Only in the modern era have the Alevi Kurds and Sunni Kurds become more closely aligned-and largely because of the Kurdish-Turkish civil war. Whatever his faults, PKK leader Abdullah calan succeeded in uniting various disparate Kurdish elements, and many Alevi Kurds joined with Sunni Kurds in their armed struggle against the Turkish state.
Ali, Sheri, and I arrived at the Shakulu Sultan Cemevi around midday. The large, whitewashed complex was filled with inviting gardens, cobblestone courtyards, towering leafy trees, and hundreds of men, women, and children. Near the entrance was a modern bookshop, tables loaded with books and CDs, and an animal pen crowded with sheep. The sheep were available for purchase and sacrifice.
Following a voice drifting out of loudspeakers overhead, we entered a twelve-sided room filled with worshipers. Most of the women sat on one side, most of the men on the other, but there was some intermingling and much informality, as children came and went and adults whispered to one another. Some of the women were covered in head scarves and long dresses, others wore tight blue jeans and T-shirts. By the door, directing traffic, reigned a portly man with a cane.
At the front of the room sat a frail old man with a full white beard, three-piece olive green suit, dapper hat, and dark sungla.s.ses, swaying gently. He was known as a "grandfather," or dede, Sheri whispered. Beside him sat another bearded old man, this one wearing a cap, and a somewhat younger man in a suit, with a beard and mustache.
The dede started chanting through a microphone, "Allah, Allah, Allah," while the other old man joined in with words of prayer. All of the supplicants sat up on their knees and bent their heads, while a man on a saz, or lute, started a disjointed strumming. "Ya Allah, Ya Allah," the worshipers prayed.
As I enjoyed the peaceful scene, I contrasted it in my mind with the Alevis" difficult history, beginning with the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1514, when Sultan the Grim ma.s.sacred about forty thousand Alevis, whom he suspected of supporting the Safavids. Ever afterward, the Ottoman Sunnis treated the Alevis with utmost contempt, an att.i.tude that lingers among some in the modern era. Throughout the twentieth century, the Alevis were the frequent targets of violence, with the most brutal campaign occurring in 193738, when Turkey"s President Atatrk used poison gas and heavy artillery to quash an incipient rebellion. Perhaps forty thousand Alevis died in the attack. And in 1978, at least 109 Alevis were ma.s.sacred and 176 badly injured during a rampage by the right-wing Grey Wolves, who ripped children from the bellies of pregnant mothers and hung up dead men on electricity poles, saying that it was their duty to wipe out "the enemy within."
The most recent large-scale Alevi tragedy occurred only ten years ago in the ancient Turkish town of Sivas. Here dozens of intellectuals gathered one July 1993 day for an Alevi literary festival honoring Pir Sultan Abdal, a sixteenth-century poet, mystic, and social rebel, executed by the Ottomans. The Alevis have long likened the pir"s struggle with the Alevi one, while, in more recent decades, many Alevi Kurds-and the Turkish authorities-see a connection between him and the Kurdish struggle. Among the festival"s honored guests was the noted satirist and leftist Aziz Nesin, a Turkish Alevi, who opened the celebration with a pa.s.sionate speech filled with anti-Islamic overtones. The next day, an angry Islamist crowd surrounded the hotel in which the intellectuals were staying. Frantically, the Alevis telephoned for help from the local police, the security forces, and the capital of Ankara, but no response came. Finally, shouting "Allah-u Akbar, " G.o.d is Great, the frenzied crowd set fire to the hotel. Thirty-seven writers, artists, and thinkers perished in a tragedy that the Alevis blame as much on the authorities as they do on the perpetrators.
Ironically, Aziz Nesin survived the inferno. He was mistaken for the police chief and rescued by a fire engine ladder.
CHAPTER NINE.
From Kings to Parliamentarians FROM DOHUK TO ERBIL, THE HEAD QUARTERS OF THE KDP and seat of the Kurdish Parliament, was a five-hour drive. I had been planning on hiring a car to make the trip, but, at the last minute, Dr. Shawkat put me in touch with a KDP official on his way to Erbil. He had his own car and driver, and offered to give me a ride.
