Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  The adept Kurdish security service caught wind of the demonstration plan and called in a group of the students to meet with the PUK's Omar Fattah days before the anniversary. They handed him a list of demands, which he promised to address. But the students still wanted to make their point. On the morning of March 16, at about eight A.M. a hundred of them gathered in the center of Halabja and began to walk the mile to the memorial. The sun peered over the mountains in Iran, casting long shadows down the valley on a clear spring day in Kurdistan. To the left of the marchers the fields shone emerald green where the city gives way to the lake. When they reached the entry road to the memorial, a few young men poured diesel fuel on some tires and set them alight to keep any visitors from reaching the museum that day.

  "It was because of their broken promises," said one of the students. "They all come to Halabja and see the memorial and then they give money—but the government keeps the money and gets rich. Here in Halabja you can see how we are living."*

  What began as a student protest captured the spirit of other Halabjans, impatient after seeing themselves endlessly portrayed in newspapers and magazines, with nothing new in their town but the polished monument. The crowd swelled with older men, women, and children. Now numbering a few thousand, the mob moved toward the museum and pelted stones at the sign outside that read "No Ba'athists Allowed Here." The sign fell, encouraging the rioters. Closer to the entryway the few dozen guards began firing warning shots, then bursts from their assault rifles. The sight of their own government's police firing shots at them must have been the last straw, and the mob surged toward the monument, scattering the guards. The protesters bashed their way through the plate glass doors and flooded the small circular hall inside, breaking everything in sight—the glass display cases, the plaques with survivors' names. A few young men found cans of diesel fuel for the museum's generator and poured it on the floor. Then they torched the building.

  The outraged security guards made to retake the monument when they saw the smoke, and this time they fired straight into the crowd. The protesters broke and fled and by midday it was all over. Six protesters suffered wounds, and seventeen-year-old boy lay dying in the dirt outside the Halabja Memorial, a bullet hole gaping in his chest. His name was Kurdistan ("Kurdo") Ahmed Sayed.

  Even months after the event, every young man in Halabja had either taken part or wanted to associate himself with the protest. While Halabja always has a strong Islamist current, suddenly the angry youths there could have been from Gaza or Karachi or Baghdad. They distrusted America and saw conspiracy everywhere, and they yearned to take quick action, like pistols with their hammers pulled back, just looking for a target.

  As they told their stories in an open-air garage in the center of town, an old man sat listening harmlessly—he could have been grandfather to any of the boys. When the conversation paused, the old fellow chimed in innocently that he still loved George Bush, that the Americans had done a great thing by removing Saddam Hussein, that destroying the monument was a crime. "I lost my wife and my children to the gas that day," said Kamal Hamisli. "I had no choice but to leave them and flee to Iran with my one surviving son. Later I came back and found them in our house, and buried each of them."

  The younger men listened quietly as he spoke about the holocaust that had hit their town, of how the gas smelled like perfume at first, before it began killing. Most of the student protesters had been three or four years old in 1988 and had no memory of the massacre. A couple of them laughed in that unsettling way people in war zones do. They wanted grandpa to stop going on with his tired genocide stories that didn't match the Zeitgeist of the angry Kurdish young men.

  "Since 1991 the Kurdish government had said it's going to rebuild Halabja. Every sixteenth of March at the commemoration, they make promises, but nothing ever comes," said one student. "Any guest coming to Halabja just went to the monument, and saw the tiles and how fancy it was. They never saw the ruined streets of Halabja."

  In fact a few "guests" had made it to town on the day of the protest—several international reporters, expecting to write the perennial Halabja story and to enjoy a corner of Iraq that was cool in spring, friendly, and free of death squads. The burning of the monument by Halabja's own people so shocked the Kurdish authorities that they held a hurried press conference, panicking over what the media coverage would do to their sales campaign of "Kurdistan: The Other Iraq," which advertised the business boom in the north. On the drive back from Halabja after the protest, PUK security repeatedly tried to confiscate film from photojournalists.1 In Sulimaniya the authorities hastened to blame the incident on outside agitators, or perhaps Halabja's Islamists. The PUK leadership seemed genuinely shocked, but nonpartisan Kurds simply nodded their heads, well aware that while Halabja went without noticeable improvement, Jalal Talabani had built a new mansion on the hill above Sulimaniya, with a Porsche parked in the back. The leadership had no idea how to spin the horrible news.

