Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Wolfowitz disagreed, of course. In January 2000, while president of Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, he pushed for aggressive action, like turning the no-fly zones into "no-go" zones for Saddam's army. Kurdistan, he said, was already outside Saddam's control and the south of Iraq could be as well. The only Iraqi group willing to endorse this plan was Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and it wasn't clear how sincerely the INC endorsed it—some Sunni members feared this plan would lead to an irreversible partition.10 The INC's main theater had moved to Washington, D.C., as it tried to get at some of that ninety-eight million dollars. The State Department and CIA felt they had already been burned by Chalabi and wanted nothing to do with him, but the exile found a welcome at the door of many Iraq hawks. Chalabi egged on their ideas for action. The Kurdish parties were lukewarm to Wolfowitz's plan, but anyhow, it didn't seem more than musings at the time.†

  I asked Wolfowitz, among others, for suggestions on how to get into Iraqi Kurdistan, and he immediately suggested Barham Salih. When I told him that route was dry, he suggested I go through Turkey.11 I called a few foreign correspondents based in Istanbul, and they told me the Turks had shut the border completely for journalists. If I wanted to go in that way, I'd have to take the huge risk of hiring a smuggler to stuff me under a load of grain. Visions of the Turkish prison in Midnight Express filled my mind, and I discarded the Turkish route. Only the front door remained: Baghdad.

  A few journalists had recently traveled to the north from the Iraqi capital, getting permission through the United Nations. Resolution 986, Oil-for-Food, greatly reduced the general suffering around Iraq, but it was no substitute for a real economy. Before long the Oil-for-Food program became as much a rallying cry as the total blockade it replaced.* In the process of keeping out materiel that could be used for weapons, many important medicines and pieces of sanitation equipment were blocked. A U.N. study reportedly blamed the blockade for the premature deaths of half a million children by 1995—and Madeleine Albright infamously said she thought keeping Saddam under control was worth it.12 That sent the anti-sanctions crowd into a tizzy, and helped me get into Iraq.

  On my own I had no better luck getting a visa to Iraq than I had gaining access through either of the Kurdish groups. The old Iraqi embassy at the edge of Dupont Circle in Washington looked deserted from the outside. Someone had purposefully wound the flag so it wasn't visible, and last year's leaves still covered the driveway. Inside, a man who looked like he had been napping on the couch in the lobby took my application. My calls to the Iraqi mission to the U.N. implied that this was the correct procedure, but of course no word ever came, and I started to think that I would never get in. Finally I found out that Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-sanctions activist group, was planning a trip. They told me they would love to have a freelance reporter along. The group, while quite sincere, also served the Iraqi government's purposes, and as such had no trouble getting visas. They put me on their list and my visa magically appeared, but when I reached Baghdad in March 2000, I discovered that the authorities wouldn't allow me to leave the group. I found myself driving about Baghdad and the south, on an official tour of the horrors of sanctions. While in Baghdad, I made contact with an Iraqi fixer of sorts, gave him five hundred dollars, and asked him to arrange a second visa for me. I reluctantly left Iraq with the anti-sanctions convoy, holed up at a hostel in Amman for ten days while the money worked, and then, finally, returned to Baghdad to make my way north to Kurdistan.

  By way of comparison the trip south was valuable. The pain sanctions caused was plain to see, but it was nothing next to the overwhelming feeling of fear and hopelessness inspired by the portraits of Saddam Hussein on every corner. Iraq was blessed with all the resources in the world as it slid into decay. Seeing the richness of the country, in oil, water, land, and talented people, made both Saddam's rule and the U.N. embargo seem all the more senseless.

  At the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters, the old Canal Hotel on the east side of the city, George Somerwill, the spokesman for the Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq (UNOCHI), was about to break in his third boss. The previous two had resigned to protest what sanctions had done to Iraq. Somerwill gave a rational explanation of what was happening: the amount of food permissible for Iraqis under Oil-for-Food was fine for a healthy population but not enough for a population that was also facing disease because of poor sanitation and lack of medical supplies.