I said good-bye to Majed and his family, and to Dr. Shawkat, whose attentions were no longer annoying me-I would miss him and all my friends in Dohuk. And I wondered, as I often did when departing from people in Kurdistan, what the status of their world would be the next time we were in touch. The specter of war hung over everything.
Around midday, the KDP official and I came to the wide expanse of the Greater Zab River, the main tributary of the Tigris. The river"s waters churned in ropes of brown and white as it raced alongside us, toward snowcapped Qandil Mountain. Pa.s.sing over a small bridge, we entered a pa.s.sageway bordered by rock cliffs to one side. And as we did so, we pa.s.sed out of Bahdinani Kurdistan and into Sorani Kurdistan, where Kurds speak a different dialect.
The Greater Zab marks the dividing line between the two main dialects of the Kurdish language. North of the river, including northern Iraqi Kurdistan and much of Turkey, Kurds speak Kermanji. South of the river, in southern Iraqi Kurdistan and much of Iran, they speak Sorani. Sub-dialects also exist, including Zaza, spoken primarily in central-eastern Turkey, and Gurani and Kermanshahi, spoken in Iranian Kurdistan. Interestingly, Zaza and Gurani are closely related, even though they are at the opposite geographic ends of Kurdistan. Many Kurds are also bilingual, speaking Arabic, Persian, or Turkish in addition to Kurdish.
All Kurdish dialects belong to one of two branches of the Iranian languages and are related to Persian. Nonetheless, they differ considerably from one another, so much so that many Kermanji speakers cannot understand Sorani speakers, and vice versa. Lacking a standard language has been yet another barrier to Kurdish political and social unification.
Tents of the seminomads However, this barrier is breaking down, largely because of television, and partly because of war and upheaval. Perhaps two-thirds of Iraqi Kurds now have access to satellite dishes, as do many Kurds in Iran and Turkey, with which they watch the KDP"s Kurdish Satellite TV, where announcers speak in both Kermanji and Sorani; the PUK"s Kurd Sat, usually broadcast in Sorani; and the PKK"s Med TV, a Kermanji station broadcast from Europe. War and upheaval has also meant more intermingling between speakers of Kermanji and Sorani, both within Kurdistan and the diaspora.
Complications remain, most notably that of written Kurdish. Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, like their compatriots, use the Arabic alphabet, while Kurds in Turkey, like the Turks, use the Roman.
In the safe haven, Kurdish was the primary language being taught in the schools, where a "Kurdicized" curriculum was also being developed. Parents who learned their lessons in Arabic were delighting in children learning theirs in Kurdish. But the practice has dangers. Many of today"s younger generation cannot speak Arabic, a considerable liability in a land with many Arabic-speaking neighbors.
A similar understandable but nonetheless irrational distaste for Arabic also runs deep in Iran, where many Kurds feel oppressed by their Islamic government. One intelligent, ambitious high school student I met there recoiled in horror when I asked him if he spoke Arabic. "I have to learn some in school, but I will never speak it, it is evil," he said.
The teaching of Kurdish in the Iraqi schools has enormous resonance for the Kurds of Iran and Turkey, where Kurdish-language schools scarcely exist. A few universities and private inst.i.tutes in Iranian Kurdistan do offer courses in Kurdish language, history, and culture, but the language is not taught at the lower public school levels. And in Turkey, the teaching of Kurdish has been a red-hot political issue-only very recently easing-with Kurds at times arrested and imprisoned for promoting Kurdish language rights. In late 2001 and early 2002, for example, students at twenty-five Turkish universities signed 11,837 pet.i.tions arguing for optional Kurdish lessons. In response, 1,359 students were arrested, 143 imprisoned, and 46 suspended.
FROM THE GREATER ZAB, we continued south, pa.s.sing through Harir, once ruled by a seventeenth-century woman warrior named Princess Zad, and Shaqlawa, a leafy Christian town. Behind Shaqlawa rose brooding Sefin Mountain, the site of a decisive peshmerga victory over the Iraqi army that paved the way for semiautonomous Kurdistan.
