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Letter from Kurdistan
-Holiday in Iraq
19.3.2007
by Christopher Hitchens - Issue April 2007 |
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March 19, 2007
Over Christmas break, the author took his son to
northern Iraq, which the U.S. had made a no-fly zone
in 1991, ending Saddam's chemical genocide. Now
reborn, Iraqi Kurdistan is a heartrending glimpse of
what might have been.
Last summer, you may have been among the astonished
viewers of American television who were treated to a
series of commercials from a group calling itself
"Kurdistan—The Other Iraq." These rather touching
and artless little spots (theotheriraq.com) urged
you to consider investing in business, and even made
you ponder taking your vacation, in the country's
three northern provinces. Mr. Jon Stewart, of The
Daily Show, could hardly believe his luck. To
lampoon the ads, and to say, in effect, "Yeah,
right—holiday in Iraq," was probably to summarize
the reaction of much of the audience. Sure, baby,
come to sunny Mesopotamia, and bring the family, and
get your ass blown off while religious wack jobs
ululate gleefully over your remains.
Well, as it happens, I decided to check this out,
and did spend most of the Christmas holiday in Iraqi
Kurdistan, bringing my son along with me, and had a
perfectly swell time. We didn't make any
investments, though I would say that the hotel and
tourism and oil sectors are wide open for
enterprise, but we did visit the ancient citadel in
Erbil, where Alexander the Great defeated the
Persians—my son is a Greek-speaking classicist—and
we did sample the lovely mountains and lakes and
rivers that used to make this region the resort area
for all Iraqis. Air and road travel were easy (you
can now fly direct from several airports in Europe
to one of two efficient airports in Iraqi
Kurdistan), and walking anywhere at night in any
Kurdish town is safer than it is in many American
cities. The police and soldiers are all friendly
locals, there isn't a coalition soldier to be seen,
and there hasn't been a suicide attack since May of
2005.
It wasn't my first trip. That took place in 1991, in
the closing stages of the Gulf War. With a guerrilla
escort, I crossed illegally into Iraq from Turkey
and toured the shattered and burned and poisoned
landscape on which Saddam Hussein had imprinted
himself. In the town of Halabja, which has now
earned its gruesome place in history, I met people
whose hideous wounds from chemical bombardment were
still suppurating. The city of Qala Diza had been
thoroughly dynamited and bulldozed, and looked like
an irretrievable wreck. Much of the area's lavish
tree cover had been deforested: the bare plains were
dotted with forbidding concrete barracks into which
Kurds had been forcibly "relocated" or (a more
accurate word) "concentrated." Nearly 200,000 people
had been slaughtered, and millions more deported:
huddling in ruins or packed into fetid camps on the
Turkish and Iranian frontiers. To turn a spade was
to risk uncovering a mass grave. All of Iraq
suffered terribly during those years, but its
Kurdish provinces were among the worst places in the
entire world—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.
Thus, I confess to a slight lump in the throat at
revisiting the area and seeing thriving, humming
towns with multiplying construction sites,
billboards for overseas companies, Internet cafés,
and a choice of newspapers. It's even reassuring to
see the knockoff "MaDonal," with pseudo–golden
arches, in the eastern city of Sulaimaniya, soon to
be the site of the American University of Iraq,
which will be offering not only an M.B.A. course but
also, in the words of Azzam Alwash, one of its
directors, "the ideas of Locke, the ideas and
writings of Paine and Madison." Everybody knows how
to snigger when you mention Jeffersonian democracy
and Iraq in the same breath; try sniggering when you
meet someone who is trying to express these ideas in
an atmosphere that only a few years ago was heavy
with miasmic decay and the reek of poison gas.
While I am confessing, I may as well make a clean
breast of it. Thanks to the reluctant decision of
the first President Bush and Secretary of State
James Baker, those fresh princes of "realism," the
United States and Britain placed an aerial umbrella
over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and detached it from
the death grip of Saddam Hussein. Under the
protective canopy of the no-fly zone—actually it was
also called the "you-fly-you-die zone"—an embryonic
free Iraq had a chance to grow. I was among those
who thought and believed and argued that this
example could, and should, be extended to the rest
of the country; the cause became a consuming thing
in my life. To describe the resulting shambles as a
disappointment or a failure or even a defeat would
be the weakest statement I could possibly make: it
feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of
betrayal from which there can be no awakening. Yet
Kurdistan continues to demonstrate how things could
have been different, and it isn't a place from which
the West can simply walk away.
