After the major hostilities were over, my reservations became beside the point. Saddam Hussein was gone! There could be no better immediate outcome than that. I was ecstatic for all Iraqis, and especially my Iraqi Kurdish friends. I had seen firsthand how they lived while he was in power.
During and after the war, everyone I knew in Iraqi Kurdistan was doing well. In Dohuk, my host family, Majed and Huda, had another child, a son, and Zobayda, the sister who helped me most during my stay, was studying in France—both events that would have happened with or without the war, but that nevertheless seemed a product of post-Baath optimism. Yousif, the cousin from San Diego, got a job translating for the U.S. Army, while his sister Fatma had married and her husband moved to the United States. Amin was back teaching at the art institute and my tightly covered translator Bayan got a job with a demining company. Dr. Shawkat, who had first helped orient me to Kurdistan, was now handling public relations for Mosul, a much larger city than Dohuk, and the site where Saddam Hussein’s two sons died in a shootout in late July 2003.
Those I had met in the Erbil and Suleimaniyah governorates were also doing well. Dr. Adil Karem Fatah, the Halabja doctor who’d fled into exile in Damascus in fear for his life, was back in Iraq. He had no reason to seek asylum now and wanted to be in his own country, helping his people. Nizar Ghafur Agha Said, the Kurdish American businessman who’d served as my translator in Suleimaniyah, was working as a regional adviser and interpreter for the U.S.’s Coalition Provisional Authority. The Rozhbayanis, one of my host families in Erbil—the mother a parliamentarian, the father an editor—had returned to Kirkuk, their hometown. Many outside observers had believed that Kirkuk would be the site of a bloodbath postwar, with Kurds and Arabs—as well as the Turkish army, if given the chance—violently fighting for control of the oil town. Kurds would ruthlessly attack those who had settled in their homes during the Baathist “Arabization” program, the experts said. But despite some ethnic tension and sporadic ugly incidents, by the fall of 2003, that scenario had yet to happen. Kurdish leaders had urged their followers to exercise restraint and settle questions of ownership by lawsuits, not guns, and most people listened.
Of all those I knew in Iraqi Kurdistan, the person whose life changed especially dramatically after the war was Nesreen Mustafa Siddeek Berweri, the woman minister of Reconstruction and Development, who had helped me so much throughout my stay. In early September 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council, assembled the previous July to help U.S. officials govern postwar Iraq, appointed Nesreen to serve as the country’s minister of Municipalities and Public Works, overseeing forty-five thousand employees. The only woman minister in the new twenty-five member cabinet, Nesreen’s responsibilities included urban planning, environmental sanitation, and, most important at first, drinking water. It was her job to get the drinking water of Iraq flowing again. Within days of her appointment, she was meeting with the Coalition Provisional Administrator L. Paul Bremer III and President Bush.
Nesreen was one of four Kurdish ministers in the Iraqi cabinet, while the twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council included five Kurds— numbers that boded well for the future of Kurds in Iraq. Other ministries headed by Kurds included the all-important department of foreign affairs and the group framing the new constitution. From the perspective of the fall of 2003 at least, it looked as if the Iraqi Kurds were finally getting their chance and would be an integral, and quite powerful, part of whatever happened next in their country. Of all Iraqis, they were in an especially good position postwar, thanks in no small part to their enthusiastic support for the United States. The Kurdish region was also in better economic and organizational shape than was most of the country, as it had been least subject to U.N. sanctions and recent Baathist rule.
Impressively, too, the KDP and PUK were managing to work together. Though behind-the-scenes tensions continued, each had reopened offices in the other’s territory even before the war began, and Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani were presenting a united front to the world, issuing joint statements as they pressed for Kurdish interests.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but mourn a little for the death of the semiautonomous zone. In many ways, that zone had not been a good situation; the Kurds had been living in fear, and the United Nations had had too much power. Yet during their semi-independent years, the Kurds had flown their own flag, circulated their own money, run their own militias, and largely governed themselves and only themselves in what had been a unique, interesting, and overall quite successful experiment. Now, they were being ordered to fly the Iraqi as well as the Kurdish flag, their currency was being withdrawn, their peshmerga were to merge into a national army, and they were to share with others in the governing of a new multiethnic Iraq. The Kurds’ relatively self-sufficient days of collecting tolls at checkpoints, smuggling oil between Baathist-controlled territory and Turkey, and receiving generous oil-for-food revenues were over. In the future, they would have to compete for national resources with other parts of Iraq and work within a budget administered out of Baghdad. Arab tourists were flooding the Kurdish region, and the Arabic language, shunned during my visit and unintelligible to many younger Kurds, was once again being heard on the streets. The magic kingdom was disappearing.
