At the time of my visit, the PUK militia also had a new contingent, composed of about five hundred women peshmerga. Established on November 11, 1996, the unit had two main goals, its commander, Rezan Rashid, told me: one, to be a fighting force, and two, to change the “reactionary mentality of tradition and Islam” toward women in Kurdistan.
CLIMBING INTO THE BMW again the next morning, Mam Muhsen, Hickmat, a guard, and I drove down the mesa to the Christian village of Kani, to congratulate the Chaldean Bishop Raban. The bishop had been appointed to his position only two months before, Mam Muhsen said, and on this Easter morning—for it was Easter, I’d forgotten—people were coming from miles around to congratulate him and ask his blessing for the new year.
The village was located down a steep muddy hill, at the end of which stood a small church, an adjoining complex, and the bishop. A tall, thin, ascetic-looking man with long black robes, a fuchsia cap and belt, silver-rim glasses, and gray hair, he was mingling with his parishioners, kissing children on the head. But upon our arrival, he moved away from the throng to usher us into a huge reception room, its perimeter lined with dozens of cream-and-gold, Louis XIV-style chairs.
Moments later, a contingent of fifteen or twenty men and boys also arrived, all in traditional Kurdish dress. Some were Christian, some Muslim, but the bishop shook all hands with equal warmth and offered everyone candy, tea, and a seat. We had barely settled in when another group entered, causing everyone to rise, shake hands, and exchange good wishes. Then another group came in, and another, and as we rose and sat, rose and sat, the first group left. Except for a few girls under age ten and myself, everyone in the room was male.
Somehow, during a short break in all the coming and going, the bishop, who spoke some English, found a moment to tell me about himself. “In 1961, when I was ten and a half and the KDP had its headquarters here, the Iraqi government bombed Amadiya and all around Amadiya,” he said. “A helicopter came down to my village, and I climbed in. I told the soldiers, ‘I want to be a priest, I want to go to Mosul.’ Then, like a miracle, the helicopter engine had trouble, and I had time to go home and get money and clothes.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” I asked, imagining him as a village boy surrounded by soldiers. But the bishop either didn’t hear me or didn’t understand.
“The helicopter took me to Mosul,” he said. “And in all those hundreds of people, it was like a miracle again, I saw my uncle. He took me to a priest, and I started to study. I finished in 1973 and came back to my village. I have been a priest here for twenty-nine and a half years, and now, I am so honored, I have been made a bishop.”
“Was this village bombed in the Anfal?” I asked, though I already all but knew the answer. Like the villages I had seen in the Aqra valley, Kani was largely built of clay and stone—not post-Anfal cement.
“No, God was with us,” the bishop said.
As He was with many Christians during much of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the early years of Hussein’s dictatorship especially, many Iraqi Christians—unlike the “traitor” Kurds—had enjoyed often-tolerable relations with the Baathists.
Christians in the Amadiya area had suffered a far worse time of it in the 1840s, not long after the Kurdish emirates had been abolished. Kurdistan had then become more accessible to Western missionaries, whose proselytizing activities led to a steep decline in relationships between the Muslims and the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians native to the region. The hostilities reached one horrific climax in 1843, when Kurds from the Botan emirate, north of Amadiya in what is now Turkey, brutally attacked their Assyrian neighbors, slaughtering around ten thousand men and abducting women and children as slaves.
Layard, the British archaeologist, blamed the attacks primarily on a fierce shaikh living in the court of the Botan prince, Bedir Khan. However, he also questioned the judgment of the American missionaries who had helped stir up trouble by building a large school and boardinghouse. “These buildings had been the cause of much jealousy and suspicion to the Kurds,” he writes. “They stand upon the summit of an isolated hill, commanding the whole valley. A position less ostentatious and proportions more modest might certainly have been chosen.”
Reading those words months later back in New York, along with daily missives advocating war against Iraq, but few words regarding the country’s rebuilding, I angrily wondered why people hadn’t yet learned to carefully consider the consequences of their actions before plunging into new environments. Like introducing a strange species or microorganism into an ecosystem, whole worlds could be turned upside down, with horrific consequences, by seemingly straightforward actions.