  But the anti-sanctions argument had one big hole in it—Kurdistan. The same U.N. studies that concluded sanctions were killing Iraq's children and un-developing the country also determined that in the north things had improved. The explanation was clear but impossible to say out loud in Baghdad: Saddam was robbing the program blind in his part of the country.13 ("What the hell did they expect him to do?" one U.N. official asked me.) Baghdad also used the ration-card system to keep tabs on the population. In the Kurdish north, where the United Nations distributed food with a semblance of fairness, health and welfare had improved.

  Somerwill had some numbers to counter that argument. The Kurds received (or were supposed to receive) 13 percent of the resources from Oil-for-Food—commensurate with their share of Iraq's population. But the 13 percent came right off the top. After that, the punitive measures were taken out of Saddam's share—for war reparations and U.N. operating expenses. Therefore, according to Somerwill, 87 percent of Iraq's population living outside the three Kurdish provinces was living on only about half the oil proceeds. He also pointed out that NGOs were able to operate in the north and were filling in big gaps in areas such as literacy and civil society. The Oil-for-Food program in the north had a small cash component as well, allowing the purchase of cement and grain in an attempt to protect the local economy. Of course, all of the resolution 986 supplies going north had to come through Baghdad, and the Kurds had complained repeatedly to the U.N. that the program was wild with corruption and meddling by the regime. It made for an interesting discussion, but Somerwill caught on that what I really wanted was to get to Kurdistan. I needed a letter of permission from his office "to observe the implementation of the 986 program" in the north. He signed a form quickly, and I was on my way; it was April 1, 2000.

  The Iraqi Information Ministry still wanted its pound of flesh. In addition to the visa fees, legal and informal, the ministry charged all visiting journalists a daily rate simply for being in the country, and they added charges for carrying any high-tech equipment like a satellite phone (though I hadn't paid this fee when I traveled with the anti-sanctions group Voices in the Wilderness). As a freelancer without much gear, I argued their rates down a bit, but it still came out to about two hundred dollars a day for me just to be in Iraq. I had to pay the official translator—or "minder," as everyone called them, because they reported all interviews and interactions back to the ministry. In addition, for my trip north they had an official driver for me to hire, a grizzled, graying man I'll call Abu Soran. He was one of the few Kurds working for the ministry and would translate from Kurdish for my minder, Ali, who looked much younger, with his wispy mustache and baby face. The two made an odd couple. Ali's manicured hand was limp when I shook it and he drew me in to kiss both his cheeks. Abu Soran had a handshake like a bridge troll.

  Making friends with the people who are reporting your every move back to a sinister instrument of a brutal regime is a funny business, and I was new at it. Some of the minders had better reputations than others, and Ali was said to be harmless. I got a slightly worse feel from Abu Soran. I paid the ministry officials in advance. They took my letter from the U.N. and wished me a nice trip. There is no April Fool's Day in Iraq, but the ministry official never gave back the letter, which soon became a problem.

  SO BEGAN MY first trip to Kurdistan, driving north from Saddam's Baghdad in an orange and white taxicab, accompanied by two low-grade Ba'athist spies. We left the sprawl of the capital and took the direct route through Baquba, stopping for lunch at a truck stop in Kir
kuk, still outside Kurdish control. As we approached Erbil province, the foothills of the Zagros Mountains rose into view. The naked rocks looked like teeth, and for a moment I thought the Kurds had somehow built a ridge spanning the horizon to hold the Arab army off from the south. Over the rise we left the last Iraqi checkpoint and slowly rolled up to the ragtag Kurdish militiamen guarding their own border. When I couldn't produce the letter from the U.N., they promptly arrested us and took us to Erbil.