Such changes were inevitable, of course, if a new Iraq were to be created. Much more alarming for the Iraqis in general was the escalating postwar violence and growing presence of Islamist extremists in the country. Much more alarming for the Iraqi Kurds in particular was the flickering possibility that perhaps a strong federalist system would not be established, that Kurdish interests would be subsumed by Arab nationalists pushing for a strong central government. The troublesome issue of sending Turkish troops into Iraq also resurfaced. Once again, the Kurds were adamantly opposed to the proposal—as were the Arabs, who had their own distasteful memories of the Ottomans. Until the last minute, however, when Turkey finally abandoned the plan, saying it would not send troops unless invited by Iraq to do so, the Americans and Turks seemed to be settling the matter between themselves. This was big-time politics, no need to take the position of a minor ally like the Kurds into consideration, the Americans seemed to be saying. An indication of future U.S. policy in the region? Before and during the war, the United States had needed the Iraqi Kurds. But now, all bets were off.
In the end, the whole Iraq question would take years to be settled. Nation building is a long and arduous process, and many outside powers in addition to the United States—Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, France—would seek to influence the fledgling nation, both politically and economically. Widespread ethnic hostilities might still erupt, extremist groups could take even more serious hold, occupying troops would probably be required far longer than initially thought. Yet despite my deep worries regarding the broader impact of the war, and the immediate future of Iraq, I was cautiously, albeit conditionally, optimistic about the Iraqi Kurds’ future—if the violence could be eradicated, if the United States stayed the course, if a strong federated state were created. The Iraqi Kurds were now known around the world, and they weren’t about to disappear inside a totalitarian state again. Positive as well as negative developments were occurring; it was early yet.
ALTHOUGH THE EYES of the world were largely focused on Iraq throughout 2003, dramatic changes were also taking place in Turkey— changes that could have as great an impact on the Kurds’ future as the Iraq war of 2003. The surprise election of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), headed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister, in November 2002, quickly led to a series of significant reforms. As a moderate Islamist party with a strong pro–European Union stance, the AKP’s rise indicated both a turning away from Turkey’s old-style politicians, with their often-unquestioning support of the United States, and an embracing of Western democratic values by Muslim traditionalists. Some worried that the AKP might have a hidden Islamist agenda, but they disavowed the accusation and throughout 2003, placed their emphasis on refor
m, not religion.
By that fall, the Turkish Parliament had passed four sets of laws and regulations aimed at improving Turkey’s democracy and chances to join the European Union. The first two packages, introduced in January, made it more difficult to close down political parties, try party members, and get away with acts of torture or mistreatment. The packages also expanded the freedom of the press and made it possible to retry cases deemed unfair by the European Court of Human Rights. One of the first cases to be retried was that of Turkey’s longest-serving political prisoners: Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan, Selim Sadak, and Leyla Zana—the latter the only woman and winner of the 1995 Sakharov prize. As Kurds and former members of parliament, the foursome had been imprisoned since 1994 for alleged links with the PKK. The evidence against them had been flimsy, and based primarily on their wearing the banned Kurdish colors during their swearing-in ceremony and using Kurdish words during or after taking the oath of office.
The Turkish Parliament passed two more reform packages in July. One lifted the infamous Article 8 of the antiterror law, the one used to sentence hundreds of writers and other nonviolent offenders to harsh prison terms simply for criticizing the government’s Kurdish policies. And the second, and most significant of the reform packages, greatly curbed the power of the Turkish military by reducing the National Security Council to an advisory body. Equally composed of military leaders and senior politicians, but usually headed by a four-star general, the council had previously had the right to step into politics whenever it deemed the civilian authorities to be losing control. Now, the parliament decreed that the council no longer had such power, and that the hitherto secret military budget had to be subject to parliamentary review. Even a few years earlier, such reforms could have led to the military again seizing power, but broad support for more democracy in Turkey now made that scenario less likely.
The reform packages marked a major step forward for the republic, and one that earned it the right to start accession talks to the European Union in late 2004. Yet the larger question of implementation remained, and remains. “Pass all the laws you want,” Sezgin Tanrikulu, the human rights lawyer I’d met in Diyarbakir, said in an interview after the reforms were passed. “The courts and law enforcement agencies will in the end apply them as they see fit.”
And indeed, throughout 2003, Tanrikulu was right. The retrial of Leyla Zana and her three colleagues, begun in early spring, proceeded at a snail’s pace, with the prisoners and observers complaining about new rounds of mistreatment. By that fall, the case still hadn’t been resolved, even though far more dangerous criminals are routinely released from Turkish prisons after serving shorter terms. Kurdish language courses did not begin until over a year after they became legal, and then only in one city at first, as applicants had to jump through innumerable bureaucratic hoops before receiving permission to offer the classes; state objections ranged from too-narrow doorways to too-few pictures of Atatürk in the proposed classrooms. Giving children Kurdish names continued to be banned until September, when they were allowed as long as they didn’t contain the letters “q,” “x,” and “w”—letters found in the Kurdish but not the Turkish alphabet. The limited amount of Kurdish broadcasting authorized by the parliament in July 2002 did not begin until nearly eighteen months later, and torture and other human rights abuses were said to be continuing.