TO AND FROM Amadiya, Mam Muhsen pointed out various personal landmarks—a cave once used by his peshmerga, a valley where he’d lived in the 1970s, a ridge that led to Iran; he’d hiked that six-day trip too many times to count. And along one empty stretch of road, he slowed down the car until it stopped with a shudder.
“This is where I was almost killed by the PKK [Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party],” he said. “In all my years in the mountains, the Iraqis never wounded me, but here, the Kurds of Turkey almost killed me. They used an American-made gun, a BZK, and shot at the car from those mountains. The car started burning. I was unconscious, I don’t remember. . . . Someone came and pulled me out.”
We sat in silence. No other cars or villages were in sight, and I could hear nothing but the sounds of our breathing and the ticking of the cooling engine. Mam Muhsen had been extremely lucky.
“Amadiya has been tormented by the PKK,” he said. “Their forces surrounded Amadiya. They forced us to defend ourselves. It’s clear to us the PKK wants to destroy Kurdistan. It’s all politics. The PKK is supported by Iraq and Iran, who are using them to hurt Turkey. The Kurds of Turkey don’t understand this. They think they are fighting for their independence. But the PKK is the worst. They destroyed many of the villages we rebuilt after the Anfal.”
He restarted the engine.
TO UNDERSTAND THE political situation in Iraqi Kurdistan today, it is also necessary to understand the political situation in Turkey’s Kurdistan— something that I had not fully appreciated before departing for Iraq.
When it comes to the treatment of its Kurdish minority, Turkey has a history that almost rivals that of Iraq. In its zeal to establish a national identity post–Ottoman Empire, Turkey even denied it had a Kurdish minority, declaring Kurds to be “mountain Turks who have forgotten their language.” Kurds who did not call themselves Kurds could rise high in Turkish government and society, and often did. But to speak Kurdish in public places, give Kurdish concerts, teach Kurdish language, and even at times wear Kurdish dress—let alone talk Kurdish politics—was usually forbidden.
In the late 1970s, Abdullah Öcalan (pronounced “oh-jalan”), an Ankara university student, and other young radicals secretly founded the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. In 1980, Turkey suffered a military coup, which led to brutal crackdowns on political dissidents. And in 1984, the PKK attacked its first Turkish military outposts. Fed up with Turkish repression, an economic exploitation of the Kurdish southeast, and the overall failure of democracy in Turkey, the PKK declared that the only solution for the Kurds was to separate entirely from Turkey and form an independent nation.
Civil war began. Rather than addressing the Kurds’ real grievances, Turkey instituted a massive military buildup in the Southeast, torturing and murdering suspected PKK members and supporters, and forcibly evacuating and destroying villages. The PKK reacted by slaughtering large numbers of Turkish soldiers and progovernment Kurdish civilians, quickly garnering the group a reputation for terrorism. By the time the war ended, with the arrest of Öcalan in 1999, about thirty-seven thousand people had been killed, over three thousand Kurdish villages destroyed, and at least 1 million Kurds rendered homeless.
The Kurdish-Turkish conflict had a direct and immediate effect on Iraqi Kurdistan. About ten years earlier, Baghdad had cleared villages in a twenty-kilometer-
wide stretch along its Turkish and Iranian borders, creating a no-man’s-land where no guerrillas could hide. In the mid-1980s, Iraq granted the Turks permission to enter Iraqi Kurdistan when in “hot pursuit” of the PKK. The policy suited Iraq at the time; at war with Iran, it could not afford to police its Turkish border. And the policy still suited Iraq over fifteen years later, at the time of my visit; Saddam Hussein welcomed the Turkish presence in Kurdistan as a destabilizing influence. Hence the Turkish tanks I’d seen on my outing with Majed, Yousif, and family. Hence, also, the Turkish air attacks against PKK camps in Iraqi Kurdistan that had started after the Gulf War and continued. Sometimes these air attacks had destroyed Iraqi Kurdish villages, rather than PKK camps, leading the Iraqi Kurds to interpret them as warnings.
