quite recently it was a nation on the brink of ruin. Today, it has a decent government, a platform for future prosperity, and an increasingly liberal political character. There are certainly limits to how much Western power can do for the cause of constitutional democracy abroad. But it can do something. And, though it will require very good judgment, it will not require much power to forestall a regional crisis over the Kurdish question or to fortify the gains inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

Tim Goot-Brennan is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

References:
Galbraith, Peter W., The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End, London: Simon & Schuster 2006.

Hitchens, Christopher, “The Struggle of the Kurds” in Love, Poverty, and War, London: Atlantic Books 2004 [1992].

Hitchens, Christopher , “Holiday in Iraq,” Vanity Fair, April 2007, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/04/hitchens200704.

Lawrence, Quil, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest For Statehood is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East, New York: Walker & Company 2008.