  Kurdish security was not so conflicted about what to do. In raids over the next several days they nabbed at least eighty young men and took them in for interrogation and beatings. A four-year-old boy and a fifty-three-year old man were wounded in gunfire during some of the raids conducted by the PUK. One local judge even suggested that such rabble-rousers would face the death penalty under an old Ba'athist law.2 The aggressive local paper, Hawlati, took the hardest hits, refusing to cooperate with a government order to turn over any photos and notes taken at the protest. While the pro-PUK journalists' syndicate buckled quickly to the request, a Hawlati columnist was arrested and later released on bail. Much of Halabja's frustration was shared across Iraq, as promised American aid got shunted away from public works and put toward security and counterinsurgency, but the Kurds also had some specific bones to pick with their leadership, and Hawlati had been leading the charge.

  The weekly newspaper had found trouble early on, most notably before the January 2005 elections. Hawlati reporters had discovered a small trove of Mukhabarat documents detailing which Kurdish officials had been working as spies on the Iraqi regime's payroll. Some of the informers had been acting under duress, but the revelations still enraged voters in Kurdistan. The scandal broke just as the Kurdish leaders had asked the public for blind support for the election of the still unpublished Kurdistan Coalition list; now many of the names on the list appeared to be Ba'ath Party collaborators. Voting in Kurdistan felt more and more like voting in one of Saddam's yes-or-no elections, in which he was the only candidate. At first the Kurdish leadership panicked and some of the former spies feared retribution, but the KDP snipped the thread before it unraveled further. Barzani's men simply stonewalled, claiming that all their "spies" had been double agents, fooling Saddam while remaining faithful to the Kurdish cause. The PUK suddenly looked like a leaky ship by comparison.

  "It became a competition. The PUK began to punish them, and the KDP did nothing. The KDP said, 'Look, you were infiltrated and we weren't,'" said one Kurdish journalist. Both parties formed committees to investigate the charges, and neither investigation went anywhere. Hawlati continued to publish every scandal it could, as well as the occasional blanket call to protest the political order. Some of Hawlatfs staff split off to form another aggressive paper, Awane, and two years after the first revelations, the two publications revealed more names and alluded to a list of three hundred former Ba'athist collaborators, all of them KDP or PUK members.3 In the end both parties swept the scandal under the rug rather than face the embarrassment, but the affair helped explain why the protesters in Halabja saw hypocrisy in a sign saying "No Ba'athists Allowed Here" outside their memorial—their own government appeared to be lousy with Ba'athist informants.

  PUK officials did not halt the publication of the newspapers, though they regularly harassed the writers. But on the KDP side, Hawlatfs editors confessed they had a very difficult time keeping an office open under the KDP's constant pressure. The local press was feeling for its red line in the new Kurdistan, and in
October 2005, a Kurdish lawyer with Austrian citizenship crossed it. Kamal Sa'id Qadir, a Vienna-based exile who wrote for many Kurdish Web journals, charged the KDP with nepotism—not hard to substantiate since the most powerful men in the KDP all have the same last name. That might have been enough, but Qadir went a bit further and specifically charged the Barzanis with skimming off Kurdistan's revenues for their own enrichment. The KDP's internal security arrested Qadir in Erbil on October 26, only a day after Masoud Barzani made his first official visit to the White House as the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government. A Kurdish judge sentenced Qadir to thirty years in prison after a one-hour trial.4

  The arrest and trial set off a storm of criticism and pressure—from free press groups as well as the Austrian government—and the KDP found itself for the first time facing the flip side of the global media it had long cultivated. Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and many prior champions of Kurdish rights quickly denounced the arrest and used the occasion to express concern about Kurdistan's two increasingly authoritarian halves. Three months later, the KDP released Qadir from jail. The Barzanis, as ever denying the corruption charges, acknowledged the arrest to be a blunder.

