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| Volume XIII, Winter 2006, Number 4 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq, Brendan O’Leary, John McGarry and Khalid Salih, eds. Univesity of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 355 pages. $45.00, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Professor, University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon
This is a timely collection of thirteen essays by eleven different authors (sometimes in tandem) of whom only one is a Kurd (Khaled Salih). The others, however, are well qualified to present their views, and most of them agree on basic ideas and issues. Unlike many regional experts, they do not oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq, holding that while in the end there were no weapons of mass destruction, “the Baathists had organized a regime of mass destruction” that was “habitually genocidal” and even “gynocidal” (p. xi). This is something of an exaggeration, since support for this allegation was based on isolated cases such as “the beheading of women defamed as prostitutes” (pp. xi- xii). As an avowedly secular state, the Iraqi Baathist government did much to advance the role of women in its society; it was no accident that April Glaspie was sent to Baghdad as U.S. ambassador in 1986. Saddam Hussein was one of the very few Muslim leaders willing to accept a woman envoy, both to underscore the secular nature of his regime and to irritate the ayatollahs in Iran. The highly visible role in his government of Tariq Aziz, a Christian, was another example of this. Ambassador Glaspie told me once that the Iranian news media always stressed Aziz’s middle (father’s) name, Yuhanna (John), to indicate their displeasure. Nearly everyone will agree that “the termination of the Baathist regime was a consummation devoutly to be wished” (p. xiv). But was it worth the lives of more than 2,400 American service men and women and ten times that number of Iraqi civilians?
From the perspective of the contributors to this study, it was worth it, if only because it has confirmed the autonomy of the Kurds of northern Iraq, first granted a measure of freedom by the concepts of a “safe haven” and “no-fly zones” after 1991. They are in agreement that Kurds yearn for the full independence promised them by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, subsequently denied by Ataturk’s facts on the ground and the Treaty of Lausanne three years later. “The people of Kurdistan almost unanimously prefer independence to being part of Iraq,” says Peter W. Galbraith (p. 242), but all contributors agree that this is not an option now or in the near future because of the fears of Syria, Iran and Turkey that the cause of independence would spread to their own Kurdish populations. In the case of Syria and Turkey, Kurds sit on their only major oil- and gas-producing regions. Autonomy under a federal system, therefore, is the best they can hope for in Iraq, and, as long as the United States supports the idea, the Iraqi Arabs are not in a position to prevent it. As O’Leary and Salih conclude, “Kurdistan can live with a new Iraq, and live well, but Kurdistanis will not be ‘just Iraqis.’ And the rest of Iraq will have to accommodate [this fact] if stability is to be achieved and maintained” (p. 35). The three-state solution with a weak rotating presidency, proposed by Les Gelb in a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece, appeals to many. “The Shias would have their Islamic Republic, while the Kurds could continue their secular traditions,” says Galbraith. “Alcohol could continue to be a staple of Kurdish picnics, while it would be strictly banned in Basra” (p. 357). He neglects to mention that there would be strong opposition to this from Basra’s not inconsequential Christian and secular Shia communities.
Although the Kurds have a long history of tribal and party factionalism, the two main political groupings, the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) and the KDP (Kurdish Democratic party) managed to come to an agreement (with U.S. help) in 1996, “which has allowed them to manage their deep-rooted political grievances while gaining the experience, knowledge and skills necessary to turn Kurdistan around,” observes Gareth Stansfield (p. 199). Having enjoyed autonomy since 1991, the Kurds have managed to acquire “a substantial body of trained administrators,” he notes. This, combined with the absence of control from Baghdad for 15 years, “has given the Kurds a positive focus of national pride which, arguably, they have never had in their long history” (p. 204). Except for one contributor, Ofra Bengio, who asserts (rather strangely for an Israeli) that one of the Kurds’ weaknesses lies in the fact that “they are not considered a strategic asset by the U.S. or Britain” (p. 181), the authors agree that U.S. support has been crucial for Kurdish autonomy and, moreover, is likely to continue. Despite the catastrophic “sell-out” of the Kurds in 1975 by the United States and the fact that, “unlike Israel, [they] have no significant American constituency” (p. 133), the current confrontation with Iran over its nuclear ambitions almost guarantees American presence in Kurdistan. As Michael Gunter, always an astute observer of the region, notes, after 2003 “the Kurds of Iraq suddenly were thrust into the role of the sole local U.S. ally, a novel position they eagerly and successfully assumed” (p. 225). According to Galbraith, “If the U.S. wanted to stay militarily in Iraq, Kurdistan is the place; Kurdish leaders have said they would like to see permanent U.S. bases in Kurdistan” (pp. 247-48). The United States is not alone. Israel has longstanding ties to the Kurds. The only contributor to even mention this well-known connection is Sophia Wanche, who makes a passing reference to the Israeli view of Kurdistan “as a potential bulwark against perceived threats from Iran.” She notes, however, that “Israel has generally prioritized its alliance with Turkey” (p. 189).
