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Drawing borders fuels conflict
4.9.2007
By Jonathan Steele: ANALYSIS |
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September 4, 2007
The death toll from the recent brutal attacks by
suicide bombers on two small-town communities in
northern Iraq crept up above 500, making it by far
the worst atrocity since the 2003 liberation. No
other mass killing has reached even half that total.
Why did four truck bombers make these people their
target? The mind struggles for an answer. The
Kurdish Yezidis are one of Iraq’s smallest religious
minorities, who follow an ancient cult unique to
themselves. They wield no political or economic
power. They live in an area that is remote from the
key cities at the eye of Iraq’s recurring
hurricanes.
Yet there is a potential explanation for their
killing. It carries a lesson for Iraq’s future that
goes much further than the tragedy of two marginal
communities, and by coincidence has echoes in other
events that occurred recently -- the ceremonies
marking 60 years since India’s independence. The key
word is partition, and the lesson is “beware
partition”.
Most media coverage of the Yezidi massacre has
concentrated on its religious dimension. Reporters
pointed to the recent “honour killing” by a
stone-throwing Yezidi mob of a young Yezidi girl who
married a Muslim and apparently then converted to
Islam. The killing was filmed and put on the
internet. Sunni Arab extremists linked to al-Qaeda
then took their anger out, it seems, against the
whole Yezidi community.
But, as journalist Michael Howard pointed out, the
ethnic dimension may be more important. Yezidis are
Kurds and they live in areas that are being
increasingly contested. According to Iraq’s
constitution, a referendum is supposed to be held
there by the end of this year on whether to join the
autonomous region of Kurdistan. Eliminating the
Yezidis reduces the chances of the referendum going
in favour of the Kurds.
Long before the Yezidi atrocity, ethnic cleansing
was under way elsewhere in Nineveh province and its
capital city, Mosul. Like the British in Basra who
have given up trying to stop intra-Shia strife, the
Americans in Mosul have proved powerless to prevent
that city’s battle between Arabs and Kurds. The
eastern half of the city and the adjacent Nineveh
plains are Kurdish. The West is largely Arab; now
the Yezidi are being intimidated to leave. Christian
and Turcoman communities in the region look on
anxiously, or flee. In Kirkuk, a contested city in
one of Iraq’s best oil regions, ethnic cleansing is
also going on, albeit on a less dramatic scale.
It is a fair bet that if these various regions --
which the Kurds claim as ancestral lands -- were not
threatened with frontier changes much of this
violence would be reduced.
To the bureaucratic eye, partition seems a neat
solution. But it often creates more problems than it
solves. Where does the new border line run, and who
will be in charge of drawing it? In India Cyril
Radcliffe, a British lawyer with no experience of
the area, working largely with maps and consulting
none of the affected people, carved up the
subcontinent in less than five weeks. As he worked,
ethnic cleansing and killing accelerated as Hindus,
Sikhs and Muslims tried to show they were the
majority in every multicultural district.
What happens to minorities who are “left behind” and
find themselves outside the new entity where their
group forms a majority? They are often “transferred”
against their will, or forced to flee like the
Hindus of Lahore. Some argue that without partition
the killing in India would have been worse, and that
the atrocities of 1947 and 1948 affected only a
small percentage of the region’s population.
Independent India had then, and still has, more
Muslim citizens than Pakistan -- eloquent proof that
they live normally in a state that prides itself on
its multi-ethnic, multireligious identity.
Today’s Iraq is very far from that. But this does
not mean that it cannot one day revert to the
multicultural tolerance it enjoyed in the pre-Saddam
era. Sectarianism was deliberately cultivated by him
on a “divide and repress” basis. The occupation
forces then made the mistake of using sectarian and
ethnic criteria for selecting the Iraqis they wanted
as their postwar allies. Finally, attracted into
Iraq by the chance to humiliate Americans as they
were to Afghanistan against the Russians two decades
earlier, al-Qaeda joined the mix by infiltrating
Iraq and deliberately provoking sectarian violence
through targeting Shia civilians with suicide bombs.
Grim though the result is, today’s heightened ethnic
and sectarian consciousness in Iraq’s towns and
cities is not a result of ancient hatreds. It is too
early to abandon hope that it can be reversed, or
that Iraq can one day be liberated from the
interference of foreigners.
Those who argue for partition only exacerbate
tensions. Many Kurds want it, but it is not the
dominant Shia or Sunni view. Surveys of attitudes in
Iraq still show that more Arabs define themselves as
Iraqis than as Sunnis or Shias. To his credit,
United States President George Bush has not
advocated partition, nor does it seem to be part of
his hidden agenda. His remarks last week about
Vietnam and what followed in Indochina after the US
left, as well as his refusal to contemplate any
withdrawal from Iraq while he remains president,
were misguided and dangerous. At least he has not
come out for splitting the country.
It is the Democrats who seem more tempted by it.
Hillary Clinton has suggested keeping a substantial
US force in Kurdistan if troops pull out of Baghdad
and the south. So have Senator Joe Biden, another
presidential candidate, and Richard Holbrooke, the
former ambassador to the United Nations. They may be
arguing this as a way of minimising the image of
humiliation and retreat when the US eventually has
to give up its foolish Iraqi venture. But it is
wrong.
mg co.za
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