Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  The fear Saddam still evokes charges the atmosphere with tension. The police chief in Sulaymaniyah showed me a cabinet case full of plastic bombs which Saddam’s agents have attached to the trucks of international aid convoys or left in unmarked cars by the gates of primary schools. Recently, he sent troops across the border to three villages in the Arbil region to confiscate the harvest. In all these maneuvers, Saddam’s strategy is simple: nibble, nibble, while the West’s back is turned, and when he is sure we’re not looking: pounce.

  At one of the new Kurdish television stations in Arbil, a local actor did a perfect imitation of the great dictator’s television addresses, using a Spitting Image rubber mask. He thumped the table, shook his fingers at the screen, turning the old gestures of menace and intimidation into harmless grotesque. But when I asked him to take off the mask and let me take a photograph, he shyly refused, for fear that someone might mark him down for trouble if Saddam ever comes back. When I talked to the head of security for the Arbil region, he took me out of town into the middle of a field of ripening wheat. In town, a crowd might gather; in his own office, somebody might be listening.

  The Iraqi army is twenty-five minutes from Arbil, massed behind defensive positions on a low, burnt hill that slopes down to the river at Kalak. Sometimes Saddam closes the border; sometimes he opens it. Today it is open, and through field glasses I can see the Iraqi border guards, strutting about in the heat haze, a kilometer away, processing a load of Kurdish workers standing on the back of a flatbed truck. Then I watch the truck proceed cautiously across the concrete bridge and stop at the Kurdish checkpoint. There it is mounted on blocks and its undercarriage is inspected for explosive devices, often attached to the bumpers. The workers are off-loaded and their documents are checked. Iraqi agents are often smuggled into such convoys, and the Kurds do their best to weed them out. But the border procedures feel porous and unconvincing. They need metal detectors, search rooms—the whole paraphernalia of any normal state—but they can’t even afford a proper metal barrier across the bridge, so people float through unnoticed, past the drink sellers and peanut hawkers and old women squatting by the road waiting for the bus.

  The local peshmerga confer with Behjet, who reluctantly gives permission for his “sheep” to be taken across the river to get a still-closer look at the Iraqi positions from a vantage point on the other side. We leave the LandCruisers behind, since they may attract fire, and walk across the bridge to a village that lies just beneath the Iraqi guns. The local peshmerga spirit us through back alleys, telling us to keep our heads down and behind the walls. At the telephone exchange, they take me up a stairway, rocketed with artillery in 1991 and now a treacherous mass of rubble and twisted iron. Through binoculars, perched gingerly on top of a protecting wall, I watch the Iraqi soldiers watching us, sauntering to and fro between their dugouts, weapons over their shoulders, binoculars in their hands. They point at my binoculars and I duck out of sight. As I cross back across the river, feeling the Iraqis tracking me in their sights, I hear the distant thunder of unseen American jets high up out of sight in the stingingly bright blue sky.

  GENOCIDE

  Barzan must have been a beautiful village once, rising in terraces from the big river at the bottom of the valley, up through a sheltering cleft in the hillside through alluvial fields to the sheltering mountains behind. You can see how extensive it must once have been, from the piles of field-stone strewn about the lower terraces. These piles, through which poke the steel rods that once supported lintels and roofs, are all that remain of the traditional home of the Barzani tribe.

  After the collapse of Mulla Mustafa’s rebellion in 1975, Saddam took swift and terrible revenge. The entire village was dynamited, house by house, and the population was deported to camps near Kushtepe and Diyana, near Arbil. There Saddam’s police kept them under close watch.

  Then, in July 1983, at a time when the Barzani were in league with the Iranians, providing intelligence and reconnaissance support in the Kurdish hills against Saddam’s troops, Saddam struck again at the Barzani tribe. His forces surrounded the camps at Kushtepe and Diyina, and rounded up every man wearing a red turban, a sign of membership in the Barzani clan. All males between the ages of twelve and eighty were loaded onto trucks and driven away toward Baghdad. They were never seen or heard from again. Their women were left behind to fend for themselves, never knowing what had happened. In March 1991, during the uprising, the Barzani widows fled to Iran. Since then, they have returned at last to their native village. Caritas, the Swiss charity, is building them new homes. They have running water, concrete floors, a corrugated iron roof over their heads for the first time. But none of it dulls the ache of not knowing what happened to their men.

