A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts
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As Britain’s intentions for Iraq’s future became clearer, the Kurds reacted with armed resistance. First came the revolts of Shaikh Mahmoud in 1919 and 1922 to 1923, then the provocative actions of Shaikh Ahmad in the late 1920s, which led the British to bomb about eighty Kurdish villages—another early foretaste of what was later to come. And when the British duly instated King Faisal and his Hashemite monarchy in 1932, the legendary Mulla Mustafa Barzani rose to the fore.
Born in 1904, Mulla Mustafa is the best-known hero of the Kurdish nationalist movement. A larger-than-life warrior-leader, whose picture can be found in virtually every home in northernmost Iraqi Kurdistan, he succeeded against all odds in uniting nonliterate men from rival tribes with educated urban professionals to fight for a then-seemingly impossible cause. Though his first revolt of 1943–45 was small and eventually defeated, forcing him into exile in Iran and the Soviet Union, when he returned to Iraq thirteen years later, at age fifty-four, he effectively waged a war against the Iraqi government that in its essence continued into the 2000s.
Mulla Mustafa returned to Iraq with the fall of King Faisal’s Hashemite monarchy, overthrown in 1958 in a coup d’etat by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qassem, who at first promised a bright future for the Kurds. With the blessing of Qassem, Mulla Mustafa took up residence in Baghdad, assumed leadership of Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which had been formed during his exile, and began drawing up a list of Kurdish demands. But three years later, in 1961, Barzani’s relationship with Qassem soured irrevocably, as it became clear that they could never agree on the extent of Kurdistan’s autonomy. The KDP was banned, and a full-scale Kurdish-Iraqi war began, to be waged with only short interruptions until 1970.
In 1963, Qassem himself was overthrown, in a coup d’etat by the Baath Party. Another exile hurried home: Saddam Hussein, hiding out in Egypt because of his earlier attempt to assassinate Qassem. Nine months later, the Baath Party fell from power in a third coup d’etat. It resumed control again in 1968, to reign with ever-increasing brutality until the Iraq war of 2003.
Initially, the Baath regime expressed interest in negotiating with the Kurds. Then–Vice President Saddam Hussein traveled to Kurdistan to meet with Mulla Mustafa, and together they drafted the 1970 March Manifesto, which promised the creation of a semiautonomous Kurdish state, to be phased in over a four-year period. But as the four years went by, various articles of the manifesto failed to be adequately implemented. The boundaries of the Kurdish state were never established. Distrust escalated on both sides, and, in March 1974, hostilities broke out again.
The Kurds resumed the war with military aid from the Shah of Iran, who was in turn supported by the United States, giving the Kurds high hopes of victory. But only one year later, on March 6, 1975, the shah and Saddam Hussein suddenly signed the Algiers Accord—a devastating moment in Kurdish history that is still lived and relived every day in Iraqi Kurdistan. The accord abruptly ended the shah’s support of the Iraqi Kurds in return for territorial rights. Overnight, the Kurdish resistance movement crumbled. A defeated Mulla Mustafa, forced into exile once again, declared the Kurdish war finished.
It was then that the modern chapter of Iraqi Kurdish politics began—a chapter still unfolding at the time of my visit and defining much of what I observed around me. I was traveling through a Kurdistan that was a divided country within a divided country. Its two northernmost governorates— Dohuk and Erbil—were controlled by a reinvigorated version of Mulla Mustafa’s old party, the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The third and southernmost governorate—Suleimaniyah—was controlled by a newer party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The seeds of this division had been sown during the earliest days of the KDP, when the party was split between its more traditional elements, headed by Mulla Mustafa, and its more urban, intellectual branch, led by Ahmad and Jalal Talabani. The latter pair, who had a socialist agenda, endured Mulla Mustafa only because of his strong following and military capabilities. But Barzani’s unilateral decision to end the Kurdish war was the last straw for the leftists, and, in 1976, citing the “inability of the feudalist, tribalist, bourgeois rightist and capitulationist Kurdish leadership”—i.e., Barzani—to wage an effective revolution, Jalal Talabani declared the establishment of his new party. The PUK then resumed the Kurdish war against the Iraqi government, to be joined in the fight shortly thereafter by a regrouped KDP. Relationships between the two parties remained extremely hostile, however, all too often erupting into bloodshed.