In my hometown of Washington, D.C., it's too easy to
hear some expert hold forth about the essential
character of any stricken or strategic country.
(Larry McMurtry, in his novel Cadillac Jack, has a
lovely pastiche of Joseph Alsop doing this very act
about Yemen.) I had lived here for years and
suffered through many Georgetown post-dinner
orations until someone supplied me with the
unfailing antidote to such punditry. It comes from
Stephen Potter, the author of Lifemanship, One-
upmanship, and other classics. Wait until the old
bore has finished his exposition, advised Potter,
then pounce forward and say in a plonking register,
"Yes, but not in the South?" You will seldom if ever
be wrong, and you will make the expert perspire.
Different as matters certainly are in the South of
Iraq, the thing to stress is how different, how very
different, they are in the North.
In Kurdistan, to take a few salient examples, there
is a memorial of gratitude being built for fallen
American soldiers. "We are planning," said the
region's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, in his
smart new office in the Kurdish capital of Erbil,
"to invite their relatives to the unveiling."
Speaking of unveiling, you see women with headscarfs
on the streets and in offices (and on the judicial
bench and in Parliament, which reserves a quarter of
the seats for women by law), but you never see a
face or body enveloped in a burka. The majority of
Kurds are Sunni, and the minority are Shiite, with
large groups belonging to other sects and
confessions, but there is no intercommunal mayhem.
Liquor stores and bars are easy to find, sometimes
operated by members of the large and unmolested
Christian community. On the university campuses, you
may easily meet Arab Iraqis who have gladly fled
Baghdad and Basra for this safe haven. I know of
more than one intrepid Western reporter who has done
the same. The approaches from the south are
patrolled by very effective and battle-hardened
Kurdish militiamen, who still carry the proud title
of their guerrilla days: the peshmerga, or,
translated from the Kurdish language, "those who
face death." These men have a very brusque way with
al-Qaeda and its local supporters, and have not just
kept them at a distance but subjected them to very
hot pursuit. (It was Kurdish intelligence that first
exposed the direct link between the psychopathic Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden.) Of the few
divisions of the Iraqi Army that are considered even
remotely reliable, the bulk are made up of tough
Kurdish volunteers.
Pause over that latter point for a second. Within
recent memory, the Kurdish population of Iraq was
being subjected to genocidal cleansing. Given the
chance to leave the failed state altogether, why
would they not take it? Yet today, the president of
Iraq, Jalal Talabani, is a Kurd: a former guerrilla
leader so genial and humane that he personally
opposed the execution of Saddam Hussein. Of the very
few successful or effective ministries in Baghdad,
such as the Foreign Ministry, it is usually true
that a Kurd, such as Hoshyar Zebari, is at the head
of it. The much-respected deputy prime minister (and
moving spirit of the American University in
Sulaimaniyah), Dr. Barham Salih, is a Kurd. He put
it to me very movingly when I flew down to Baghdad
to talk to him: "We are willing to fight and
sacrifice for a democratic Iraq. And we were the
ones to suffer the most from the opposite case. If
Iraq fails, it will not be our fault."
President Talabani might only be the "president of
the Green Zone," as his friends sometimes teasingly
say, but he disdains to live in that notorious
enclave. He is now 73 years of age and has a rather
Falstaffian appearance—everyone refers to him as "Mam
Jalal" or "Uncle Jalal"—but this is nonetheless
quite a presidential look, and he has spent much of
his life on the run, or in exile, or in the
mountains, and survived more dangerous times than
these. You may choose to call today's suicide
murderers and video beheaders and power-drill
torturers by the name "insurgents," but he has the
greater claim to have led an actual armed Resistance
that did not befoul itself by making war on
civilians. In Baghdad, he invited me to an
impressively heavy lunch in the house once occupied
by Saddam Hussein's detested, late half-brother
Barzan al-Tikriti, where I shared the table with
grizzled Kurdish tribal leaders, and as the car
bombs thumped across the city I realized how he
could afford to look so assured and confident, and
to flourish a Churchill-size postprandial cigar. To
be chosen by the Iraqi parliament as the country's
first-ever elected president might be one thing, and
perhaps a dubious blessing. But to be the first Kurd
to be the head of an Arab state was quite another.
When he was elected, spontaneous celebrations by
Kurds in Iran and Syria broke out at once, and often
had to be forcibly repressed by their respective
dictators. To put it pungently, the Kurds have now
stepped onto the stage of Middle Eastern history,
and it will not be easy to push them off it again.
