Erbil rose to importance again in 1167, when it became the capital of the powerful Kurdish prince, Zayn al-Din Ali Kucuk Begtegin. His descendant Muzaffer al-Din Kokburi built a major Sufi center and madrassa, or religious school, whose tile-studded minaret still stands. Muzaffer may have also been the first to officially celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, in 1207—a festival that has since spread throughout the Muslim world.
Like much of Kurdistan, Erbil was viciously attacked by the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan in the thirteenth century, but the city put up an impressive resistance and fell only after a long siege. And under the Ottomans, Erbil served as a cultural and administrative hub, home to many poets, scholars, and bureaucrats.
UPON REACHING ERBIL, I went directly to the home of Nesreen Mustafa Siddeek Berwari, Kurdistan’s minister of Reconstruction and Development, who had invited me to stay with her. Nesreen and I had been in frequent touch by e-mail before I left the United States, thanks to a mutual contact, and we had already met in Dohuk. It was Nesreen who had introduced me to her cousins Majed and his siblings, and Nesreen who had helped arrange my stay in Amadiya. Nesreen had also answered many of my basic questions regarding Kurdistan and helped me navigate its societal mores.
In her mid-thirties, Nesreen lived with her father and an unmarried brother in a large house that had been provided for her use by the KDP. Running the household were relatives from the family village of Chamsaida, while out front was a guardhouse manned by peshmerga, most also from Chamsaida. Kurdish families are loose structures, often numbering in the hundreds, and those in positions of power often hire relatives.
Nesreen was waiting for me when I arrived, and we soon settled down for a glass of tea. Confident and direct, with shiny dark hair and eyes, Nesreen was one of the most unusual women in Iraqi Kurdistan, and emblematic, I hoped, of better things to come for all Kurdish women. One of two women ministers and four women parliamentarians serving in the KDP government, she was single, traveled extensively by herself, oversaw a ministry of about fifteen hundred employees, and held a masters’ degree in public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
She owed a large part of her success to her father. An uneducated but open-minded man who’d grown up in Chamsaida, he had moved his family to Baghdad in 1958, understanding that his children—eight sons and one daughter—would have little future if they stayed in rural Kurdistan. His foresight had paid off extraordinarily well. Among Nesreen’s brothers were a geologist who was also a successful painter, an engineer, a businessman who specialized in computers, and the director of Brayati, one of Kurdistan’s foremost newspaper and media companies.
Born in Baghdad in 1967, Nesreen was the next-to-youngest child. Her oldest brother joined the Kurdish revolution in 1974, when she was seven, and thereafter, the Baathists periodically harassed her father. Then in 1981, they imprisoned the entire family for one year, along with hundreds of other peshmerga families. Nesreen took her schoolbooks with her into jail, and the guards let her out to take her final exams.
“I didn’t want to give up my chance for an education,” she said as we sipped our tea. “This is what Saddam wanted, for the Kurds to have no education, to be nobodies. But because of Saddam, I and many other Kurds have always pushed ourselves harder, to prove we could do it.” She passed me a box of imported chocolates.
After the family was released from prison, they moved to Dohuk, but Nesreen stayed behind to attend the University of Baghdad, where she studied architectural engineering and urban planning. She was in her final year when the Gulf War broke out and the uprising began, forcing her and much of her family to flee to Turkey. But after living in a Turkish refugee camp for two months, she heard that the University of Baghdad was reopening and decided to go back to finish her degree. The move took courage; as a Kurd, she hadn’t known how she would be received. Yet once again, she hadn’t wanted to give up her chance for an education, and had graduated without incident.
Back in Kurdistan after the creation of the safe haven, Nesreen first found work as an administrative officer for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. She steadily rose in the U.N. organization, eventually becoming head of the Habitat field office in Dohuk. Like all U.N. workers, she was paid far more than ordinary Kurds, and at that time, when most of her brothers were unemployed, she was her family’s main source of economic support.