After the Gulf War and the establishment of the Kurdish safe haven in 1991, there were questions over who would govern the zone. Many outside analysts did not believe the divisive Kurds capable of peacefully governing themselves, but, in May 1992, they more than rose to the occasion by holding democratic elections—the first in Iraq in thirty years—a remarkable achievement anywhere, but especially so in the Middle East. For the most part, international observers deemed the elections to be free and fair, with the KDP and PUK receiving a near equal number of votes. A jointly controlled Kurdish Parliament was set up, with fifty representatives from each party and five representatives from minority parties. The new government moved quickly to establish order, altering existing Iraqi laws to better serve the new quasi-state, outlawing the Baathist methods of repression, and, most impressively, announcing the formation of a Kurdish federal state, with the hopes of eventually being incorporated into a post-Saddam federation. Ordinary Kurds rejoiced in what seemed the beginning of a new era.
However, before long, an old pattern reestablished itself. The KDP and PUK began accusing each other of misappropriating funds and of being more interested in accruing power than in developing the region. Desperate economic conditions, terrorist bombings, and attempted assassinations raised tensions to the breaking point. In the spring of 1994, fighting broke out. Thousands died in a tragic and unnecessary internal war that led to the division of Kurdistan into two separately governed zones—a situation that would endure until six months after my visit, when a joint KDP–PUK session of the Kurdish Parliament met on October 15, 2002, for the first time in six years.
LATER THAT DAY, I met Dr. Shawkat Bamarni in the hotel lobby. Head of Dohuk’s Public Relations Office, and thus an influential member of the KDP, it was his job to meet foreigners like myself and help us maneuver through Kurdistan. As a writer, I also needed Dr. Shawkat’s help to line up interviews and gather background information.
A broad-shouldered man dressed in a neat dark suit with a pearl gray tie, Dr. Shawkat had a heavy, lugubrious air about him. Throughout that visit, and on numerous others, he seldom smiled, though he was always exceedingly generous and kind, and even told the occasional joke, most of which didn’t quite translate into English. Later in my stay, I saw a photograph of him as a young guerrilla fighter, attending a conference with Massoud Barzani, in which Dr. Shawkat looked angry, untamed, and desperately ill at ease, as if longing to bolt out of the strange conference room and back to his familiar mountains. Now, though, hair thinning and eyes tired, he seemed all too accustomed to meeting foreigners in conference rooms and glass-sheathed hotels, both in Kurdistan and “outside.”
“Welcome,” Dr. Shawkat said in good English, motioning me toward a cluster of armchairs. From the other end of the room came the familiar tinkling sound of AOL’s “you’ve got mail” signal. The Internet had arrived in Kurdistan in the late 1990s, and the Jiyan Hotel was host to a cybercafe.
Dr. Shawkat’s eyes lit up when he heard I’d spent some time in Iran— he’d lived there for many years. He asked me a few questions about my background and talked about the other foreign visitors he’d recently hosted. Then, he got down to business.
“Don’t ever go outside by yourself—always go with a friend. And when you travel outside Dohuk, you must take a bodyguard,” he said.
“Is that really necessary?” I asked. Before leaving the United States, I had talked to several Americans who’d spent much time in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as
to a number of Kurds. The subject of bodyguards had come up, but no one had been able to tell me definitively if they were necessary. Some had said that they were more of a formality than anything else, while others had hedged on the subject by saying that bodyguards were sometimes needed, sometimes not; it all depended . . . on what, they couldn’t specifically say. I didn’t understand their answers until after I’d spent some time in Kurdistan, and then found myself answering the question in the same ambiguous way. Most of the time, the guards were a formality, but at times, I heartily welcomed their presence.
“If they’re not really necessary, I’d rather not use them,” I said. “They’ll just get in the way.”
“You know the situation here,” Dr. Shawkat said.
