A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  “The Academy has its own tribunal in charge of judging deviant personalities,” wrote Grojean, “and those appearing before the tribunal are held apart in a special building prior to trial to reflect on their acts. If the assembly considers the ‘culprit’s’ personality to be susceptible to improvement, then the judgment may be lenient, but it can also be very severe and even result in the death penalty if the person is found guilty of having had a relationship with a member of the opposite sex or of having betrayed the party’s principles. Judgment is then either followed by an execution or else commuted to a less severe sentence by Öcalan himself. Selim Çürükkaya states that over 50 people were executed between 1985 and 1992.”35

  Ocalan later had second thoughts about many of these executions. He ordered an investigation into killings at the Academy and ended up accusing its head of deliberately trying to undermine his leadership. The head was executed by a firing squad. But looking for traitors was part of a paranoid organizational style that did not stop. Even after his imprisonment, Ocalan continued to denounce some defectors. Of course, they also denounced him—there has been a steady stream of such denunciations, particularly since the PKK split in 2004.36

  In 1986, the PKK guerrillas carried out the decisions made at the Third Congress and began “military conscription.” In other words, they started to kidnap young men and demand they become guerrillas. They attacked Kurds who worked for the enemy, especially the village guards, targeting their tribes, their villages, even their families. They firebombed the houses of village guards late at night, when everyone was asleep inside. They shot up minibuses going to areas controlled by village guards. In Pinarcik, they killed thirty civilians in a firefight, most of them women and children. They also targeted people who worked for the state, even if they just built roads or taught school, and burned down schools and health clinics.37

  As anyone could have predicted, this approach backfired. Though people were afraid to join the village guards for a while, when Turkey upped the pay and gave the village guards more security and equipment, recruitment climbed again. The PKK’s forced conscription also miscarried because boys who were kidnapped often tried to run away and, when they did, carried information about PKK plans back to their towns where police and village guards were waiting.

  As the PKK attacks increased in number, Kurds were rounded up at a great rate. In 1988, Leyla Zana was arrested for protesting in front of the gates of the jail where her husband was imprisoned. “I had gone to visit Mehdi. There were a lot of people in front of the jail. It was July and quite hot. Many of the women there were with babies and young children, there were also old women. There was no water and everybody was very uncomfortable, especially the young and the elderly. They took us in a garden where it was announced that we would not be allowed to see the prisoners. Then, on the other side of the wall we heard them beating the men we had come to see. We just revolted, we began shouting and throwing stones. I was arrested with another eighty-three people. A soldier said that I had tried to take his gun and finally I was accused of inciting people to revolt.”

  She was tortured in prison. “The first seven days in custody were terrible. They subjected me to all kinds of torture. I was blindfolded and led to the interrogation room where I was stripped completely naked by a number of interrogators, all men. They hit me, I collapsed and they splashed me with cold water to bring me round. After that they gave me back my clothes and took me back to my cells. They also tortured me with electricity.”

  While she had nightmares about her imprisonment for years, she also learned about solidarity in jail. “I was sharing a cell with common prisoners, thieves, prostitutes, and drug addicts but eventually they became friends. We cooked together, we ate and slept together, all kinds of people in the same situation. It was about that time that I began to be a political activist, and when I learned there were Kurdish women fighting with guns I was moved to action. This changes everything, I told myself, a woman is also a human being.”38

  The struggle of Turkey’s Kurds had yet to attract much international attention, particularly during the Anfal, when all eyes were focused on Iraq and Saddam’s atrocities. But by this time there was a substantial Kurdish diaspora in Europe, and in Paris a physicist named Kendal Nezan had founded a Kurdish Institute. In October 1989, the Institute organized the first-ever international conference on Kurdistan, cosponsored by human rights groups and the wife of Francois Mitterand, President of the Republic. Also at the conference were Claiborne Pell, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his staffer Peter Galbraith, who told The New York Times that the Senate had wanted to apply sanctions to Saddam Hussein after the chemical attacks, but these sanctions were blocked by the Reagan Administration. “Too many governments are too concerned about alienating the oil-rich or politically powerful nations where the Kurdish people reside,” he said.39

  While nobody considered asking the PKK to the 1989 Paris conference, thirty members of Turkey’s largest opposition party, the Social Democrats, including seven Kurds, were invited. Their party chairman, however, barred them from going, fearing their presence at a conference about Kurds would prompt heavy criticism in the Turkish press. They went anyway. When they returned, they were called before the party’s disciplinary committee and expelled for “taking part in political activities contrary to the party’s fundamental principles.”40 In Turkey, it seemed that fundamental social democratic principles did not include opposing genocide.

  Iraq: Free at Last

  With the advent of the no-fly zone in 1991, for the first time in their history, Iraqi Kurds had enough breathing space to think about how they would govern themselves. But they had no food. The UN had put the whole country under economic sanctions until Saddam paid Kuwait war reparations, and though refugee agencies were sending in food supplies for war victims, Saddam had imposed a blockade above the green line and little food reached the Kurds. He had also stopped paying salaries in the region, and fighting still took place sporadically between his forces and the various peshmerga.