You may easily murder a child, as the parties of god
prove every single day, but you cannot make a living
child grow smaller.
I got a whiff of this intoxicating "birth of a
nation" emotion when I flew back with Talabani from
Baghdad to his Kurdish home base of Sulaimaniya.
Here, as in the other Kurdish center, in Erbil, the
airport gives the impression of belonging to an
independent state. There are protocol officers,
official limousines, and all the appurtenances of
autonomy. Iraq's constitution specifies that
Kurdistan is entitled to its own regional
administration, and the inhabitants never miss a
chance to underline what they have achieved. (The
Iraqi flag, for example, is not much flown in these
latitudes. Instead, the golden Kurdish sunburst
emblem sits at the center of a banner of red, white,
and green.) Most inspiring of all, perhaps, is
Kurdish Airlines, which can take a pilgrim to the
hajj or fly home a returning refugee without landing
at another Iraqi airport. Who would have believed,
viewing the moonscape of Kurdistan in 1991, that
these ground-down people would soon have their own
airline?
The Kurds are the largest nationality in the world
without a state of their own. The King of Bahrain
has, in effect, his own seat at the United Nations,
but the 25 million or so Kurds do not. This is
partly because they are cursed by geography, with
their ancestral lands located at the point where the
frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria converge.
It would be hard to imagine a less promising
neighborhood for a political experiment. In Iraq,
the more than four million Kurds make up just under
a quarter of the population. The proportion in
Turkey is more like 20 percent, in Iran 10 percent,
and in Syria perhaps nine. For centuries, this
people's existence was folkloric and marginal, and
confined to what one anthropologist called "the
Lands of Insolence": the inaccessible mountain
ranges and high valleys that bred warriors and
rebels. A fierce tribe named the Karduchoi makes an
appearance in Xenophon's history of the events of
400 B.C. Then there is mainly silence until a
brilliant Kurdish commander named Salah al-Din
(Saladin to most) emerges in the 12th century to
unite the Muslim world against the Crusaders. He was
born in Tikrit, later the hometown of Saddam
Hussein. This is apt, because Saddam actually was
the real father of Kurdish nationhood. By subjecting
the Kurds to genocide he gave them a solidarity they
had not known before, and compelled them to create a
fierce and stubborn Resistance, with its own
discipline and army. By laying waste to their
ancient villages and farms, furthermore, he forced
them into urban slums and refugee centers where they
became more integrated, close-knit, and socialized:
historically always the most revolutionary point in
the emergence of any nationalism.
"The state of Iraq is not sacred," remarked Dr.
Mohammad Sadik as we drove through Erbil to his
office at Salahaddin University, of which he is
president. "It was not created by god. It was
created by Winston Churchill." Cobbled together out
of the post-1918 wreckage of the Ottoman Empire,
Iraq as a state was always crippled by the fact that
it contained a minority population that owed it
little if any loyalty. And now this state has broken
down, and is breaking up. The long but unstable and
unjust post-Ottoman compromise has been
irretrievably smashed by the American-led invasion.
Of the three contending parties in Iraq, only the
Kurds now have a serious Plan B. They had a head
start, by escaping 12 years early from Saddam's
festering prison state. They have done their utmost
to be friendly brokers between the Sunni and Shiite
Arabs, but if the
country implodes, they can withdraw to their
oil-rich enclave and muster under their own flag.
There is no need to romanticize the Kurds: they have
their own history of clan violence and cruelty. But
this flag at present represents the closest
approximation to democracy and secularism that the
neighborhood can boast.
Americans have more responsibility here than most of
us are aware of. It was President Woodrow Wilson,
after the First World War, who inscribed the idea of
self-determination for the Kurds in the 1920 Treaty
of Sevres, a document that all Kurds can readily
cite. Later machinations by Britain and France and
Turkey, all of them greedy for the oil in the
Kurdish provinces, cheated the Kurds of their
birthright and shoehorned them into Iraq. More
recently, the Ford-Kissinger administration
encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Baghdad,
offering blandishments of greater autonomy, and then
cynically abandoned them in 1975, provoking yet
another refugee crisis and a terrible campaign of
reprisal by Saddam Hussein. In 1991, George Bush Sr.
went to war partly in the name of Kurdish rights and
then chose to forget his own high-toned rhetoric.
This, too, is a story that every Kurd can tell you.
However the fate of Iraq is to be decided, we cannot
permit another chapter in this record of betrayal.
Meanwhile, you should certainly go and see it for
yourself, and also shed a tear for what might have
been.
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