  "I call this a mistake," said Nechirvan Barzani. "That guy was crazy, and we just gave him prestige. Now just let them say whatever they want to say. You can't shut everybody's mouth. For me it's better for them to say it than to hide it."*

  The Kurdish press needed to educate itself about libel and incitement, Nechirvan said. But the KDP had just received a public education: if they wanted to talk of democracy and human rights, they needed to walk the walk. The arrest of Kamal Sa'id Qadir showed the tip of an iceberg that the Kurdish parties, long set in their ways, had started to scrape.

  THE KURDS' FRUSTRATION with their politicians simmered, growing bolder with the referendum on the draft constitution in October 2005 and the elections for a permanent government in December. Still, the Kurdish leadership went strongly into both elections, counting on over populations to vote in lockstep with them to maximize their leverage over the Arabs. Kurds in the three northern provinces indeed voted overwhelmingly to endorse the constitution. Since their leaders had practically written the document, the fear that Kurdistan would combine its three provinces for a veto had disappeared. Now the threat of a veto came from elsewhere. Inadvertently, the clause allowing any three provinces to reject the constitution with a two-thirds majority now applied to Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who had been left almost completely out of the constitutional drafting process. The Sunnis dominated Anbar province, as well as Salahudin province, which included Saddam's homeland around Tikrit. The third province they threatened to carry was Nineveh, with its hard core of Sunni military men in its capital city of Mosul. In order to make sure the constitution passed there, the Americans were counting on the Kurds.

  Kurds in Nineveh made up nowhere near half the population, but all the proponents of the constitution needed was to prevent a two-thirds majority. A last-minute deal by U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad gave the constitution a better fighting chance. Promising a lengthy session for amendments later on, the American ambassador persuaded one Sunni Arab faction, the Iraqi Islamic Party, to support a yes vote in the referendum. The constitution would still need all of Nineveh's Kurdish vote to pass. Kurdish towns around the city like Sinjar and Akre would vote yes, but the key Kurdish population in the city of Mosul was shrinking.

  I embedded with the U.S. military for the October constitutional referendum and requested a unit in Mosul, expecting Nineveh to be the swing state. The embed process remained the only safe way to get a feel for the attitudes of Sunni Arabs.* In random interviews around the city, I found, predictably, that most planned to vote against the referendum. Although no one I spoke with had read the draft of the constitution, they had a one-word answer for what they thought of it: taksim, or partition. Their community leaders had told them the constitution was a recipe to divide the country between Kurds and Shi'ites. A few partisans of the Iraqi Islamic Party told me they planned to vote yes, but the surprise came from other minorities. The Christians I spoke with all opposed the constitution for the same reason. I would have expected them to embrace Kurdish influence, but they clearly feared it—the Kurds had failed again to set an appealing example for those outside their ranks.

  Inside Mosul many Kurdish families were on the run, leaving the city daily in the face of death threats from Sunni Arab insurgents. Despite their domination of the Iraqi army deployed in Mosul, and their political dominance since the January 2005 elections, the Kurdish authorities faced much the same problem the Americans did in the city center—a murderous insurgency and a local population that was not on their side. Tens of thousands of Kurds had already fled the city for the safety of the surrounding Kurdish towns; others crowded in on relatives on the eastern bank of the Tigris. To some it looked as if the Kurds wanted to annex the eastern "left bank" of the city, but on the ground they felt lucky to hold it as a buffer zone.5 As I visited nests of KDP pesh merga around the city, they appeared just as precariously hunkered down as the U.S. Army troops I traveled with. Crossing the river meant entering a red zone as hot as anywhere in Iraq.