  Wanting some form of self-government, the political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan decided to hold elections for an Assembly in May 1992. These were the first democratic elections ever held in Iraq. There was a 7 percent threshold, which meant a party needed to get 7 percent of the total vote to make it into the Assembly. When the votes were counted, only the KDP and PUK had passed the threshold; each had roughly half the total vote.

  The parties had different geographical bases—the KDP was based in the northern part of the no-fly zone, and the PUK in the more urbanized southern part. Their politics were different, too: The Barzani KDP was conservative and tribal, the Talabani PUK more left-wing. But, as historian David McDowall explains, there were many other factors affecting the way people voted: “The overwhelming majority voted according to their sense of personal loyalty. Many were the beneficiaries of patronage networks, either directly to a political leader, or via intermediaries through whom services or supplies were obtainable. Others had moved in order to be in the same party as the majority of their family, a new kind of communal solidarity pattern. Many, who could sell their services, had ‘shopped around.’ Some had been lured by money, for example, into one of the Islamic parties funded by Iran or by Saudi Arabia, or by a better deal in another party. Others had become disenchanted. Many of the jash chiefs who had submitted to the KDP, PUK and KSP, had now withdrawn to form their own ‘Society of Kurdish Tribes.’ They were anxious to defend tribalism, a form of identity to which perhaps 20 percent of Kurds still subscribed, against what they perceived as the political and social transformation of Kurdistan, a process in which the political parties were the leadings agents.” After the election, most joined the KDP, the most powerful defender of tribalism.

  One of the first acts of the new Assembly was to establish a Kurdistan Regional Government. But unity still did not come easily. In practice, the KRG functioned as an alliance of two parties rather than as one government. All
posts were divided equally: If a minister was KDP, his deputy had to be PUK. This created what McDowall called “two parallel administrations reaching down to the police on the street or the teaching staff in a school,” each with its own patronage network. Nepotism, corruption, and inefficiency became epidemic. People could not rise in any profession without belonging to one of these two parties.

  At the same time, Saddam’s economic boycott grew more and more severe, completely circumventing UN rules. The UN commissioned a report laying out what needed to be done to rebuild the Kurdish economy, but failed to carry out any of its own recommendations, and international agencies refused to work directly with the KRG for fear of implying recognition of a separatist government. Under these circumstances, supplies had to be smuggled in from Turkey, benefitting people closest to the border. In the southern part of the region, even though the grain harvest was not enough to feed the local population, farmers would sell grain to Saddam because he paid them more than they could get otherwise.41

  In this situation, with a divided government still based on family and tribal affiliations, tension between the two parties was inevitable. The situation was further complicated by the PKK, which was securely dug into the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq. The KDP, which was economically dependent on Turkey, was pressured by it into joining an assault on the PKK’s Iraq bases in October 1992, in which many were killed. The PUK meanwhile, was briefly allied with the PKK.

  There were other causes for antagonism as well, particularly quarrels over division of revenue from smuggling. Barzani’s people in North Kurdistan had an extremely lucrative smuggling business in and out of Turkey, exchanging oil products for tobacco and alcohol. The Talabani network in southern Kurdistan also raised its main revenue from smuggling, but only in and out of Iraq, where there wasn’t much to smuggle because of the sanctions. Thus, people in the area controlled by the PUK were very poor.42

  Women particularly did not fare well in the new autonomous region. The incorporation of the jash into party politics had been a fateful one for women, for it gave impunity to men who had raped and killed their own people, and thus institutionalized a culture based on violence. But women were starting to voice their anger. In the spring of 1994, when a war between the KDP and PUK broke out over a land dispute, women organized a 200-kilometer peace march from Suleimaniya (the PUK capital) to Erbil (the KDP capital). They sang songs pleading for a return to sanity and made speeches about brother fighting brother. One told a reporter, “Men are making the fire; we are trying to extinguish it.”43 The march had as little effect on the war as a similar women’s peace march from Zagreb to Belgrade in the summer of 1991 meant to “surround the generals with a wall of love.” That march was stopped by Serbian troops, and war began soon after.44

  The KDP-PUK war continued, with neither party able to control its own peshmerga. Soon there were new floods of refugees from the war zones. The situation was further complicated by the emergence of an Islamist militia based in Halabja, in territory otherwise controlled by the PUK. The Islamist group, supported by Iran, had received 4 percent of the votes in the Assembly election, not enough to be part of the government, but significant nevertheless. Now they came into the war on the side of the KDP and seized three towns, including Halabja, and a large area of land.

  The civil war went on for four years, with first one side winning, then the other. It featured alliances between Baghdad and the KDP, Tehran and the PUK, intermissions, invasions by Turkey hunting the PKK, and failed attempts by the US to broker peace talks.45 Not until 1998 was the US able to organize a solid peace agreement. And not until the US invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 did the Kurdish economy become viable.