Initially, relations between the KDP and PKK had been good. In 1983, the two parties signed a cooperation agreement against any kind of imperialism, with American imperialism heading the list. But in 1987, the KDP broke with the PKK, largely because of the PKK’s violent methods. Less than a year later, the PKK signed an alliance with the PUK, whose territory does not border Turkey, but it also soon fell apart.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the KDP, PUK, and other smaller parties successfully established a self-governing, semiautonomous Kurdistan. One of the fledging coalition’s early acts was to declare its intention to “combat the PKK,” as it understood that if Iraqi Kurdistan was to survive, it needed Turkey’s help. Turkey was the only neighboring country that could provide the military bases needed for the Western allies’ protective air patrols and offer the Iraqi Kurds an essential economic trade route to the West.
In July 1992 the PKK successfully cut off that trade route. Fighting broke out between the Kurds of Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq. In 1994, the internal fighting between the KDP and the PUK also began, enabling the PKK to play the two Iraqi parties against each other. “Öcalan is the enemy of Kurds,” the KDP declared after one unfortunate incident in which the PKK took humanitarian aid workers hostage against possible KDP attacks.
In March 1995, some thirty-five thousand Turkish soldiers entered Iraqi Kurdistan in order to destroy PKK camps—only the largest of several similar expeditions throughout the 1990s. Officially, the KDP opposed the action. Privately, they condoned it; both they and the PUK worked with the Turks in various anti-PKK operations.
Öcalan was arrested in 1999, and the PKK abandoned its armed military struggle, saying that it would now fight for equal civil rights through peaceful means. However, about five thousand PKK peshmerga were believed to be still hiding in northern Iraq in the early 2000s, giving Turkey all the excuse it needed to cross the border—and to keep about fifteen hundred troops permanently stationed in Iraqi Kurdistan. Skirmishes between the PKK and the KDP also continued. I had already seen many buildings and a few villages now completely abandoned due to post-1991 PKK–KDP hostilities.
All of which set the stage for yet a new chapter in Iraqi-Turkish-Kurdish relations to begin with the Iraq war of 2003, when the United States proposed sending large numbers of Turkish troops into northern Iraq—supposedly for peace monitoring and humanitarian purposes. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi Kurds reacted with anger, outrage, and mass demonstrations. To allow some Turkish troops into Iraqi Kurdistan to pursue the PKK was one thing. But to allow a mass invasion by a military force that was brutally suppressing fellow Kurds and occasionally bombing Iraqi Kurdish villages—not to mention badly mistreating the Iraqi Kurds during the 1991 uprising—was unthinkable. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed, and the Turks were kept out of northern Iraq, though the issue was to come up again months after the war.
THE SHIFTING RELATIONSHIPS between the KDP, PUK, PKK, Iraq, and Turkey may seem Byzantine, but they are par for the course in Kurdistan. Throughout the centuries of the Ottoman-Safavid Empires and before, the Kurdish tribes were constantly forced to form new alliances, break old ones, join loose confederations, leave them, toy with friends, and two-time enemies in order to survive. And throughout the twentieth century, with little voice in their respective nation-states, the Kurds were again often forced to temporarily ally themselves with one strange bedfellow or another. An uncertain status in the world necessitates constant balancing acts.
LEAVING GAMADIYA THAT AFTERNOON, I returned to Dohuk to find Majed and Yousif waiting for me. Like Mam Muhsen, they had Easter calls to make, and were eager to have me come along. It doesn’t matter that we are Muslim and our friends Christian, they emphasized. The problems of the past are over; all religions as well as tribes get along well in the new Kurdistan.
Though nothing is ever quite so simple, many other Muslims, Christians, and members of other minority groups expressed similar sentiments to me in northern Iraq. The fledgling democracy was granting full religious and cultural rights to all minorities, and some citizens did seem to be developing what one scholar calls a “Kurdistani”—as opposed to a “Kurdish”—identity, apropos of the new pluralistic Kurdistan.