Through the help of an American working for the United Nations, Nesreen began requesting catalogues from graduate schools in the West. Setting her sights on Harvard’s Kennedy School, she took the required entrance interview by phone, was accepted, and flew to Boston to become the school’s first Iraqi Kurdish student. Fifteen months later, she graduated. Half of her tuition was paid by the Kurdistan government, half by a Kennedy School scholarship. Her father had attended her graduation, a scene I loved imagining.
When Nesreen had first left Iraq to study in the United States, there had, of course, been much gossip. She’s going alone—for over a year!—the community tittered. She’s going to get married; she’ll never come back.
Yet Nesreen did return, to initially be offered the position of deputy minister of Reconstruction and Development, which she turned down. All too familiar with her culture, she knew that as a woman deputy minister, she would have little power. Then in 1999, to the credit of the KDP leadership, often criticized for its traditional tribal politics, Nesreen was appointed minister of Reconstruction and Development. It had worked out well.
“I can honestly say that I’ve had no real problems as a woman in government,” she said. “My age and lack of government experience have been the greater obstacles.”
But those, too, had been dealt with and overcome. The KDP had gone so far as to say that of its twenty ministers, the best were its two women. More important, much of the Kurdish community had grown both accustomed to and proud of Nesreen’s accomplishments, so much so that younger women often spoke of hoping to follow in her footsteps.
OVER THE NEXT few days, I explored Erbil with Rezan, a pretty and giggly young translator, recently graduated from the University of Salahuddin. We started with a tour of the many indoor-outdoor markets surrounding the Citadel, Erbil’s oldest district, rising about twenty-five yards above the rest of the city. All of the expected items were for sale—carpets, clothing, CDs, computers, fruits, and vegetables—and I was only half listening to my guide’s patter when she suggested we stop to visit her “milk brother.” Thereupon, I met a beaming young man who ran a carpet store. His mother had died when he was an infant, and Rezan’s mother had suckled him. This meant that he and Rezan were related by milk and so looked out for each other and could not marry.
Within Erbil was a huge Turkish-style mosque being built by the city’s Turcomans—a people with whom Kurds have a fractious relationship, though there is no real history of violence between them. Related to the Turks, the Turcomans live primarily in Iraq’s northern cities and in Baghdad. No reliable population figures exist, but they probably number between 350,000 and 750,000. Among Kurds, the Turcomans have a reputation for being extremely conservative, wealthy, haughty, standoffish, and passive—a view that the Turcomans I met basically agreed with, although they preferred the words “conservative, wealthy, proud, private, and peaceful.” Many Turcomans work as artisans, especially carpenters and tailors, and for centuries, they controlled the northern cities’ gold markets.
Although brutally mistreated by the Baath regime, the Turcomans boycotted Kurdistan’s 1992 elections and turned down the chance to participate in the reunited 2002 Kurdish Parliament. Many observers believed, however, that those policies had less to do with the Turcomans’ hostility toward the Kurds than with their unwillingness to anger Turkey by appearing to endorse Kurdish autonomy. Turkey kept a protective eye on its related community and often complained of the Turcomans’ second-class status in the safe haven—an accusation the Kurds denied.
That afternoon, Rezan and I stopp
ed by the Faili Cultural Center, home to another minority group in Kurdistan. Numbering perhaps 150,000, the Faili are Shiite Kurds who settled during Ottoman times in various parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, and yet were denied Iraqi citizenship. The Baath regime had proclaimed them to be Iranians and, on two separate occasions, cruelly expelled them to Iran, forcing out about fifty thousand in 1971 and an even larger group in the early 1980s. Over seven thousand Faili had also been arrested in the early 1980s, never to be seen again, said the center’s director, Shawker Faili, as he showed us a long, sad wall, lined with photographs of the missing. Within his extended family alone, eighteen people had disappeared after arrest, while eleven others had been executed.