  Getting arrested by KDP militiamen made Ali and Abu Soran rather nervous. I didn't feel worried—I was fairly certain the Kurds had nothing against journalists. The soldiers, armed with knockoff AK-47 assault rifles, asked me to get in their car, and a few of the men got in the cab with Ali and Abu Soran. Ali had never been to the north of Iraq and regarded the Kurds with fascination and a bit of fear—all his life Kurdistan had represented rebellion and anarchy. Abu Soran, a native of Koi Sanjaq, could have been worried about his occupation as a spy for Baghdad or simply about being originally from the PUK side of Kurdistan, They took us to a nondescript building in the center of Erbil and served us tea in a waiting room. The KDP security officer called the U.N. to ask if I my story was true, and then we waited for a call back. He took me into a thin-walled office and sat me down.

  "Your friends—they are Mukhabarat?" he asked me in Arabic. I assumed the men were still right outside the door, so I tried to have it both ways.

  "I don't know," I said, vigorously nodding my head yes.

  The Kurdish officer smiled. When the U.N. called him back a short while later, he told us to enjoy our stay in Kurdistan.

  People have lived in Erbil for perhaps eight thousand years—it is in the running with Damascus for the world's oldest continuously inhabited city—but that doesn't make it a particularly beautiful town. It has none of Kurdistan's stunning mountains to frame it, no lazy riverfront like Mosul or Baghdad. At the city center a citadel rises up on a plateau towering about a hundred feet over the city.* Some Kurds live there today and claim they descend from the founders of the city. Unfortunately the rest of Erbil's architecture is Ba'athist industrial—great hulks of concrete and glass that soak up too much heat in the summer and seem immune to it in the wintertime. I've been told that the name comes from arbah 'ila—Arabic for "four idols." In Kurdish the city is called Hawler—"temple of the sun" in that language. On my first visit it could have been called the temple of Barzani: the KDP had put up a portrait of Mulla Mustafa for every portrait of Saddam they had taken down in 1991.

  Abu Soran drove us to the U.N. compound, where I had arranged to stay in a guesthouse, and at that point my two minders checked out. They were both afraid to come with me on my KDP tour of the city and preferred to sit back at the U.N. guesthouse watching satellite television, with many racy channels unavailable in Baghdad. It was part of so many open deceptions going on. The Mukhabarat office back in Baghdad knew that once we got north, their spies wouldn't dare move about Kurdistan. They would bring back a little information about Kurdistan, a little information about me, but mostly everyone would get their cut of the cash.

  Also feigning blindness were the U.N. staffers. They were allowed to talk to me because I had come from Baghdad with official (if mislaid) permission. But the U.N. agreement with the government of Iraq forbade any dealings with illegal visitors. They had to act as if other journalists didn't exist—most of the small number who made it into Kurdistan by unofficial routes. The same ban extended to the NGO workers who snuck in from Syria. The invisible treatment didn't endear the United Nations to the Kurds, but no matter how much the U.N. tried to pretend this was Iraq, the difference was unmistakable.

  Emerald green pastures carpeted the landscape around Erbil—reminding me more of Ireland than Iraq. There wasn't an Arab headdress in sight, and men in the marketplace looked right at home in their traditional baggy trousers gathered at the waist with a wide cummerbund. The haggling there involved Iraqi dinars, but the old bills from before Saddam started printing his face on all of Iraq's money. In Baghdad a shopping bag full of "Saddam dinars" was needed to buy the same volume of groceries that could be had for a handful in Erbil. In the north the exchange rate was better, even though the currency had only a pseudo-government behind it. The printing plates for the bills came from Switzerland, and the Kurds called the money "Swiss dinars." Satellite call centers could be found in the major cities, with clearer, cheaper, easier connections to the United States and Europe than at any of the dilapidated phone company buildings in Baghdad. Just as I arrived, the regional government announced that clocks would be set one hour ahead for spring; the Kurds didn't even want to share a time zone with Arab Iraq.