  The long gray hair of the Barzani widows flows unbraided and unadorned down their dark mourning garments. They sit barefoot and cross-legged at the entrances to their empty houses, with their surviving female children, waiting for the return of their menfolk. Their houses are empty, they explain bitterly; their storehouses of corn and jars of oil are empty, too, for there are no men to provide for them. They survive on the charity of the foreigners. It is no way for a woman to live.

  The Iraqi soldiers came in the night, they said, talking in the stunned monotone of people trapped in sorrow, and they took their men from their beds and their children from their cots. They took cripples and blind people, too, all the men of Barzani. And no one knew where they had been taken. Some people had said there were mass graves, but nothing certain had ever been found. The hand of evil had swept their men off the face of the earth. Their faces streaked with tears, left to flow and not wiped away, the Barzani widows said they could not master this grief, because there was no end to it. The worst of it was that there was simply no defense against the pain of hoping, of believing that one day you would raise your eyes along the dusty, single-track road wending its way to the village through the mountains, and see a column of survivors returning at last.

  Nationalism seeks to hallow death, to redeem individual loss and link it to destiny and fate. A lonely frightened boy with a gun who dies at a crossroads in a firefight ceases to be just a lonely frightened boy. In the redeeming language of nationalism, he joins the imagined community of the martyrs. All along the highways of Kurdistan, the portraits of peshmerga martyrs gaze down at you from the plinths where once hung portraits of Saddam. These portraits are the nationalist folk art of Kurdistan. In one, a warrior is shown standing amid the high mountain snows; in another, by a lake, with a plover floating in midair like the breath of hope. The pictures depict them in uniform, with their weapons on their shoulders, staring at the present from the safety of death, looking back with a worried expression, as if wishing to be reassured that their sacrifices were not in vain.

  The road from Barzan led eastward, down from the mountains, past Sulaymaniyah into a vast valley floor sown with wheat. We passed turbaned men scything grass for their animals, and groups of villagers squatting by the roadsides with huge bundles of grass, waiting to be picked up by a passing truck; later, we would see them all, crowded impossibly but cheerfully on the back of some flatbed roaring past us, waving, while the old women sat glumly in veils on top of the grass bundles. We drove past rice paddies, with men and women in bare feet, their clothing up about their knees, digging in the plants; and children, skin brown as their hair, selling sunflower seeds in little blue packets by the side of the road.

  At its most elemental, nationalism is perhaps the desire to have political dominion over a piece of land that one loves. Before anything, there must be a fierce attachment to the land itself and a sense that there is nothing else like this, nothing so beautiful, anywhere else in the world. The mountains, the Kurds say, are their only friends, the only ones who never betray. But the mountains are also what bind them together as a people, sever them from others, give them a habitat and a home, create in them every day the desire that one day this will be truly theirs and no one else’s. As Muhyeddin said, that
night on his porch in Sulaymaniyah as I got up to go, “Look, it all comes down to this.” He made a tight first and held it up close to his face “We want something, even if it is small, which no one will ever take from us.”

  The road led south and east, through the lush plains of Shahrizor, toward the Iranian border. Just five kilometers from that border, sheltered on three sides by round treeless hills, now turning brown in the May heat, stands the town of Halabja.

  On March 16, 1988—at the time of the Kurdish New Year, and less than forty-eight hours after Kurdish peshmerga had seized the town from Iraqi forces—Iraqi planes swooped over the city, dropping canisters of mustard gas, nerve gas, and cyanide. Within a few hours, five thousand people lay dead.

  There are films, taken by Iranian cameramen, hours after the attack. The colors of the children’s clothes are bright; the blighted grass and leaves are still green; there is still color in some of the faces; fathers lie in doorways, their arms over their children; mothers lie with their faces in the river, seeking to wash away the searing in their throats. It was the first chemical attack on a human population since the First World War. After it was over, the Iraqi army entered Halabja and dynamited the town.