We made the rounds, starting with a visit to the big, modern Assyrian church, where we met several priests. Next came a stop at the home of Armenian neighbors, followed by visits to several Chaldean Christian families. At every stop, candy, nuts, colored Easter eggs, and tea were passed around, along with expressions of Christian-Muslim goodwill, and it was a heartwarming feeling to be enthusiastically welcomed into living room after living room by host after host. As at Bishop Raban’s, other groups kept arriving and leaving as we made our calls, until I got the sense that the whole town of Dohuk was on the move. The whole male population of Dohuk, that is. Except in a few cases, there were no women guests—just hostesses.
Our last stop was the home of a Christian man originally from the Barwari region, also home to Majed and Yousif’s family. The friendship between the two families went way back, to the days of their great-grandfathers. Back then, the Muslim great-grandfather had helped the Christian great-grandfather escape from an Ottoman massacre.
“They wouldn’t give him up, and for this reason, we have always been close,” the Christian said, ceremoniously laying out a pristine white tablecloth, upon which he placed assorted nuts, four tumblers, and a bottle of Scotch.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Questions of Honor
AT THE NORTHERN EDGE OFIRAQI KURDISTAN, NOT FAR from the Turkish border, is the city of Zakho, population about 150,000. Some historians believe that its name derives from the ancient Aramaic word zakhota, meaning “victory,” and refers to a battle fought nearby between the victorious Romans and the defeated Persians. Xenophon the Greek mentions Zakho in Anabasis, written in 401 B.C., but the city is probably considerably older than that, perhaps dating back to the 2000s B.C.
Part of the Bahdinan emirate during much of the Ottoman Empire, Zakho hugs the banks of the Khabur River, which splits in two just before entering the city. A one-thousand-year-old bridge spans one of the channels, while the other circumnavigates the town to join up with the first branch by the ruined tower of the Zakho castle, built in the 1700s on the site of a much older fortress.
But none of this ancient history has much bearing on Zakho today. Like the rest of Kurdistan, its past has been burned and destroyed, submerged and trampled on so many times that it is but a blip in the city’s collective memory. Most people in Zakho know almost nothing about its early history, just as most people in Kurdistan know little about what occurred in their lands prior to the 1960s, or even, among the younger generation, the 1980s. Ask the average Kurd to what era an ancient monument in town belongs, and he or she won’t be able to say. Constant oppression and war allow no time for the contemplation of the past.
Continual upheaval has also meant that the Kurds have had little time to cultivate their traditional arts. Who can think of weaving carpets or spending hours cooking elaborate dishes taught by grandmothers when most of one’s family is in the mountains or in jail, bombs are falling, and one may have to pack up—again—and leave soon?
Before the advent of radio and television, the Kurds p
reserved their history and culture through an unusually rich oral tradition—a treasure trove of folktales, epic poetry, songs, and proverbs. Especially on winter evenings, people gathered in homes and male-only guesthouses to gossip, exchange information, tell stories, and sing. Family and tribal histories, community legend and lore were preserved, created, and re-created through the authoritative voices of elders passing along their knowledge to the young. Some fortunate Kurds learned to read and write Arabic through village mullahs, and the upper crust learned Turkish and Persian in schools for the nobility, but for centuries, most villagers were nonliterate, and Kurdish remained an oral language. The first Kurdish newspaper did not appear until 1898, when it was published in Cairo, Egypt, of all places; pressure from the Ottomans made it impossible to publish in Kurdistan.
The Kurds’ oral tradition was already breaking down by the 1960s, and would probably be in steep decline today even without the horrific events of the past four decades. But relentless war and oppression have hastened its demise. Only recently, with the start of a shaky peace, are the Iraqi Kurds fully opening their eyes and wondering at all they have lost, not just physically and emotionally, but also culturally.
Yet throughout it all, even in the worst of times, the surviving ancient sites of Kurdistan have never completely lost their power. Palpably drawing both the literate and the nonliterate to them, especially at the end of the day, when dusk brings with it the larger questions of life, the sites offer respite. They are places of forgetting as well as remembering, places in which to lose the pain and immediacy of the modern world in the imagined glories and mysteries of the past.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 13