Later in my stay, I would be invited to a picnic on Sefin and was surprised to find a broad gra.s.sy plateau on top, sprinkled with daisies, purple thistles, and big red wild tulips with pointy leaves. All around Sefin bobbed hills of dark red and gray, resembling giant clam sh.e.l.ls, due to prominent vertical ridges, and hillocks streaked with bright yellow, white, and green- as if cans of paint were spilled down their sides.
Beyond Shaqlawa, the road zigzagged up a steep, distinctive ridge to Salahuddin. Visible from miles around, Salahuddin had been a resort pre-1991, but since the uprising, had served as the headquarters of the KDP. A huge party seal, dominated by a fierce-eyed eagle, stood at a central crossroads on the mountain"s top. To both sides stretched the offices and homes of top officials, including KDP President Ma.s.soud Barzani and Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani. The ma.s.sif was also an important meeting site. In October 2002, after the Gulf War, various disparate elements of the Iraqi opposition first met here to form the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a major anti-Baath coalition. In February 2003, one month before the Iraq war, the 65-seat Iraqi opposition committee convened on the summit to discuss plans for post-Saddam Iraq.
Visible from Salahuddin, and accessible via another zigzagging road, was Erbil, or Hawler, as it is known in Kurdish. The two towns were less than a half hour apart, and closely connected, with politicians and bureaucrats often traveling between them several times a day. Traffic jams along the interconnecting road were common, as were traffic jams in Erbil itself. I was many miles away from sleepy Dohuk.
LIKE AMADIYA, ERBIL is another of the world"s oldest continuously inhabited cities, dating back about eight thousand years. The Sumerians called it "Urbilum" in their cuneiform tablets of the 3000s B.C.; while under the a.s.syrians, the city became known as Arbailu, or "Four G.o.ds," as it served as the empire"s religious capital and home to the shrine of the G.o.ddess Ishtar.
It was to Erbil that Sennacherib, perhaps the most famous of all a.s.syrian kings, made a pilgrimage in 692 B.C. to pray to Ishtar for his coming battle with the Babylonians; his prayers were answered. It was also to Erbil that the supporters of Teumman, a would-be usurper to the a.s.syrian throne, were brought and brutally flayed alive in the mid-600s B.C. In 608 B.C., the Medes conquered the city, followed over the next six centuries by the Persians, Greeks, and Parthians, under whose rule Erbil became Christian. Mentioned in the Bible as Arbela, the city was also an important crossroads for caravan routes.
However, it was the famous 331 B.C. battle between the Greeks and the Persians for which ancient Erbil is most known. One of the most decisive battles of all time, pitting Alexander the Great against the Great King Darius III, the battle caused all of Asia as far east as the Hindu Kush to fall under Greek rule, thereby ending the powerful Achaemenian Persian dynasty. The battle of Arbela was also a brilliant military achievement in which Alexander and his army defeated a force many times their size, losing about twelve hundred men to the Persians" loss of perhaps forty thousand.
Despite its name, the battle of Arbela was actually fought on the plain of Gaugamela, meaning the "Camel"s Grazing Place," about fifty miles northwest of Erbil. The Great King Darius had reached Gaugamela well before Alexander, but made critical tactical errors, such as neglecting to occupy hills that could have been used as lookout posts. A few days before the battle, Darius also learned that his wife, a prisoner in Alexander"s camp, had fallen ill and died. He tried to make a last-minute peace settlement, offering a huge ransom for his other, still-captive family members. Alexander refused, and the battle began, with the Persians finding themselves in more and more desperate circ.u.mstances as the day wore on.
When the battle reached a crescendo, Darius and his immediate followers fled to their base camp in Arbela, from which they continued north into the Kurdish mountains and Iran. Alexander entered Arbela the next morning, to find the Great King gone, but he seized his chariot and weapons, and proclaimed himself King of Asia. The Greeks then buried their dead and marched on to Babylon and the Persian capitals of Susa and Persepolis. Thousands of Persian corpses were left to rot on the battlefield.
