The family house, protected by a high wall, boasted a pocket garden, balcony, marble facade, and small porch, upon which we left our shoes before entering, as is the Middle Eastern custom. Inside the front door was a tiny foyer with two doors-one leading to the formal reception room, the other to the family room. The formal side, where I"d first been received, and where the men usually sat, was furnished with sofas, coffee tables, a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, and a television and telephone, both served by satellite dish. The family side, where the women usually sat, was simpler and cozier, furnished only with rugs and a second television. But the rules governing who was received where were flexible. Mixed company, older company, and strangers of both s.e.xes tended to be received in the more formal room, while younger company of both s.e.xes was often entertained on the family side. Whenever both rooms were full, there was usually much traffic between them, while the closest family members were often whisked past the front altogether and into another room, by the kitchen.
At the front of the house was a room where Majed"s bodyguards, provided by the KDP, ate and slept. He didn"t really like having them there, he told me, and had never actually needed them but, between his political position and the region"s general unrest, fears of Saddam Hussein and the Islamists, felt that they were necessary. The bodyguards were big, heavyset men, dressed in the military-style khak and red-and-white turbans. All also had thick mustaches, which are common among Kurdish men everywhere, and worn as a kind of badge of Kurdish honor. The guards" presence was both rea.s.suring and unsettling.
In contrast to the guards, Majed and his brothers usually wore Western-style clothes-suits or jeans and sweaters-while the women dressed in a variety of styles. Majed"s two sisters leaned toward knee-length skirts or dark pants, often worn with tight blouses or sweaters; Amal had a penchant for makeup and jewelry, Zobayda did not. Majed"s wife, Huda, a beautiful woman with a luminous complexion and limpid brown eyes, usually wore flowing dishdasha, or caftans, as many Kurdish women do in the home, while the village cousin, Fakhriya, wore the long, traditional Dohuk-style dress, which features a long vest, balloon pants, and sleeves that tie behind the back. Except for Fakhriya, none of the women covered their heads either inside or outside the house.
My room was upstairs and held a Western-style bed, as did most of the other bedrooms. But the bathroom down the hall had an Eastern-style toilet-a hole in the floor-and when they were alone, the family usually ate around a tablecloth on the floor.
I soon settled into a pattern, leaving the house every morning with Majed, his guards, and five-year-old daughter Mina, on their way to work and school, to be dropped at the various places I wanted to visit. Whenever possible, I returned to the house by two P.M., in time for the main meal of the day and the typical Middle Eastern postprandial nap. In the late afternoon, I often went out again.
Like most civil servants in Kurdistan, Majed and his siblings worked only during the long mornings, and spent the afternoons with family and friends. This leisurely schedule was a holdover from the ruling days of the Baath Party, which in the 1970s had inst.i.tuted sweeping social change in Iraq, while also forming a close alliance with the former Soviet Union.
The Baath Party, whose name literally means "resurrection from the dead," was founded in Damascus, Syria, in 1940 by a Christian intellectual named Michel Aflaq. A socialist and secular party with a pan-Arab agenda, the Baath Party came to power in Iraq in 1968, following their second coup. Run by a small group of military and civilian officials at first, the regime only later developed into a ruthless totalitarian machine controlled by one man, Saddam Hussein.
In 1972, the Baath Party nationalized Iraq"s oil industry, and used the revenues to construct a modern country, building infrastructure, inst.i.tuting literacy campaigns, increasing the minimum wage, and greatly improving the status of women by revising outmoded Islamic laws. Women became college graduates, entered a wide variety of professions, and largely discarded the hejab, or veil. The Baathists also provided complete job security to large contingents of people-including acquiescent Kurds-and provided free education and health care, even while clamping down on dissent and human rights, in a campaign that would grow to horrific proportions. Some older Kurds I met rued the pa.s.sing of those prosperous early Baathist days.
During the evenings, Majed and his family often entertained guests, who almost always dropped by unannounced, as is the Kurdish custom. Guests often stopped by during the day as well, and at least one woman of the house was always expected to be home to receive them, with tea, fruit, and candy at the ready.
Also in the evenings, the family and I often gathered in the formal living room, to talk and watch satellite television-Britain"s BBC, Qatar"s Al-Jazeera, and various Turkish, European, and Kurdish channels. Much of the Kurdish programming focused on music and dancing, and I watched endless hours of Kurds in traditional dress surging forward, ebbing back, bending, swaying, and jumping in tight, rainbow-colored line dances.
Every evening, the electricity would go out at least twice, as the long hand of Saddam Hussein reached toward us. Dohuk"s energy supply did not meet its needs, and the Baath regime had agreed to provide the city with an additional thirty megawatts a day-at a hefty price, no doubt. But Saddam liked to play games, and often sent much of that power through in the early morning, when most people were asleep, leaving Dohuk constantly scrambling for light.
Whenever the power went out, Zobayda or Huda would leave the room to fetch a long fluorescent lamp powered by battery. The cold blue stick would cast pale sheets of illumination over those sitting nearest it, but leave the rest of us in darkness. A kerosene heater-in a country known for its oil-also warmed those sitting nearby, but left the rest of us shivering.