Another morning Rezan and I attended a session of the Kurdish Parliament in what had once been the Baathist security district. From the outside, the concrete-and-stone parliament building glowered, dark and forbidding. Inside, a new era had begun. In the entrance hall, floors polished to a high gleam, hung an enormous portrait of Mulla Mustafa, flanked by two guards in Kurdish costume, both standing disconcertingly motionless and expressionless, à la Buckingham Palace.
Heading straight to the visitors’ gallery, Rezan and I took seats above a wood-paneled room filled with semicircular rows of green-upholstered seats. About fifty or sixty representatives and cabinet ministers were filing in, with the ministers—including my friend Nesreen—taking seats in the front row. Mam Muhsen, my host from Amadiya, was also there, along with a half-dozen other representatives in traditional Kurdish dress and a Christian in black robes etched with gold. Most of the other men wore Western-style clothes, as did the half-dozen women among them.
The parliament president, Dr. Rowsch Shaways, took the podium, and the session began with the traditional Muslim benediction, “Besmellah, al-rahman al-rahim”—In the Name of Allah, the Magnificent, the Merciful. As the words rang out, I marveled at how familiar it all seemed, and how small. With a slight change in the religious message, I could have been in the capitol building of one of the smaller U.S. states.
To one side of Dr. Rowsch sat a KDP representative, but the chair to his other side was empty, as were over half of the seats in the assembly hall. Since the 1994–97 internal war, almost all of the PUK representatives had left Erbil, and their absence was yawningly apparent. The parliament still had a quorum—fifty-three members—but whatever laws it passed now applied only to the KDP-controlled side. The PUK governed its territory through a separate cabinet of ministers and the party’s politburo.
For many Kurds I met, the hostility between the KPD and PUK was a painful and embarrassing subject, best avoided. Memories of the internal war were still raw, especially in Erbil. The conflict had displaced tens of thousands of people and resulted in thousands of deaths. It had also brought out the worst in both ordinary citizens, some of whom took to looting and murder, and politicians.
The first clashes between the KDP and PUK after Kurdistan’s 1992 elections took place in December 1993 and by 1995, the death toll was already in the thousands. Unable to reconcile their differences, the parties sought the help of outside allies, with the KDP turning first to Turkey and the PUK cultivating Iran. But both parties also kept communications open with Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein adroitly manipulated the hostilities between them until tensions rose to the breaking point.
In August 1996, the PUK allowed Iranian forces to enter Kurdistan, allegedly in pursuit of the Iranian version of the KDP (KDPI). Panicking, the KDP turned to Baghdad for assistance. Horrified civilians watched as thirty thousand Baath troops entered the region and immediately captured Erbil. The forces also tracked down several hundred rebels who had supported a failed 1995 CIA-backed coup attempt to oust Saddam, leading the United States to airlift out of the region about five thousand Americans, Kurds, and other Iraqis deemed at risk. The maneuvers gave Hussein back some of the prestige he had lost following the 1991 Gulf War and undermined the legitimacy of the Kurdish safe haven.
International pressure forced the Baathists to withdraw from Kurdistan within weeks. Subsequently, the KDP took full control of Erbil and the PUK retreated to Suleimaniyah. Not until September 1998, with the help of American mediation, did the two parties sign the Washington Agreement, which established a permanent cease-fire between them and paved the way for future negotiations.
I shuddered as I remembered this history, wondering at the fragility of emerging nations, so easily swayed as they take two steps forward, one step back. Another serious misstep and semiautonomous Kurdistan could have been gone for good.
AFTER THE PARLIAMENT session was over, Rezan and I toured the building with Fawzia Eziddin Rashid, one of the KDP’s four women parliamentarians. A warm and round middle-aged woman with short black brushed-back hair, Fawzia had started working for the KDP when she was still a student. As one of the few single women then working for the party, she had taken care to spend every night in a different home, to diminish the chances of being arrested. Especially back then, the community treated women who’d been imprisoned as “very little things,” as the assumption was that they had been raped by the guards and, thus, had lost their honor.
