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Najaf
and Karbala 2004, Srebrenica 1995: two bloody
conflicts, miles apart, both the result of events
more than 80 years ago. Few places demonstrate as
vividly as the former Yugoslavia and Iraq that
today’s rulers tend to forget the lessons of the
past: both countries were artificial states created
by the victorious allies from the ruins of the
conquered Ottoman empire in 1918-21.
We know the results in the Balkans — royalist
dictatorship followed by large-scale civil war and
massacres during the second world war, then
communist dictatorship under Tito followed in turn
by collapse and even more brutal civil war in the
years after his death.
Yugoslavia no longer exists and it seems to me that
the only way to bring peace in Iraq is to achieve a
similar federal tripartite solution for the Shi’ites,
Sunnis and Kurds. Given the violence of the last
week alone — 60 killed and 120 wounded by a car
bomb, three election officials killed in an ambush,
18 Americans slaughtered inside an American base —
it must be foolhardy to think that the forthcoming
elections will presage peaceful democracy.
Peter Galbraith, the former American ambassador to
Croatia, with his vantage point in Zagreb during the
bloodbath in Bosnia, was able to see how a country
cobbled together by the allies was failing to work.
When he visited Iraq after the American conquest
last year he was struck by how similar the equally
artificial British-created country was to what he
had witnessed in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia fell apart violently when the powerful
Serbian minority began to flex its nationalist
muscles and met the resistance of the majority to
Serbian rule. The Serbian leader, Slobodan
Milosevic, then used Serbian ethnic nationalist
fears to stir up inter- ethnic strife, with
devastating results.
We are seeing the same pattern in Iraq and with
identical potentially lethal consequences. The
Sunnis — Iraq’s former ruling class — know they will
be the minority in a democratic unified state and
want to sabotage the new Iraq America is trying to
create. Bungled American handling of the transition
is making matters far worse by allowing non-Iraqi
Sunni Arab Islamic fanatics to enter the country and
add a whole extra terrorist dimension.
So, in the so-called Sunni triangle of central Iraq,
we have two ideologically disparate groups coming
together in hatred for the new Iraq. Joining the
politically dispossessed Sunni Ba’athists are
Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic fanatics for whom Iraq is
part of the holy war to restore Sunni rule to the
lands of the ancient Islamic caliphate, whose
capital in its Abbasid glory days was at Baghdad.
Despite their secular/Islamist differences, both
hate the prospect of democracy, one that will see
the Shi’ite majority in power for the first time.
Under Saddam such fanatics were kept out since, for
all his occasional nods towards Islam, he was
essentially a secularist. (Michel Aflaq, founder of
the Ba’ath party, was a Syrian Christian, and Tariq
Aziz, Saddam’s deputy, is from Iraq’s small
Christian minority.) But thanks to Donald Rumsfeld’s
“army lite”, such groups have been able to enter
Iraq through the porous Syrian border. Jihad, holy
war, has come to Iraq.
Islam is far from monolithic. There are divergences
of doctrinal belief, such as between mainstream
Sunnis and minority Ismailis (who follow the Aga
Khan). Most Muslims also reject the extremist views
of the Wahhabi sect of (Sunni) Hanbali Islam, an
austere 18th-century interpretation of the Koran
that predominates in Saudi Arabia, and from which
radicals such as Osama Bin Laden gain their
theological inspiration.
According to the Koran, Muslims are not supposed to
attack each other, but the violence against Shi’ite
Muslims in the two holy Shi’ite shrines of Karbala
and Najaf last weekend show that some Sunni
extremists have no qualms about Muslim-Muslim
terror.
They take their cue from writers such as Sayyid Qutb
(1906-66), the Egyptian whose book Signposts (or
Milestones) is to present-day Islamic extremism what
Lenin’s books were to Bolshevism. Qutb’s main
enemies were leaders such as Nasser whom he felt had
betrayed Islam. Qutb’s modern disciples, such as Bin
Laden, take a similar view of rulers who are
insufficiently Islamic, such as the al-Saud dynasty
in Saudi Arabia.
American officials are now worried that Iraq
might take the “Iranian option” and, given the close
ties between Iran and many of the leading Shi’ite
theologians in Iraq, this is not surprising. This is
where the other Iraqi minority, the Kurds, enter the
picture.
The Kurds have felt betrayed ever since
Winston Churchill and other western leaders denied
them a state of their own after 1918. While Kurds
are predominantly Sunni Muslim, they do not identify
with their fellow Sunnis in Iraq, since for them
their Kurdish nationality matters more than their
Sunni beliefs.
Most Kurds today are essentially secular, and so the
idea of being in an Arab Shi’ite theocracy would be
a double nightmare, both ethnically and
theologically. But an independent Kurdistan would be
a security nightmare for Turkey and Iran, which have
large Kurdish minorities. Straight independence
would thus be a risky solution.
This is why Galbraith is surely right to say that
only a tripartite solution will work. (So too might
a cantonal model, which would deal with the problem
of the Shi’ites in the Sadr City section of Baghdad,
a Shi’ite enclave within a predominantly Sunni
region.)
Devolution on thorny issues such as education would
enable Sunni Arabs and (secular) non-Arab Sunni
Kurds to be free from domination from a potentially
theocratic Shi’ite Arab national majority. The
federal government would deal with matters such as
defence and foreign policy where religious and
ethnic sensitivities might not be so acute. If oil
revenues were shared on a federal basis that would
make up for the fact that there is little oil in
Sunni Arab areas.
One major Shi’ite cleric, Mohammed Bahr al-Ulum, has
said the Sunni Ba’athist/Islamist terrorists are
“trying to ignite a sectarian civil war”. Galbraith
fears the same and reflects that “there are no good
options for the United States”.
One can only hope that the pessimists are wrong, and
that against all precedent Iraq will not break into
civil war once the Shi’ites finally take over the
reins of power next year. But history, alas, is with
them.
Christopher Catherwood is the author of Winston’s
Folly: Imperialism and the Creation of Modern Iraq
and the forthcoming A Brief History of the Middle
East
http://www.timesonline.co.uk
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