In A.D. 196, the Romans conquered Erbil, only to succ.u.mb to the Persian Sa.s.sanians thirty years later. Under their enlightened rule, however, the city"s Christian community continued to flourish. Erbil was the see of a bishopric until the ninth century, two hundred years after the arrival of Islam, when it was moved to Mosul.
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 madra.s.sa, 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 gla.s.s 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 hara.s.sed 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 n.o.bodies. But because of Saddam, I and many other Kurds have always pushed ourselves harder, to prove we could do it." She pa.s.sed 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 t.i.ttered. 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 pa.s.sive-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 partic.i.p.ate 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-cla.s.s status in the safe haven-an accusation the Kurds denied.
That afternoon, Rezan and I stopped 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, 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 a.s.sembly hall. Since the 199497 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 pa.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sing 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 a.s.sistance. 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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.s all sorts of admirable laws, but what good will they do us if they can"t be implemented? The trick is to pa.s.s laws that our society is ready to accept."
The Kurdish Parliament also had to take care to pa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ated-she hid it under her garment and slipped away.
The next day, the city was in an uproar. Where was the missing typewriter? The doorkeeper was questioned, but swore-honestly-that he"d never opened the office door. Nahida and her colleagues then made a wooden box with a handle in which to keep the machine, which they moved from house to house, to ensure its safety.
Imagine a typewriter having so much value, I thought as she spoke. Less than sixty years had elapsed since then, but even in "backward" Kurdistan, the typewriter was all but obsolete.
Nahida also spoke about the many times she had successfully deceived the Iraqi authorities, who, in the 1940s and 1950s, were representatives of the Hashemite monarchy or various military dictators, not the Baathists. Frequently, the police hauled her down to their stations for interrogation, and one time in the 1960s, the guards said they would release her if she gave up the names of two party members. You promise? she asked. Yes, they answered, and she gave them the names of Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, already known leaders. The guards kept their promise and let her go.
On another occasion, Nahida had delivered a high-ranking KDP official to an important meeting in a heavily guarded town by disguising him in old patched clothes, and traveling with him and two other women. Upon reaching the town, the foursome were stopped at a checkpoint and interrogated by an army commander. We are only three poor sisters who have come to see our family and this man is our village cousin, here to help us with our travels, Nahida said. The army commander, saying that he had six sisters himself, offered them a cup of tea, which Nahida asked the disguised KDP official to serve. Being unaccustomed to such tasks, he dropped the tray. You idiot! Nahida said, thinking quickly. I don"t know why we bothered bringing you along.
Listening to Nahida tell her stories, I was struck by their "big adventure" quality, which gave them an almost innocuous character. Had that been a less-dangerous time? I wondered for a moment, and then decided against it. Rather, it was the stories" high-adrenaline quality that gave them their feel. I"d heard others tell of near escapes from the Baathists with similar glee. Something light to hang on to in all the darkness.
WHILE IN ERBIL, I often came home at the end of the day to visit with Nesreen. Sometimes, there was a certain stiffness between us, as she, in her official capacity as minister of Reconstruction and Development, wished to represent Kurdistan in its most positive light, and I, as a writer, instinctively wanted to see what lay in the shadows, good or bad. More often, we had an easy give and take as I tried to make sense of the world around me.
Nesreen and I usually caught up on our days over a simple dinner in the kitchen, shared with her father and brother, neither of whom spoke English. Both dressed traditionally, while Nesreen wore stylish Western clothes and spoke of how much she"d enjoyed shopping while in the United States. It was comments like these that reminded me that Nesreen"s life was not just like mine, a fact I sometimes forgot, as her English was excellent and she was well informed about many things American. She was also one of a growing number of Kurds with Internet access at home; her Internet provider was AOL.
Despite all that Nesreen had seen and the many humanitarian crises that she tackled daily, her outlook was overwhelmingly positive and optimistic in a way that also struck me as very American. She did not dwell on current problems as much as plot routes around them, seeing the possibility of wide-ranging improvements just ahead. And her outlook was not unrealistic. In the previous ten years, and especially in the last five, Kurdistan had successfully transformed itself from a war-ravaged region into a functioning quasi-modern society, with 65 percent of its countryside rebuilt.