  The prospect of a US invasion had been building for while. Neocons in Washington had been calling for a ground war in Iraq for years, some moved by the plight of Iraqi citizens, most by their vision of the US as a force to bring democracy to the Middle East and make that volatile region safe for business. The calls were very loud after the Gulf War, when many said the US should have marched on to Baghdad instead of pulling back. At the time, Dick Cheney, who oversaw “Operation Desert Storm” as Defense Secretary under the first President Bush, told CNN that invading Iraq would be a big mistake: “There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. . . . In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.”46

  He changed his mind when he became Vice President under George W. Bush, and, with Donald Rumsfeld, pushed for a full invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the pretext that it had “weapons of mass destruction.” The invasion and occupation were driven by illusion, arrogance, venality, cronyism, and the foolish assumption that the US could simply export its own political system anywhere it chose and be welcomed with open arms. While Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator who ruled by terror, what came out of the war was also terrible, as Houzan Mahmoud of the Organization for Women’s Rights in Iraq (OWFI) described in 2006:

  “Since the invasion, more than 100,000 people have lost their lives and more than 1 million Iraqis have fled the country in order to seek safety. The UN has recently announced that 6,600 people have been killed in Iraq in the past two months alone. . . . Internal refugees are increasing, with both Sunni and Shia Muslims migrating between cities to escape sectarian violence and religious persecution. Most of these people are living in camps, tents or in abandoned buildings without the most basic living standards. Security is still the paramount issue but, three years after the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, basic water and electricity supplies are still a dream for many people there. Schools, hospitals and other civil institutions have no proper functioning and armed militias rule over numerous neighbourhoods, enforcing religious law and terrorising people at will.”47

  In this dismal picture, the only winners were the Iraqi Kurds. Finally their long-shot bet on the US had paid off. The UN sanctions were over and the economy was taking off. True, Baghdad still contested Kirkuk and the oil money being generated there. But in a newly weak and fragmented Iraq, Baghdad was willing to give the Kurds almost anything else they wanted just to keep them from seceding.

  The US was determined that Iraq not be partitioned; therefore the interim constitution, ratified in 2003, held that “the country’s permanent constitution needed an absolute majority to succeed in a popular referendum and could be voted down by a two-thirds majority in a minimum of three governorates—code for the three Kurdish governorates. In other words, no constitution could be passed without the Kurds’ approval,” as journalist Joost Hilterman said.48

  This was autonomy, but autonomy from the top down, dependent on the US. Though Islamists were part of the picture and many tribal leaders were not friendly towards the aspirations of women, once the constant wars stopped, women had enough room to maneuver to create a feminist movement. Choman Hardi described how it happened: “In the post-dictatorship era . . . political space was opened up for suspended issues to be addressed and sidelined voices to be heard. Women rapidly mobilised in response to the widespread gender-based discrimination, marginalisation and violence. Even though initially they were preoccupied with more urgent issues, such as protecting women from violence, gradually their aims and objectives broadened. After a period of working in isolation the women’s organisations founded umbrella organisations to consolidate their efforts and exert greater pressure for change. The patriarchal system responded to the on-going pressure by making cosmetic changes.”49

  The first b
ig struggle took place in 2007 around the draft KRG Constitution, which had been heavily impacted by the rising tide of Islamism. Article Seven said, “This constitution stresses the identification of the majority of Kurdish people as Muslims; thus the Islamic sharia law will be considered as one of the major sources for legislation making.”

  Secular feminists like Houzan Mahmoud opposed Article Seven, saying, “It is clear to the world that in those countries where sharia law is practised—or simply where groups of Islamic militias operate—freedom of expression, speech, and association is under threat, if not totally absent. The rights of non-Islamic religious minorities are invariably violated and women suffer disproportionately. The implementation of sharia law in Kurdistan would be the start of a new bloody chapter in the Islamists’ history of inhuman violence against the people, of oppression sanctioned by religious law.”50

  Kurdish feminists met with the committee writing the constitution, held a press conference in the Parliament building, and managed to defeat “the forced Islamization of women’s lives.” In this they were considerably more successful than feminists in Baghdad, who were unable to defeat a similar article in the Constitution of Iraq, which, according to activists, “canceled equal rights for all Iraqis in personal status matters and devolved judgments related to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody to the authority of religious leaders.”51

  Still, while women may have been better off in Iraqi Kurdistan than in the rest of Iraq, Houzan Mahmoud pointed out that they still suffered from “honour killings, FGM, forced marriages, early marriages, stoning, rape, marital rape and many other forms of violence.”52

  In 2007, the KDP and PUK agreed to divide up power: Barzani got Iraqi Kurdistan and Talabani got to move to Baghdad and be President of Iraq. Foreign investors, especially from Turkey, flocked into Iraqi Kurdistan, throwing up fancy apartment buildings for the newly rich and building five-star hotels for foreign investors. Erbil, an ancient Assyrian trading center and UNESCO world heritage site, became a city surrounded by a 100-meter ring road that sported “a Nevada-like environment of gated hamlets for educated elites and expatriate foreigners,” wrote journalist Derek Monroe. “It is widely understood that any major building project has to have some type of business connection with the Barzanis, who are pivotal to the permitting process. . . . Colonies like Royal City, English Village, American Village, and others, along with the wholesale import of fast food restaurants, have absolutely nothing to do with local culture or people.” Most of the people who lived in these gated communities were in the upper echelon of the KDP and PUK, plus their friends and relations.53