Two major bones of contention between the Kurds and the rest of the Iraqis are the control of the country’s vast natural resources and the city of Kirkuk, which in the case of oil are one and the same. Everyone is aware that Kirkuk sits atop one of Iraq’s two main oilfields (the other is in the Shia south on the Kuwait border); but, as Galbraith notes, the other important resource that Kurdistan has in abundance, even without Kirkuk, is water. “Water is a vital resource in the parched Middle East, arguably more important and contentious than oil over the long term, [and] Kurdistan has lots of water” (p. 274). It is the only area of Iraq that receives appreciable amounts of annual rainfall. The rest of the country is dependent on rivers flowing from Kurdistan and Turkey. In the case of both resources, Kurdish leaders realize that some sort of sharing arrangement will have to be worked out with the other regions of the country, especially the resource-poor Sunni Triangle.
Kirkuk is the most contentious immediate issue. Kurds were the largest group in the province (48 percent) according to the 1957 census, the last to distinguish the population by religion and language; but in the city itself, they came in a narrow second to the Turcomans, followed by Arabs (45,306, 40,047 and 27,127, respectively, p. 84). However, if the 5,146 “unclassifiables” that O’Leary believes “were mostly illiterate Kurds” (p. 83) were added, the Kurds and Turcomans would be approximately equal. But there is a significant fourth community that he overlooks, the Christians, who numbered 12,691 in Kirkuk city in 1957, over 10 percent of the total population of 120,402. He does list a “Chaldo-Assyrian” category amounting to 1,509, but this reflects only the small fraction (12 percent) of Kirkuk’s Christians who speak Eastern Aramaic as their first language (rather less than the nearly 30 percent of Christians countrywide). Except for the 634 native speakers of English, who it can be assumed were workers for the Iraq Petroleum Company, the remaining 10,500 Christians would have been Kurdish and Arabic speakers (probably more of the former than the latter as most of Iraq’s Christians at that time were from villages in the Kurdish north), thus enhancing the Turcoman claim to being the largest single bloc, religiously (Muslim) and linguistically, in the city.
Galbraith alone among the contributors notes that “Chaldean and Assyrian Christians” make up “Kirkuk’s fourth national community [which] has no outside protectors and merely wishes to live in the governorate and practice its beliefs undisturbed” (p. 276), something the insurgents’ periodic targeting of churches has tried to undermine. During the Baathist regime, many Kurds were displaced from the city and replaced by Arabs from the south. At the time of the U.S. invasion, the city police force was entirely Arab, but it fled in the face of the peshmerga (Kurdish army) liberators, and Kurdish forces now control the city. Neither Sunni nor Shia Arabs nor Turkey, as the protector of Kirkuk’s Turcoman population, is happy with this situation. But, Wanche warns us, “Make no mistake: Kirkuk is as vital for Kurds’ national identity as Jerusalem is for Jews and Palestinians.” Kurdish leaders have proposed that Kirkuk “be a power-sharing city and region within Kurdistan” (p. 187), but they will never give it up willingly. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and it is likely that the city and its oil fields will remain within the Kurdish (and American) sphere of influence, if not outright control. However unhappy Turkey may be with this, the United States has made it clear that it “was willing to protect Kurdistan from unwanted Turkish interference” (Gunter, p. 225).
One of the book’s most important contributions is the inclusion of maps showing the varied interpretations of what constitutes Kurdistan. I was bemused by one, however, showing the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan proposed by the KDP (p. 193), which includes a large chunk of the Syrian province of al-Jazira, including not only the Syrian gas and oil fields, but its capital, Qamishli. As late as 1960, the census of this town showed an Arab and Muslim population of only 13,000 as opposed to a majority population of 20,000 Christians, descendants of survivors of the Eastern Anatolian massacres of 1915-18, carried out mostly by Ottoman Kurdish irregulars. They would likely not welcome being handed over to an Iraqi Kurdish administration, and Syria is not about to give up either its oil or its Christians. I was also pleased to be enlightened by O’Leary and Saleh about the origin of the three stars on the Iraqi flag. They symbolize the failed attempt at union between Egypt, Syria and Iraq under Nasser in the late 1950s, not the three major population groups, as is sometimes supposed (p. 35).
Overall this is a very useful and well-organized compilation of essays, the contents of which have in no way been overtaken by events since publication. Inevitably some of them are better than others, but all offer something of substance to the reader.
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