  Mosul also made an interesting place to gauge opinions about another historic event: the trial of Saddam Hussein, scheduled to begin on October 19, just four days after the referendum on the constitution. After Saddam spent nearly a year in American custody, Iraq's special tribunal had decided to bring him and seven of his cronies to trial for a relatively minor case, the 1982 murder of 143 Shi'ites in the town of Dujail. The inexperienced tribunal brought this case first because it was uncomplicated, and a good test of their ability to try Saddam without letting him turn the dock into a podium, as Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic had done. But the choice was anticlimactic, especially for victims of Saddam's later atrocities, like the gassing of Halabja and the massacre of Shi'tes after the 1991 rebellion. Asked what they wanted to see at the trial, Iraqis in Mosul across the spectrum used a surprisingly similar phrase: they thought Saddam should get a fair, just hearing. But the tone differed. Kurds in Mosul said the word "justice" with such malice that it was easy to imagine what horrible punishment they thought could fit Saddam's crimes. Many Sunni Arabs in Mosul said the word as if Saddam, given a chance, could justify his actions. I did all my interviews with U.S. troops only a house away, so if there were any outright Saddam supporters, they probably kept quiet. But one Arab, busy at a bakery preparing sweets for Ramadan, said he considered Saddam to be a prisoner of war. "You can't hang a prisoner of war. That would start a civil war in Iraq for certain," he said. Voting on the constitution and bringing Saddam to justice were both intended to bring the country together; instead they combined to make Sunni Arabs feel under siege.

  On October 15 the referendum went smoothly, again providing a quiet celebration as regular Iraqis, under heavy American security and a complete vehicle ban, turned out in large numbers to cast their vote for or against the constitution. Iraq's electoral commission projected it would take ten days to tally the results from across the country, and in the meantime, on October 19, Saddam took the stand in Baghdad.6 Only one of Saddam's five judges allowed his face to be shown on cameras, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, a Kurd from Sulimaniya. Saddam Hussein marched into the court and refused to give the judge so much as his name, shouting that he remained president of Iraq. The judge smiled indulgently and asked Saddam to relax and sit down. After a three-hour session taking down the not-guilty pleas of all eight defendants, the judge calmly adjourned for six weeks, yielding to requests from Saddam's lawyers for more time to prepare. The trial would drag on for months, and Iraqis were mesmerized by the image and especially the voice of their former leader. But the courtroom drama felt like a relic of the past, only relating to the present day as a wedge, with a Kurdish judge calling on Shi'ite witnesses to condemn a Sunni Arab.

  ON OCTOBER 24, the night before the referendum results were announced in Baghdad, insurgents staged their
most spectacular attack to date: a three-car bomb assault on the perimeter of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels in the center of Baghdad, next to the square when American troops had pulled down Saddam's statue in April 2003. Two vehicles packed with explosives rammed themselves into the high concrete blast walls around the parking lot, pulverizing the barriers to clear a path for the third—a cement truck stuffed with munitions. The truck driver got his wheels caught in the rubble and detonated far short of the building, which housed many foreign journalists, but the blasts still killed seventeen people and sent footlong pieces of shrapnel flying half a mile around.7

  No one suggested the bombing was specifically linked to the announcement the next day, but the result of the referendum did nothing to bring Iraq's factions closer to peace.

  The Kurdish-Shi'ite coalition managed to push through the constitution, with the popular vote endorsing the constitution by almost 80 percent across Iraq. But Sunni Anbar and Salahudin provinces came in solidly opposed, and a majority in Nineveh also rejected the draft—but a majority of only 55 percent, falling just shy of the two thirds needed to invoke the three-province veto. Effectively, the Sunni vote had been discounted again. They had boycotted Iraq's first elections in January, and now they had, as a bloc, rejected a constitution that would become Iraq's law. Some had predicted this as the worst possible outcome—a constitution that passed with clear Sunni opposition, smacking down the Sunni Arabs' first attempt at participatory democracy.8

  THE KURDS ALSO greeted the constitution with mixed feelings, albeit from a different perspective. Popular sentiment was for secession, though most still understood that their leadership had played the game well in Baghdad and that international constraints forbade a Kurdish state. The frustration with being stuck in Iraq may have helped to channel growing discontent with the KDP-PUK binary hegemony. In December 2005 the Iraqi interim government's term came to an end and elections were held for a permanent four-year government. By that time the Kurdish list showed a few stress fractures—and not all from the street.