Michael Rubin reviews Kevin McKiernan's The Kurds: A
People in Search of Their Homeland.
May 3, 2007
In The Kurds, journalist and filmmaker McKiernan
offers a gripping tale of travel among the Kurds of
northern Iraq, Turkey, and, briefly, Iran. Based on
trips taken over fifteen years, his anecdotes give
depth and perspective to Kurdish society.
He augments his narrative with historical
background. In describing the origins of the Kurds,
for example, he relays not only the local Kurdish
explanation that they are descended from the Medean
Empire (seventh century B.C.E.) but also the
scholarly debate which pours cold water on that
myth. |
Resident Scholar Michael Rubin |
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McKiernan's tale begins
in Iran where he headed at the behest of a
nongovernmental organization to assist Iraqi Kurdish
refugees fleeing the 1991 uprising. He relates a
midnight interrogation by the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards while the hotel manager, "a Kurd in a police
state," looked on, "a look of embarrassment on his
face."
Over the next chapters and years, McKiernan shuttles
between Iraq and Turkey where he meets local Kurds,
as well as officials and others. Importantly, he
traces the evolution of the Kurdish issue in
Washington, recalling how in 1992, Kurdish officials
such as Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) leader
Jalal Talabani--Iraq's current president--had
difficulty getting meetings at the State Department.
It is easy to romanticize the Kurds--the perennial
underdogs who have overcome great odds--and too many
journalists do so. But McKiernan does not, nor does
he whitewash Kurdish history in Iraq. He addresses
the 1994-97 internecine civil war in which Talabani
and his rival, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
president Masoud Barzani, sent each other's
supporters to mass graves. He also describes the KDP
obsession with spying upon and controlling foreign
press and visitors.
Such balance, however, does not extend to the
Turkish Kurds. McKiernan's account oozes with
antipathy toward Turkey. He wrongly calls Kurds
"second class citizens" in Turkey, ignoring that
presidents, foreign ministers, and scores of
parliamentarians have been Kurdish. Lack of
education and urban-rural divide better explain the
social differences in Turkey than ethnicity. Too
often McKiernan uncritically accepts the Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) narrative, though many Kurds
consider it a terrorist group.
The second half of The Kurds discusses the 2003 Iraq
war. McKiernan captures the atmosphere of anxiety
that Saddam might again launch chemical weapons
against the Iraqi Kurds. His provides a gripping
account of the assassination attempt on PUK prime
minister Barham Salih. He describes how Iraqi Kurds
would sell stories about weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) to U.S. reporters willing to pay for them.
This raises an important but unaddressed question:
how much of what entered U.S. news accounts
originated with Kurdish political parties?
McKiernan's writing is eloquent, but uneven analysis
weakens his narrative. That U.S. government
officials cite the open press in speeches should not
lead to the conclusion that they derive their
information from newspaper stories. Conspiracy
theories lace his account, such as the silly idea
that the Pentagon hid the death of U.S. servicemen
during the 2003 war. While a frequent theme of
Baathist propaganda, such cover-ups are impossible
given soldiers' parents, wives, and children, as
well as the U.S. government's pension system. It is
unclear how representative McKiernan's encounters
are, or whether he reinterprets or revises
observations in order to appear more astute. He
appears to exaggerate Kurdish-Shi'ite distrust.
Analogies to American Indians and false predictions
of civil war cheapen what is ultimately a good read
but an uneven account of an important time and
region.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI.
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