The Kurds, one prominent local told me, live by the saying, “If you
don’t plan it, it can’t go wrong.” Without making any sudden moves,
Kurdistan is emerging as a series of micro-decisions which favor the
autonomy of the Kurdistan region of Iraq over deference to the
central government in Baghdad. This is State-Building 101.
Somewhat like Quebec or Taiwan, the Kurdistan Regional Government
now has its own ministries for agriculture, development, education
and investment. Only Kurdish is spoken, and only the Kurdish flag
flies in Kurdistan; the Iraqi flag—which continues to symbolize the
unity of Arab tribes—is unofficially forbidden. Politically
incorrect lapel pins uniting the Kurdistan and British (and
American) flags are distributed at events. The region’s top chief,
Massoud Barzani, carries the title of president of the Kurdistan
region. The peshmerga guerrillas have evolved into a united
100,000-man force with new military and police academies to train
this voluntary Kurdish national army, yet another foundation of
sovereignty creeping under the radar. These are not merely trappings
of autonomy. They are habits of statehood being codified on a daily
basis. Micro-sovereignty is complete; remaining for the future are
Kurdistan passports, United Nations membership and a new currency
(or rather to get one back, as the Kurds used their own currency for
11 years until the “Bremer dinar” and then the Iraqi dinar
were reintroduced).
The closer that Iraq’s Sunni-Shia rivalry edges toward state
collapse, the more one is forced to wonder why the Kurds, long
deserving of statehood, aren’t granted it to preserve their island
of stability. Trapped between Turkish, Arab and Persian
civilizations, Kurds have been abused for centuries by their
neighbors. Little remains of the 3,000-year-old citadel in Erbil
where Alexander the Great clashed with the Persians. The Kurdish
national movement gained strength after the Ottoman partition,
during which Sulaymaniah became a Kurdish administrative center, but
in the inter-war period Kurds were not even recognized as a people
in neighboring states (in Turkey they were considered “mountain
Turks”). Today, the Middle East’s largest minority spans Turkey,
Syria, Iran and Iraq, with more ethnic Kurds in Turkey (15 million
to 20 million) than in all the other states combined. With Syria and
Iran under international scrutiny, Turkey restrained by its EU
aspirations, and Iraq crumbling by the minute, the only thing
restraining the Kurds is America and the Kurds’ leverage in Iraq’s
federal structure, in which they presently control the presidency
and other key posts in the foreign ministry, army and other
agencies. Kurdistan is able to retain the legitimacy of being part
of Iraq rather than being an unrecognized Kurdish rump state and
thus receive large volumes of donor assistance through Baghdad, all
the while using its share of federal revenues to build
self-sustaining, independent institutions.
Prominent calls have risen for a Bosnia-style Iraqi federation of
three semiautonomous regions, most recently by U.S. Sen. Joe Biden.
If a stable, federal Iraq pulls through over the next two years,
national unity will have prevailed but Kurds will have achieved
maximal constitutional protections, even an advantageous position
together with the Shia parties.
“If….”
Mention the scenario of Iraq’s self-destruction providing a fait
accompli for Kurdistan’s independence, however, and watch smiles
creep across Kurdish faces. After Saddam razed their villages,
gassed their people and stole their livelihoods, the Kurds’ present
schadenfreude and condescension toward Iraq’s plight seem
natural.Baghdad is a four-letter word here.
The history and culture of Kurdistan, situated along the eastern
Taurus and central Zagros mountain ranges, date back to the Seljuk
era. Kurds are an Indo-European people speaking an Indo-Iranian
language. The only thing Kurds have in common with their Arab
neighbors is the Sunni faith, but even here they represent the
opposite extreme from the Sunnis to their south. Kurds are
viscerally afraid of extremism. Within hours of my arrival in
Erbil, a Kurdish government representative politely suggested I
shave my week-old beard, fearing my appearance would arouse
suspicion. With the exception of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK),
which waged a guerrilla war in and against Turkey through the 1980s
and 1990s, Kurdish fundamentalism has been so restrained by the
authorities as to become an oxymoron. Particularly since the
assassination of their deputy prime minister (and many others) in
2004 by a Yemeni extremist, Kurds are on high alert. One of the
first targets for the Kurdish peshmerga upon Saddam’s ouster was the
radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which is now cornered and
near strangulation near the Iranian border. Along the frontier with
Iraq, peshmerga troops steadfastly guard against any undesired
infiltration. Arabs and Arabic speakers are subjected to immediate
racial profiling. Kurds are so (rightly) insecure about their
national security that loyalty to the state supersedes even the
family. “They are not my relatives until they are cleared at the
border,” a well-educated Erbil resident told me.