One day I traveled with Nesreen, her guards, and staff on one of their weekly field trips to inspect newly reconstructed villages. In various stages of completion, the projects were overseen by serious-faced foremen and engineers in hard hats who rushed to greet us when we arrived. Watching the men as they consulted with Nesreen and her staff, and their wiry workers laboring hard, I was struck by everyone"s earnestness, energy, and drive-so different from the lethargy often found at U.S. construction sites. These people weren"t just doing a job, they were building the country they"d never before been allowed to have, while also providing for their dispossessed.
According to the United Nations, a total of about 140,000 displaced families, or 815,000 displaced people-the most anywhere in the Middle East-were living in northern Iraq at the time of my visit. And they came in many different types. The newer refugees had the most urgent needs, and they were given resettlement priority, which created some resentment, of course, as did the fact that the newer homes were of better quality than those built just after the uprising.
When the Ministry of Reconstruction and Development was first established in 1992, it had operated with limited funds provided by various relief organizations and the Kurdistan government. But, starting in early 1997, with the implementation of the United Nation"s oil-for-food program, money had been steadily flowing into the ministry"s account. Nasreen and her colleagues had an annual budget of $60 million to $70 million for project implementation-in stark contrast to most of Kurdistan"s ministries, which did not directly benefit from the U.N. resolution, as they were not involved with humanitarian issues and so were often barely sc.r.a.ping by.
Everywhere I went in Kurdistan, the oil-for-food program was a topic of much heated discussion. Despite all the humanitarian relief that the program was undeniably providing, it was fraught with problems. Some policies that had made sense when the program was first implemented had outlived their usefulness, while others needed drastic revision.
Security Council Resolution 986 was originally developed to help relieve some of the civilian suffering caused by the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War. The program allowed Iraq to export its state-owned oil and use much of the revenue earned, kept in a U.N. bank account, to buy food and other basic goods. As such, the program was not humanitarian aid, but rather, the directed use of Iraq"s own revenue toward humanitarian purposes. The program was organized in six-month phases, with the Baath government submitting a proposal for each new phase to the United Nations for its approval.
Under the resolution, 13 percent of the program"s resources had to go directly to the northern no-fly zone. Baghdad decided how goods should be distributed there, but the United Nations administered the program-a complex process with many sticking points. First and foremost, Baghdad effectively stonewalled many of Kurdistan"s most urgent requests, ranging from medicines to the visas required for foreign experts to enter the country. Second, the enormous program suffered from endless bureaucracy.
So much money was flowing into the United Nation"s Kurdistan coffers that it couldn"t be spent fast enough. As of January 10, 2003, according to the Kurdistan Regional Government, $4 billion of the Kurds" share of oil-for-food funds was sitting unused in a French bank account, where it remained months after the war. The United Nations disputed the figure, saying that the unspent sum by May 22, 2003, when the United Nations ended sanctions on Iraq, was only $1.6 billion. Either way, the unspent sum was serious money.
Central to the oil-for-food program, and emblematic of its problems, was the monthly ten-item ration basket provided to all Iraqi residents over age one, no matter what their economic status; infants received a monthly four-item ration basket. Without these food rations, an estimated 60 percent of Kurdistan would be going hungry, and so, in one essential way, the program worked very well.
But in addition to wastefully supplying even the wealthy with rations, the food basket wreaked havoc with the local economy. Kurdistan is a fertile agricultural region. Before the Anfal, most Kurds were farmers. But with every adult receiving nine kilograms of wheat flour every month, along with other foodstuffs, those Kurds who were still farming were unable to sell their crops profitably. Others had no incentive to begin farming again.
By creating a lack of incentive to farm and a dependence on handouts, the oil-for-food program was in effect continuing Saddam Hussein"s campaign to transform the Kurds from active producers into pa.s.sive consumers. And there were other disturbing repercussions. As much as the refugees needed adequate housing, some now balked at moving back into the countryside out of fear that they would be unable to make a living.