“Yes,” I said, but I also knew that I really didn’t. I knew about Saddam Hussein, of course, and about the high probability—the certainty, really— of his agents’ presence in Kurdistan, along with agents from Iran, Turkey, and Syria, all countries with interests in destabilizing northern Iraq. As a semiautonomous, Western-supported state, Kurdistan posed a threat—a democracy in a region generally hostile to democracy. Kurdish independence here might encourage Kurds elsewhere to rise up against their governments. In the mid-1990s, Saddam had targeted Americans in northern Iraq for assassination, which led President Bill Clinton to pull all U.S. aid workers out. Since then, however, that Iraqi government policy had ended. I had no reason to believe that anything would happen to me, but I was in a volatile part of the world, where things could change at any time. No one really knew the situation here.
We moved on to more personal topics. Dr. Shawkat had hundreds upon hundreds of books, he said, and thousands upon thousands of photographs. He took pictures of everything and everyone, and documented and indexed all his images carefully, in an intricate cross-referencing system. He also wrote in his journal every night, as he had for decades, and saved and indexed every letter. Kurdistan was history in the making, he said proudly, reminding me of something I’d read: The Kurds like photographs because the images confirm their existence—otherwise too often denied.
“How do you find the time?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, but I must.”
Dr. Shawkat, I would later decide, was a quintessential KDP man. Throughout northern Iraq, I met many like him—big, broad, middle-aged men dressed in dark suits, which often didn’t quite fit. There were plenty of younger, slimmer KDP officials as well, but in general, they didn’t take their jobs quite as seriously, weren’t quite as committed to the party or to the idea of a semiautonomous Kurdistan. Already one generation removed from the armed Kurdish struggle, many of the younger officials seemed more focused on their own desires than on communal needs. To them, the KDP was a job, not a mission, as it was to men like Dr. Shawkat.
Mulla Mustafa had passed away in 1979, but the KDP was still headed by the Barzani confederation and still had a reputation for old-fashioned tribal politics. Mulla Mustafa’s son—the round-faced, boyish Massoud Barzani—was now the KDP president, and Nechirvan Barzani, Massoud’s nephew, was the KDP prime minister. Like his father, Massoud tended to dress in traditional shal u shapik and keep his thoughts to himself.
Jalal Talabani, in contrast, who still headed the PUK, was a round, garrulous lawyer who dressed in Western suits. He reputedly held more liberal and socially progressive positions than his rival. But Talabani was often criticized for his unpredictability and willingness to compromise, whereas Barzani was generally regarded as more steadfast.
The Iraqi Kurds continually pointed out the differences between the two parties to me, and I did notice some contrasts between them, as represented by both their policies and the officials I met, most of whom were men. KDP officials tended to be more formal and reserved; PUK men were more forthcoming and spontaneous, though more disorganized. Overall, however, I found the two parties to be essentially much alike. Both were powerful institutions that revolved around their strong-willed leaders, maintained strict party hierarchies, controlled an astonishing number of activities, paid close heed to tribal politics, and supported their own militias.
EACH OF KURDISTAN’S three governorates, all named after their capital city, had a distinct personality, which loosely corresponded to the personality of its governing party. KDP-controlled Dohuk was the smallest, most conservative, and tribal of the three, so much so that Iraqi Kurds elsewhere sometimes poked fun at it. But Dohuk was also the most quintessentially Kurdish, as it had been least subject to urban influences. PUKCONTROLLED Suleimaniyah was relatively modern and liberal, at least as far as its largest cities were concerned. Suleimaniyah city was the site of the first Kurdish university, established in 1968, and had been the center of Kurdish publishing since 1920. Erbil, the headquarters of the KDP and seat of the Kurdish Parliament, fell somewhere in between Dohuk and Suleimaniyah, both geographically and in terms of character, except when it came to religion. The city of Erbil was said to be the most devout of the three large cities. It was also the largest, with a population of nine hundred thousand, as compared to Suleimaniyah’s seven hundred thousand and Dohuk’s four hundred thousand.