It is no surprise that Kurds want independence from any future Iraqi
state, whether democratic or monstrous. Saddam used chemical weapons
against the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, and after his defeat in the
Gulf War in 1991, he completely severed all institutional, cultural
and educational ties to Kurdistan. Many Kurds were barred from
admission to Iraqi universities, so today many don’t even speak
Arabic. The peshmerga of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) came
down from the mountains, and their commander, Jalal Talabani, once
marked for death by Saddam, began building the PUK half of
post-Saddam Kurdistan and now occupies his nemesis’ office. The
Kurds’ minimum demands for a highly decentralized, federal Iraqi
republic will ensure that Iraq will at best be a very weak state,
particularly if the Shia parties grant themselves the same autonomy.
Iraq simply cannot have a strong center, for the main parties would
then evidently prefer it not exist at all. In other words, it faces
a dilemma similar to that of the Yugoslavia of the late 1980s,
unwittingly on the brink of civil war.
Just a cursory comparison with Iraq demonstrates the fact that
sustained reconstruction is impossible without security. It’s hard
to capture how un-Iraqi Kurdistan is, a realization which lends
immediate, strong sympathy for the cause of Kurdish statehood.
Should not the single island of stability in the region be
preserved? On the same day in late March that former Iraqi Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi declared that Iraq was being torn by civil war,
I had tea with Abdul Kader Mustafa, editor of the popular and
independent Barzan newspaper, who giddily confessed that he feels
born again each day he is back in Kurdistan after three decades’
exile in the United States. The next day, at a ceremony on a former
Iraqi military base marking Kurdish, American, British and Korean
(South Korea’s 3,000 troops make up the regional component of
coalition forces) friendship, the presence of hulking,
armed-to-the-teeth American contractors could not have seemed more
superfluous. There have been almost no foreign deaths in Kurdistan
since the American invasion three years ago. Over dinner at a
Turkish restaurant in Sulaymaniah, Iraq’s deputy minister for
culture lamented that Baghdad was not safe enough to pursue any
major cultural restoration. In Sulaymaniah, however, the public
library has been splendidly renovated, with even a charming, Rodin-like
sculpture garden in front. Large developments of modern homes are
taking shape in the middle of town, with no security protection
whatsoever.
Because of the first Iraq war and the U.S.-patrolled no-fly zones,
Kurds have had a 15-year head start over the rest of Iraq in
recovering from Saddam’s reign of terror. They are aided in many
ways by their non-Arab culture. Whereas Arab citizens are accustomed
to rentier entitlement regimes, Kurds are rapidly becoming
entrepreneurial and market-oriented. After their own brutal civil
war, Kurds now practice a tolerance and nonviolent governance simply
absent in any of the Arab neighbors. While churches are being
destroyed elsewhere in Iraq, Kurds are building them, and in
Sulaymaniah, once one-fourth populated by Jews, synagogues are
reappearing as well. Built on a former Iraqi army base, the city’s
Azaadi (“Freedom”) Park has a London-style Speaker’s Corner next to
a memorial bearing the names of Kurds executed there by the Baathist
regime in 1963. Still, Arab Iraqis are welcome to seek work there
and flee the uncertainties of the rest of Iraq. There is also a
certain innocence that comes with near-total isolation. The Kurds’
incredible hospitality literally brings new meaning to the term
“kindness of strangers.”