"One of our biggest problems is sustainability," Nesreen said on the day of our tour. "We build the villagers new homes, but then leave them there with no means of support. A few projects have even failed because of this- after all this investment."
Nesreen"s ministry, along with the Ministry of Agriculture and various aid organizations, tried to tackle the problem by providing villages with supplies to create small businesses such as aviaries and poultry farms, but the real answer lay in convincing the United Nations to change its policies. During my visit, Kurdish officials were in constant discussion with the international organization, trying to effect such change, but little progress had been made. Central to the problem was the fact that Resolution 986 was conceived to deliver short-term humanitarian and reconstruction relief, not bring about long-term development. Thus, the United Nations saw the building of the Kurdish economy as falling outside its mandate. However, the organization also seemed to have little interest in reexamining that mandate, perhaps because it was collecting a 2.2 percent commission on all Iraqi oil sales for operational costs. Between 1997 and early 2003, the oil-for-food program had generated over $1 billion for the United Nations.
The Kurdish officials sometimes tried to get around the resolution"s limitations by claiming that a new project-such as a tomato paste factory or road-wasn"t really new, and thus "long-term development," but rather an older project that needed rehabilitation. Sometimes the ploy worked, sometimes not. Either way, it was a ridiculous game to be forced to play in a land where aid was sorely needed-and theoretically available.
Another important piece of the Kurdish economic puzzle was its bloated civil servant population, numbering well over three hundred thousand. Like all civil servants in Iraq, these well-educated Kurds-most of whom had also served under the Baath regime-were accustomed to taking orders rather than initiative, and to their government providing them with everything from free health care to education. But be that as it may, the civil servants were also earning the ridiculously low salary of 500 dinars a month, about $30 at the time of my visit-as compared to $500 to $2,000 for Kurds employed by the United Nations. Yet to raise the civil servants" salaries was apparently impossible. The Kurdish government did not have the money, and the oil-for-food funds could not be used to pay civil servant salaries or for any other aspect of the Kurdish government"s operating costs.
The more I learned about the oil-for-food program, the more it made my head spin and bile rise. Indeed, the program had done much good: no Kurds were going hungry, many worthwhile projects had been implemented, and much of the country had been rebuilt. But the Kurdistan of 2002 was not the Kurdistan of 1996. Much change had taken place, and the program was in dire need of aggressive reform. In addition to granting Saddam Hussein far too much decision-making power-a separate and noxious issue in itself-Resolution 986 was treating the Kurds like children. The oil-for-food money wasn"t charity; it was the Kurds" share of their country"s income. Yet they had little say in how it was spent.
One year later, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I would remember all this and wonder about what was to happen in Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq when other perhaps well-meaning but nonetheless often bungling outsiders arrived. On November 21, 2003, the oil-for-food program was officially terminated; how to replace it and the previously fostered culture of dependency posed major challenges for the new country.
CHAPTER TEN.
Invitations IN THE CENTER OF ERBIL, RISING LIKE AN EERIE LUMP OUT OF the world"s collective subconscious, was the Citadel. At about seventy-five feet in height and one hundred thousand square yards in area, the ma.s.sive brown mound was built on layers upon layers of consecutive ruins, with the bottommost ones dating back to the sixth century B.C., when the first village was built on the spot. Over the centuries, the Citadel has been ruled by some of history"s greatest civilizations: the Sumerians, Babylonians, a.s.syrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Sa.s.sanians, and early Islamic dynasties. All undoubtedly left their marks somewhere deep within the Citadel"s mysterious layers, but no serious archaeological exploration of the mound has ever been conducted.
In the modern era, prior to the 1960s, the Citadel was home to many of Erbil"s oldest and wealthiest families, who lived in the five hundred or so houses on top, many of which still stand. The Citadel was also home to coffeehouses, government offices, mosques, religious schools, and a jail. Most of the Citadel"s residents were Muslim, but there was a Christian community and-before the establishment of Israel-a small Jewish one.