  On my first trip out of Erbil I found a schoolhouse and recorded the kids singing the KDP national anthem. The teacher bragged that the children in the village hardly knew a word of Arabic. The village itself, just a few miles south of the city, was called Dal de Gan, which the teacher said meant "refuge of chieftains." In 1987, Iraqi troops and jahsh razed it to the ground as part of the Anfal campaign. Oil-for-Food money started to help rebuild the town in 1998, and forty-eight families had moved back into new mud-brick houses. Most of the men were out with their sheep, but a few of the women were willing to speak.

  "We're not afraid of anybody here," said Sadiya Bassi, a young mother. Her family ran the gamut of the Anfal experience. One brother had been a pesh merga and fled into the hills when the pogrom began. Her mother described watching the village dynamited and bulldozed in 1987, then sneaking back to comb the rubble for a few belongings. Sadiya's father had invaded Kuwait as a soldier in the Iraqi army. He deserted when his commanding officer, an Arab, mercifully told all the men to go home to their families instead of being slaughtered by the coming American invasion. HABITAT, the U.N.'s settlement agency, helped the family return from the slums in Erbil, and two years along, life wasn't bad. Everyone mentioned the Oil-for-Food program as the reason, but it all seemed too good to be completely believed. "Since the U.N. is here, I'm not afraid, but when they go, Saddam is coming back, and they will destroy us again," said Bassi.

  Destruction seemed like a fact of life for Kurds like Bassi—they could rebuild their villages, start printing schoolbooks in Kurdish, hold their own elections, and police their own streets, but they couldn't shake the idea that fate had plans to smash it all.

  After the arrest—a bad first impression—the KDP graciously arranged to bring me up to the mountain resort of Salahudin, where I met Sami Abd-al-Rahman. The KDP had absorbed his own party after the 1992 elections, and he now sat at the head of the KDP politburo. He was a bit stern—though I can't blame him. For the stories I was writing, my questions boiled down to a tricked-out version of "What's a Kurd?" I asked him if the Kurds had ever seen it so good. He resisted the hyperbole.

  "Our people have seen better times, but since the genocide campaign, this is the best," he allowed. He gave good marks to the Oil-for-Food program but walked a careful line between singing the praises of "Free Iraq" and making sure I wouldn't try to put words in his mouth about Kurdish independence.

  "We have never asked for separation [from Iraq] and no one would be dealing with us if we had," he said. "And that's why we are a factor of stability in the area. And we have been managing to ourselves for eight years."

  Sami deflected questions about the Washington Agreement that had ended the Kurdish civil war, and claimed that the KDP was sharing with the PUK whatever they got from the Khabur bridge customs revenues, and that it was nowhere near a million dollars each day. He said the agreement at least had produced two and a half years without shooting. Much of Sami's nuance was wasted on me at the time, and only listening to my recordings of the interview years later do I hear the stress he put on certain historical events—repeating, for example, that the Kurds had not taken over the north but simply filled the vacuum created when Saddam withdrew. When I asked why he trusted the Americans to keep protecting the north, he enthused about a new world order, in which minority rig
hts and self-determination were respected. That was a talking point with many of the leadership figures I met. He also gave me my first recitation of the standard disclaimer of a desire for a Greater Kurdistan

  "It is a sweet dream," he said, "and no one can prevent us from dreaming this sweet dream. But we are pragmatic. We know that for the time it is difficult that this dream be fulfilled."

  As Abd-al-Rahman's protocol officer took me out to the foyer, he saw Abu Soran waiting beside his orange and white Baghdad taxicab down in the parking lot. "They think we are so stupid that we don't know their spies?" he nearly spat.

  The KDP had taken a small page out of Baghdad's book and kept my access limited in Erbil. They didn't sit in on all my interviews—as the Iraqis did in the south—but they did control my access. I had been given the name of Hussein Sinjari, the flamboyant PUK representative who had worked as the PUK liaison to General Jay Garner and later as Jim Muir's mountain escort. Disgusted by the civil war, Sinjari left the PUK in 1996 and founded a democracy institute in Erbil. He had never joined the KDP though, and they told me it would be impossible to see him. With my inexperience, I didn't know how easily I could have sidestepped them.