Yet the Kurdistan Regional Government is having a hard time
disassociating itself from Iraq, of which it is still a federal
unit. ATM machines are absent because foreign banks still won’t
commit to long-term investments there, and foreign mobile phones
can’t roam anywhere in the region. The KRG recently decided to
launch a website, ‘The Other Iraq’, to showcase Kurdistan’s solid
opportunities in construction, oil and gas and agriculture, and has
attracted a steady but still minor flow of European and Asian
companies. (Hint: The region could use a postal service.) Kurdistan,
not Jordan or Lebanon, is the natural base for Western companies and
contractors operating in Iraq. Kurds have at least won the battle to
not be called “northern Iraq”—which is as insulting to the Kurds as
calling Scotland “northern Britain” is to the Scottish. Even Saddam
Hussein recognized Kurdistan as an autonomous province in 1970, and
Kurdistan is the only such entity in Iraq’s new constitution. The
return of expatriates is a lead indicator of the Kurds’ success to
date. Unlike brain-draining Syria, Iran and Iraq, Kurds are bringing
their money and talent back home to serve the Kurdistan project.
Many are conversant in German; if Kurds from Germany can do a
fraction for Kurdistan what Turks from Germany have done for Turkey,
Kurdistan has a bright future indeed. Other expat Kurds are
concentrating on building a new American-style university in
Sulaymaniah, with plans to open doors within three years and have
regularly visiting American faculty.
The lobby of the Erbil International Hotel (also known locally as
the “Sheraton”) exudes a cosmopolitan vibe, night and day. Cabinet
ministers regularly meet with locals and each other there, pouring
over investment proposals, greeting foreign delegations and fielding
questions from journalists. They have no time for formality or
pretense. “We were always taken advantage of because we were
asleep,” Falah Mustafa Bakir, a senior minister in the Barzani
government, told me. “Now we have to be awake round-the-clock.”
Iraqi Kurdistan is now the freest and most productive of all
Kurdish-populated regions, and has become the melting pot for the
region’s Kurds and a hub from which resistance to subjugation in
particularly Iran and Syria is planned. Syrian Kurdish men in
particular have fled en masse to study in Sulaymaniah, where they
can freely associate and make plans to return home and agitate for
greater rights.
But to measure Kurdistan’s merits purely on the basis of comparison
to the frightening mayhem of Iraq would be a straw-man
approach. Kurdistan needs to accelerate its political development if
it is to convincingly distinguish itself from its politically
regressive neighbors. With Kurdistan no longer divided and ruled by
Saddam, the two ruling parties—or rather families—Barzani’s KDP
(Kurdistan Democratic Party) and Talabani’s PUK, still divide and
rule Kurdistan. They have mafia-like control over business interests
in the region and high-level stakes in Baghdad itself. A rivalry
between the parties has meant that the two cellphone operators in
Kurdistan remain incompatible, utterly corrupt nonsense for a
population so small. More fundamentally, they have resisted efforts
for the formation of new parties such as the “People’s Front,”
maintaining a patronage duopoly which dictates the terms of
elections. Anger at both parties is simmering, as demonstrated by
the gains made by the Kurdistan Islamic Union Party in the most
recent elections. Anger at PUK and KDP corruption recently boiled
over in Halabja, where hundreds of demonstrators torched the very
monument inaugurated by Colin Powell two years ago to commemorate
the victims of Saddam’s chemical gas attack in 1988.
Ultimately, the remaining task of consolidating Kurdistan’s position
vis-à-vis more powerful and manipulative neighbors will require that
its leaders stick together and cooperate. With the exception of
America—and more recently Israel, which prefers that Iraq remain
weak—Kurds still realize that they have, as their saying goes, “no
friends but the mountains.”
Because America continues to officially seek a united Iraq, little
news of Kurdistan’s unique success makes the headlines. But as
America’s standing hits new lows among Iraqis and remains high in
Kurdistan, its need for a reliable, secular ally in the region may
force it to concede even greater autonomy to the Kurds, perhaps in
exchange for support for Washington’s increasingly confrontational
policies on Syria and Iran.