The boundaries of the governorates loosely corresponded to those of the old Ottoman Empire emirates. Most of Dohuk governorate had once belonged to the Bahdinan emirate, Erbil was at times ruled by the Soran princes, and Suleimaniyah was the former capital of the Babans. Under the Ottomans, the Kurds had inhabited sixteen large emirates and about fifty smaller Kurdish fiefdoms, all located in what is now Iraq and Turkey; the Safavids had ruled over a fewer number of Kurds in what is now Iran. Most Kurdish princes had sided with the Ottomans after a decisive 1514 battle between the two empires at Çaldiran (Turkey), which established the border between them. The Kurdish princes supported the Ottomans largely because the Turkish Sultan offered them semiautonomous, self-governing powers, in return for paying taxes and providing military support, while the Safavids did not.
In the long run, this semiautonomous arrangement proved to be a double-edged sword. Because whenever a Kurdish prince rebelled against the Ottoman authorities, he inevitably had a brother, son, or nephew who was happy to obey the sultan and literally stab the prince in the back. Threats from disgruntled relatives was a major theme running throughout Ottoman history, and one that resonates in Kurdistan to this day, as individuals jockey for position within families, tribes, and the government.
I WENT TO Dr. Shawkat’s office to talk about my itinerary. He sent one of his drivers to pick me up, and we drove to a low-slung building surrounded by a wall and overgrown garden. Sitting on plastic chairs outside the wall, AK-47s between their knees, were several guards in the machine-woven, military-style shal u shapik, better known as khak (like the English word khaki, both derived from Persian), and red-and-white turbans that are the trademark of the Barzanis and their supporters. Wound tightly around the head over the base of a skullcap, the turbans are usually one cloth high; Barzani family members wear two, one piled on top of the other.
One of the guards ushered me into the dank KDP building, chilly with the rains of early spring. Behind a large desk, beneath a photograph of Massoud Barzani, sat Dr. Shawkat, today dressed in a handsome brown suit and golden tie. Rising with a big smile, he kissed me on both cheeks and apologized. He still had other business to attend to, would I mind waiting? He directed me to a couch nearby, beneath a photograph of Mulla Mustafa. An assistant lumbered in with tea, balancing the delicate hourglass and saucer carefully between his large hands.
A man in a Western suit and double-tiered turban big as a birthday cake entered, followed by a slight Armenian priest in black robes and a collar, and an older man in an exquisite shal u shapik of a lustrous beige striped with thin brown. Each man sat with Dr. Shawkat for about fifteen minutes, discussing his concerns over a glass of tea while I watched them curiously. The diversity and occasional magnificence of the male Kurdish costume, coupled with their often striking faces, seemingly carved by the elements, fascinated me t
hroughout my visit, even after their initial novelty wore off.
I studied the walls. On one hung a detailed map of northern Iraq, and on another, a dusty wreath of dried red, yellow, and green—the colors of Kurdistan. On a third was a woven plaque, also of red, yellow, and green, commemorating the KDP’s establishment, while in a corner flickered a television, silently tuned to a Kurdish satellite station.
Nowhere in sight was a map of Greater Kurdistan—a red-hot political issue in the Middle East. Depicting all of the lands that are inhabited by Kurds, the Greater Kurdistan map is about four times larger than the Iraqi Kurdistan map, as it includes over a third of Turkey, a fifth of Iran, slivers of Syria and Armenia, and an Iraqi Kurdistan expanded to encompass the oil-rich cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Many non-Kurds assume that an independent Greater Kurdistan is what most Kurds are pushing for, and that independence is, in fact, what the whole trouble with the Kurds is all about. Yet I found the reality of the situation to be far more complex and nuanced. Although the creation of an independent Greater Kurdistan is certainly the dream of many Kurds, many realize that it is just a dream, and are primarily focused on achieving equal rights in the nations in which they live. Certainly neither the KDP nor the PUK, as I was told repeatedly, was pushing for an independent Greater Kurdistan. They simply wanted a semiautonomous state within a federated Iraq; they were Iraqis as well as Kurds, they often said.
“You see how busy I am,” Dr. Shawkat said, finally joining me. “I have so many visitors. I have no time.”