Fawzia had also been one of fifty-nine representatives who had holed up in the parliament building for 101 days from late 1994 to early 1995, frantically negotiating to save their splintering government. With her husband working in Salahuddin, and her children safe with relatives, she had watched with deep despair as Iraqi tanks rolled past the parliament and the rival peshmerga fought each other street by street, building by building.
After a tour through the parliament library—filled with law books in Arabic and Kurdish—we headed to Fawzia’s office to speak about the women’s rights committee on which she served. The committee had recently succeeded in changing seven laws that affected women. One made it illegal for a man to beat his wife; another stated that if a man took a second wife without the permission of the first, he could be sentenced to three years in prison. These changes sounded sadly limited in scope to me, but they brought home how painstakingly slow change can be. As one Kurdish politician said to me later, “Of course, we can pass all sorts of admirable laws, but what good will they do us if they can’t be implemented? The trick is to pass laws that our society is ready to accept.”
The Kurdish Parliament also had to take care to pass only laws that fell within the Iraqi legal framework. Kurdistan was still governed by Iraqi law, albeit with some alterations, and, if the Kurds departed too far from Baghdad’s authority, a post-Saddam federation would be harder to establish. They could also be accused of separatism, which would lead to a whole host of other problems.
Down the hall from Fawzia were the offices of other parliamentarians, some of whom I spoke with on subsequent visits. I also met with the Kurdish Parliament president, various cabinet ministers, and other officials. Some had nothing but praise for their new government, but others frankly admitted that it still had some way to go before achieving true democracy.
Interestingly, when I asked the politicians what they felt was the biggest problem confronting Kurdistan, aside from Saddam Hussein and the surrounding enemy states, many answered, “People don’t understand their rights.” By this they meant that the Kurds, like all Iraqis, had lived under a strong-armed regime for so long that they didn’t know they could object to mistreatment or otherwise stand up for themselves. Women didn’t know that they had any recourse against cruel husbands; men didn’t know they could protest illegal arrest or torture; families didn’t know that they could refuse to kill their “wayward” daughters in the face of societal pressure.
Many in government and the media were now working hard to spread the word in this arena. Through television and articles, conferences, and classes in democracy held in the schools, police departments, and militia centers, the Kurds were gradually becoming aware that just because certain things had been handled in certain ways in the past, that didn’t mean such practices had to continue. “We are still very new to democracy,
” said one deputy minister. “But we are a humble people, and we learn quickly. Even five years from now, things will be very different. Look at all the change that happened in the last ten years.”
ONE OF THE first women to work for the KDP in a leadership capacity, elected to the party’s Central Committee in 1959, was Nahida Shaikh Salaam Ahmad. Now in her eighties, Nahida had first become involved in politics in 1937, when she’d worked for the Hewa party, a forerunner to the KDP. Her father, Shaikh Salaam, had been a famous poet, her husband an influential KPD member, and one of her eight sons, Dr. Rowsch Shaways, was president of the Kurdistan Parliament.
My translator Rezan and I went to visit Nahida one morning, to find a charismatic woman with bright white hair and a strong, weathered face waiting for us. She wore a magnificent blue dress with a floral design, a sheer black head scarf, numerous gold and coral bracelets, and a turquoise ring reaching almost to her knuckle. Despite her age, her voice rang deep and strong, and she spoke with dramatic gestures, which I felt sure must once have commandeered the Central Committee.
Nahida told us about working for the KDP in its earliest years, in the mid-1940s. Back then, she said, she was one of few women among many men, and so always carefully covered herself in her abeyya. The party was poor, and one of her jobs was to write out its newsletter by hand, making multiple copies. Until, that is, she had a brainstorm. Through her work as a teacher, she knew that Suleimaniyah’s Department of Education had a typewriter. She decided to steal it for the KDP. With the help of the doorkeeper, she made a copy of the office key and returned late one night in her abeyya. Picking up the typewriter—far heavier than she’d anticipated—she hid it under her garment and slipped away.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 19