  At the outskirts I stop by an extraordinary pile of steel reinforcing rods and collapsed roof, beneath which there soon appear two cheerful children and a watchful mother, who is hanging out her washing on the angle between a cantilevered roof and a terrace. Then, on the left as you go in, about seventy-five meters of pure rubble, not an undamaged concrete block to be seen; then, on the right, proceeding up the main street, signs of attempts to dynamite the shops: pillars crushed under collapsing roofs; other pillars blown away, leaving only the exposed steel rods holding up the roof; huge artillery-shell-sized holes in the rear walls; on and on up the street, piles of rubble, roofs fallen in. But everywhere, despite everything, families are continuing to burrow out a life in the ruins. Up the pitted street, past tea shops and feed stores, I come upon a man painting pictures inside a little library, including one picture of a woman in a red dress carrying a pitcher of water beside a stream near a tall flowering tree. The houses rise up a hillside; and from the contours of the hills, I can tell that this is a vision of the lost Halabja. Down another alley, I find sandal makers, impassively spinning the white yarn from which they stitch the immaculate white uppers of klash. Next door to the sandal makers, I find a neat-as-a-pin plumber’s merchant with his cocks and stops and washers laid out in precise rows; next door to him, a carpenter, with a revolver lying on a seat amid some sawdust. Halabja market is full of pushcarts piled with beans and strawberries. I look at them and wonder whether their membranes and cells contain any memory or trace of chemical.

  I come across a tall and distinguished teacher on her way back home for midday lunch from her primary school. We walk together through the ruins and she says, yes, here, he died, and there, in that pile, her body was found, and there in the basement of what was once a teahouse—she is pointing to a dark hole in the middle of a pile of rubble—the peshmerga found fifty bodies. “And one of them was my sister.”

  When afternoon class resumes, she takes me to her school. How many children died in the attack? She does not reply, but instead goes to her blackboard and writes down a number: 198.

  The children in her class watch her from their rough-planked desks: seven-year-olds in plaits tied with bows, black-eyed, giggling behind their hands, their faces lit by the hot, slanting light through the barred windows. What do you teach them about Halabja? I ask. They know. They know, she says.

  She claps her hands, and they flood out of the room in a tumult, assembling in the school yard with all the other classes, shouting patriotic Kurdish songs at the top of their voice for the foreign visitor; little exuberant voices shouting into the sunlight. They surround me, pressing close, a school yard full.

  At the end, I drive up into the hills over the town, so that I can get the Halabja dust out of my lungs. I take a path up the hillside and find myself face-to-face with the mass graves of the victims. They are buried in large, featureless caissons of concrete overlooking the city, now faint in the heat haze. I think of the Barzani widows, weeping in their doorways. Behjet and Taha take off their shoes, because it is the setting of the sun, and they kneel and say their prayers. The murmur of their prayers rises in the air behind me as I sit and look at the blighted town below.

  “Genocide” is a worn and debased term, casually hurled at every outrage, every violence, even applied to events where no death, only shame or abuse, occurs. But it is a word that does mean something: the project to exterminate a people for no other reason than because they are that people. Before the experience of genocide, a people may not believe they belong to a nation. Before genocide, they may believe it is a matter of personal choice whether they belong or believe. After genocide, it becomes their fate.

  Genocide and nationalism have an entwined history. It was genocide that convinced the Jews and even convinced the Gentile world that they were a people who would never be safe until they had a nation-state of their own. As with the Jews, so with the Kurds. To see Halabja, to sit by those faceless graves, is to know that the chemical attack marked them apart forever, just as it revealed, beyond doubt or equivocation, what their neighbors were capable of feeling and doing.

  The Kurdish leaders all tell you their goal is not a nation-state. Such a goal is too large for us, Muhyeddin said that night on the veranda, too impractical, too unrealistic. It is a longing that will only render us mad, or fanatical. We must be content with autonomy within the existing states. We must swallow our longings and make our peace with the nation-state order that was dropped over our land like a net after Versailles.

  But after seeing Halabja, you realize one thing very clearly: autonomy will never do. It is a stopping point along the way to a destination. But it cannot ever be the end of the road. For Halabja happened, and for a people who have known genocide, there is only one thing that will do: a nation-state of their own.