Why can’t the Turks just lighten up? I thought as I read about the stonewalling. During the height of the Kurdish-Turkish civil war, the Turks had perhaps had some justification for their harsh techniques, but PKK/ KADEK had stopped calling for independence in the mid-1990s, when their focus shifted to equal civil rights, and all major hostilities ended in 1999. The local Turkish officials’ refusal to institute even such simple reforms as Kurdish language classes seemed like paranoia to me—as had the general Turkish reaction to the Iraq war of 2003, when many Turks expressed a histrionic fear that the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey might join together to fight for an independent Kurdistan. Anyone who had spent much time in the region knew that such a scenario was unlikely. With the United States on their side, the Iraqi Kurds had far too much to lose, while Turkey’s Kurds were too exhausted to begin another war. In addition, PKK/KADEK and the Iraqi Kurds were still at loggerheads.
Mainstream Turks’ attitude toward the Kurds reminded me of mainstream white Americans’ attitude toward black Americans before the civil rights era—and still all too often today—when fear of the “other” led to ascribing to the minority group all the worst attributes of humankind. Racism was rampant in Turkey and, even if the reforms were miraculously instituted overnight, would probably take a generation to significantly lessen. It was unfortunate, too, that much of Turkey’s impetus for change was coming from outside European Union pressure rather than from within.
Among the July reforms passed by the Turkish Parliament was an offer of amnesty to some rank-and-file PKK/KADEK guerrillas. The offer should have signaled a new beginning, but instead it led to heightened hostilities. The rebels felt that the amnesty was an insincere gesture, as it did not include PKK/KADEK leaders and granted reduced sentences only to those who informed on others still at large. KADEK subsequently called off its four-year unilateral cease-fire, saying that Ankara had failed to respond with reciprocal goodwill. The rebel group added, however, that the end of the truce did not mean war, and only a handful of skirmishes broke out over the next few months.
With the amnesty largely a failure, the question of what to do with the approximately five thousand PKK/KADEK rebels still hiding out in northern Iraq remained, and remains. Under the leadership of Osman Öcalan, Abdullah Öcalan’s brother, the rebel group had kept a low and peaceful profile since 1999, but also said that it was not giving up the fight. Turkey wanted the United States to help flush out the guerrillas in exchange for providing peacekeeping troops, but even before the troops’ proposal was abandoned, the chances of the United States pursuing the rebels were slim—things were unstable enough in Iraq as it was. Curiously, too, KADEK seemed to be supportive of the U.S.-British presence in the region. Osman Öcalan told journalists that he wanted to cooperate with the West to help establish a democratic Iraq and had no objections to Turkish troops passing through Iraqi Kurdistan on their way to peacekeeping missions farther south.
In the end, the verdict on the reforms in Turkey, like the verdict on the war in Iraq, was still unclear. Both countries were at a historic crossroads, with changes in the works that could have enormous implications for the Kurds. And while the situation in Turkey, like the situation in Iraq, could still go many different ways—the military could still step in, implementation could take too long, Turkey could backtrack—I was also cautiously optimistic about Turkey’s Kurds’ future. Unlike Iraq, Turkey already had a functioning democracy, repressive though it was in ways, and a serious desire to meet the reformist standards of the European Union. Corruption and abuses of power were deeply ingrained in the state, but both Turks and Kurds were demanding change.
Of course, there were still plenty of wild cards, several of which were dealt shortly before this book went to press: the United States’ decision to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, 2004—far earlier than originally planned; the capture of Saddam Hussein; Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for a full-scale general election prior to the transition of power. And if, say, Iraq fell apart and the Iraqi Kurds split off from the Iraqi Arabs and Turkey panicked . . . Anything could still happen.
Immediately before, during, and after the Iraq war of 2003, I received worried e-mails from my friends in Turkey. Saddam Hussein might attack the Southeast, masked special forces were back on the streets, Emergency Rule might be reinstated. But as the war came, went, and receded, the e-mails became reassuringly mundane. In early October, my translator Celil wrote: “Nowadays people in Diyarbakir are curious about the health condition of Öcalan. . . . But yesterday there was a festival in Batman and Ciwan Haco the most famous Kurdish rock singer (now living in Sweden)
came to Batman after 23 years and we all went to Batman. It was fantastic.”
My Kurdish friends in Iran and Syria were also wrapped up in their everyday lives. I received no reports from either country of increased repression or any other fallout—bad or good—from the war. Events in Iraq and Turkey were undoubtedly already affecting Iranian and Syrian Kurdistan behind the scenes—Iranian politicians were nervous, I read—but on an everyday level, nothing had changed.
I THOUGHT BACK to the many questions I had had at the beginning of my journey. How had the Kurds kept going after all they had suffered? They kept going because they had no other choice. How were they juggling the old and the new? With two steps forward, one step back. Were they still their own worst enemy? At times. Had they reinvented themselves? Yes.
A S FOR THE question of an independent Kurdish state, that remains open. For the most part, Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria today are not talking about independence but, rather, about equal civil rights and the need to establish federated political states. Yet floating in the back of many Kurdish minds—how could it be otherwise?—are dreams of complete independence, with some regarding it as only a dream and others viewing the federated states as a stepping stone to the larger goal.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 45