What Kurds want most in the post-Iraq settlement is Kirkuk. The
oil-rich city was a central point of contention with the Kurds as
Iraq was formed in 1921, and judging from the two-hour-long litany
of complaints given to an audience of card-carrying PUK members by
their man on the ground there, the situation remains far from
resolved. Saddam’s campaign to isolate the Kurds meant they had no
major power stations, railways, airports or refineries. Though there
are oil deposits elsewhere in Kurdistan, its autonomy is
unsustainable without a major industrial center. The Kurds have
already demographically reversed Kirkuk’s violent Arabization under
Saddam, but they will have to wage a nonviolent, democratic campaign
to become the masters of its oil fields through a referendum
scheduled for 2007. If they can complete a refinery for Kirkuk oil
in its outskirts in the next five years, the last foundation for
independence would be in place.
But as a landlocked country, Kurdistan cannot amount to much more
than a Middle Eastern Bolivia without reassuring its neighbors that
it has no regional ambitions beyond claiming Kirkuk. Though the
ideal united Kurdistan state, the dream of mid-20th century Kurdish
hero Mustafa Barzani, would stretch from the Syrian city of Afrin
through Iraq’s Badra district to the Ilam region of Iran, Kamal Fuad,
an elder statesman in the PUK Politburo, makes clear that “our
responsibility stops at Hamri mountain,” which lies 100 kilometers
south of Kirkuk and constitutes a natural land boundary with the
rest of Iraq. Mosul, which was the Ottoman and then Baathist
administrative center for northern Iraq, holds no interest for
Kurdish leaders.
Few neighbors want a strong Iraq to emerge from the ashes, and even
fewer seem to want a strong Kurdistan encroaching on their borders.
The Turkish government, for example, has shown little sympathy in
closing its border to Kurdish oil refined in Turkey and needed back
in Kurdistan, leading, ironically, to long lines for petrol
throughout Kurdistan and the common sight of plastic gas containers
being sold on the roadside. But in one of the most hopeful examples
of globalization trumping geopolitics, it is Turkish companies
applying the most pressure on their government to back down. As the
master construction engineers of the region, Turkish contractors are
speedily building both of Kurdistan’s international airports, as
well as tunnels, flyovers and ring roads. Interestingly, the Turkish
government’s recent steps to recognize Kurdish rights, combined with
its concerns over the pan-Kurdish rhetoric of Kurdistani satellite
television, have led it to launch two “moderate” Kurdish-language
satellite stations of its own, a net plus for Kurdish identity.
Ultimately, having Kurds remain as minorities in the neighboring
states—rather than entirely consolidating into Iraqi Kurdistan—would
serve Kurdistan’s interests. Minority status helps to build
international pressure for greater rights. For example, in the wake
of the recent Kurdish protests across Turkey, particularly in
Diyarbakir in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, a Kurdish TV station
plans to open a case before the European Court of Human Rights
against Turkey for restricting its airtime and content. Minorities
straddling Kurdistan’s borders will also preserve trade relations.
The smuggling of fuel, tea, sugar, and drugs has for centuries
linked the markets of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and
Afghanistan—with Kurdistan right in the middle. The famed Hamilton
Road along the Zagros range (built by New Zealand engineer A.M.
Hamilton in 1928-32) can once again be the modern artery for this
branch of the Silk Road. The Zagros mountainscape is pinch-yourself
magnificent, the site of thousands of impromptu family picnics
throughout the week of Nowrouz, the Zoroastrian-derived celebration
of spring. Kurdish women in colorful, flowing gowns and men in their
baggy peshmerga suits with matching headdresses and cummerbunds
dance in the markets and hills like a scene from a Bollywood movie.
If geopolitics has an end state, it is when borders, populations,
resources and interests find equilibrium. In Palestine and
Kurdistan, new quasi-states are emerging in response to a need to
correct the mistakes of the post -Ottoman settlement as well as the
more modern imperative to transcend the rigid state system
altogether. Kurds will undoubtedly have, in some form, all the
freedoms they deserve. They should get them sooner rather than
later.
Parag Khanna is a fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington, D.C., and author of “The Second World,”
a book about the clash between the forces of geopolitics and
globalization, forthcoming from Random House.
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