  GUERRILLAS

  It is raining in Raniya, and the rain is hammering on the tin roof of the hotel veranda where I am sitting. Black-veiled women, clutching their skirts about them, are running for cover through the downpour. Water is gushing down the gutters, carrying with it a tide of filth and offal and market leavings. The tea samovar is steaming, and the air is pungent with the smell of charcoal burning in the brazier. The hotel cook is slicing strips from a lamb’s carcass hung up on a hook next to my table. Behjet and Taha sit beside me, with long faces. They are unhappy with their sheep. I am leaving their protection for a day and a night to visit a guerrilla band in the mountains. I am about to be turned over to the protection of Hassan, who has arrived with a LandCruiser and will drive me through the mountain passes to the guerrilla camp. I am not just passing from one warlord’s protection to another. From Behjet’s point of view, I am going over to visit the enemy. For I am going to see the PKK, the guerrilla organization of Turkish Kurds, who use the mountain hideouts of the Kurdish enclave to train for raids on the Turkish army across the frontier. Behjet’s party, the KDP, opposes these raids for fear that the Turks will retaliate by closing the frontier and severing the main lifeline that keeps the enclave alive. In the autumn of 1992, the KDP peshmerga went to war against the PKK guerrillas, to stop them using the enclave as a base. Now, however, there is an uneasy cease-fire between them. I am profiting from the cease-fire to pay a visit to what I know to be, by repute, one of the last national liberation movements of a classical Marxist kind.

  I soon realize how foolhardy this trip may be. I have not paid the weather sufficient respect, and now it is taking its revenge. The bridges are out—washed away—and so we are soon weaving and bouncing our way through plowed fields, seeking the flatter, stony shallows where the river will let us cross. We plunge into the river up to the tops of the tires and struggle across.

  Hassan is eighteen, with the wispy stubble of his first mustache on his upper lip. He speaks
in a broad Sorani dialect, so mountain-bound that my translator can barely make out what he is saying. But he smiles gaily, no matter how vile or difficult the road, and I soon realize that he is a veritable maestro of the four-wheel drive. For four hours, he coaxes and cajoles the ancient car up a muddy, rutted, single-track road, more suited to the smugglers’ pack mules that keep passing us than to a vehicle. Hassan gently nudges the big machine up the corkscrew bends, through the waterfalls which are carving up the surface, revving the wheels gingerly through the mudslides and rockslides that have carried the road away altogether. We pass villages that are being pounded by flash floods, cascading off the mountains in an angry chocolate-brown torrent. Villagers are vainly trying to canalize the water with corrugated iron ripped from their roofs. Children huddle with beasts inside dark doorways, waving to Hassan and me as we pass. After four hours, Hassan pulls up in an encampment of tents made of tree branches and white plastic sheeting. Smugglers, he says, and takes us inside to a large, snug, dry tent where, having removed our shoes and crawled to our places past a line of suspicious men eating rice with their hands, we are served delicious hot mint tea, which we drink to the sound of the rain hammering on the plastic sheeting. These smugglers run mule teams over the steep passes into Iran, which lies only a kilometer or so over the mountains. In one corner of the tent I see stacks of Iranian margarine, cooking oil, and sugar. If there is Iranian heroin, I do not see any. In a whisper, Hassan tells me the smugglers and the guerrillas work together. Meaning? I can only assume the smugglers hand them a cut of their profits, in money or in kind, and the guerrillas provide protection.

  Within a kilometer of the smugglers, we reach the guerrilla camp itself, set in a huge semicircular bowl that rises from a violent river raging at the bottom toward a flank of ridges that protect the camp from aerial attack. Dotted here and there on the hillside are dun-colored, rain-soaked tents, a typical Kurdish adobe house with a radio antenna rising above its flat roof, and at the center a two-story adobe house, in front of which a pair of ragged children are playing. The house, it turns out, is a barracks for guerrilla officers upstairs, and it is there that I will sleep. Downstairs sleeps a Kurdish family of four and their goats, sheep, and chickens.