During those evenings, we would talk about the events of the day, personal histories, the weather, politics. Everything would seem to be quite ordinary, until suddenly it wasn"t. A silence would fall, holding within it anxiety, depression, fear. But none of this was ever expressed, and a moment later the conversation would begin again as the electricity went on again, as ordinary and comforting as ever.
CHAPTER THREE.
The Little Engine That Could DOHUK CENTERED ON ONE LONG MAIN STREET THAT ROSE and fell as it ran from the more prosperous end of town, through the commercial center, to the poorer quarters. Much of its way was lined with small gray shops, some of which sported English-language signs: Havrest Hair Salon, Jzery Book Shop, Dohuk Center for Money Exchange, t.i.tanec Hotel. Sparkling fruit juice stores, blenders whirling with bright swatches of color, beckoned from the occasional corner, along with a central bazaar, a few dusky Internet cafes, and several liquor stores, frequented by both Christians and liberal Muslims. Overhead, snarls of electricity wires drooped in the air, heavy black cobwebs.
At the traffic circles hulked bulky white statues commemorating the Kurdish revolution or a story from Kurdish folklore. Many had been sculpted after the 1991 uprising by art students under the supervision of their teachers, and were amateurish yet endearing, raw yet hopeful, embodying within them both the can-do att.i.tude and the lack of sophistication of many Kurds, cut off from the rest of the world for generations.
DOMINATING PARTS OF the downtown was the University of Dohuk, housed in a scattered array of cold utilitarian edifices originally built by the Baath regime. The science faculty building had once been a prison; the administration building, a Baath Party headquarters; and the College of Medicine, a Baath army outpost. The university had been founded only after the 1991 uprising, largely through the efforts of Dr. Asmat Muhammad Khalid, whom I went to visit one morning early in my stay. I wanted to learn more about how semiautonomous Kurdistan worked. The new university seemed a good place to start.
At the university, I found a burly, white-haired dynamo of energy waiting for me in a sunny, book-lined room, seemingly exorcised of its Baathist ghosts. Dr. Asmat spoke moderately good English and swiveled enthusiastically in his high-backed leather chair behind a shiny desk as he told me the university"s story. Above him hung a photograph of Ma.s.soud Barzani, on another wall hung one of Mulla Mustafa.
Trained as an engineer, Dr. Asmat had first thought of establishing the university in 1970 while attending a conference, he said. But when he raised his hand and suggested it, everyone in the room, mostly Arabs, laughed in his face-"Dohuk is too backward for a university," they said. The Kurdish region did have one university at the time, but it was in Suleimaniyah, the Kurds" most sophisticated city. Dr. Asmat felt humiliated, but never forgot his idea.
The uprising and its aftermath provided Dr. Asmat with the opportunity he needed. He took his idea to Ma.s.soud Barzani, and on September 14, 1992, the Kurdish Parliament issued a decree establishing the University of Dohuk. It was to be composed of only two colleges at first: the College of Agriculture and the College of Medicine.
"Our start-up team was six persons," Dr. Asmat said. "But how to build a university from nothing? We had no money, no teachers, no cla.s.srooms, nothing. Everything was destroyed. And our campus-all these buildings- was occupied by refugees. We had lecture rooms filled with refugees. One time I entered a cla.s.sroom between women making bread on one side, and women washing clothes on the other.
"We had to ask the people of Dohuk for help. We called to carpenters to repair the buildings, professionals to teach the cla.s.ses, and farmers to teach farming. People cleaned, and gave furniture and books. All volunteer."
Now the university belonged to the International a.s.sociation of Universities (IAU) and boasted nine colleges, various postgraduate programs, about two hundred professors, and over two thousand students. Tuition was free; its primary source of funding was the Kurdish government.
"But, wait-" I said as Dr. Asmat, apparently finished, stood up to usher me out the door. "I don"t understand. . . ." The Kurdish government was far from flush, I knew, and I was puzzled as to how the university had grown so large so quickly.
But Dr. Asmat had no more time to talk-graduation was only two weeks away, and he had much to attend to. He pa.s.sed me on to the dean of the College of Medicine, Dr. Farhad Sulayvani. A wiry, bespectacled man of erect military bearing, Dr. Sulayvani seemed tall when sitting down, but was of average height when standing up. He didn"t look directly at me until well into our conversation-a mannerism that I often encountered in Iraq, where people also had the disconcerting habit of waiting, their faces expressionless, for me to fully explain myself before moving a muscle or saying a word. There"s much wariness here, I often thought, at first attributing the trait to recent history and caution before foreigners. Only later did I realize that the Kurds are wary when confronting one another as well.
Also one of the university"s founders, Dr. Sulayvani told me more about the school"s earliest days, when the College of Medicine had had no decent facilities, equipment, books, or trained staff. Its adjoining teaching hospital, though in operation for years under the Baath regime, had also had little trained personnel. After the uprising, Saddam Hussein ordered all Arab professionals out of the region, thinking that without Baghdad brainpower, Kurdistan would collapse. "But the Kurds proved him wrong," Dr. Sulayvani said proudly, sitting up straighter than ever. Though improvement came only gradually, it did come-in the college"s case, through the help of other universities, aid organizations, the United Nations, and the smuggling in of everything from books to secondhand microscopes.
So the university did have some other resources besides the government, I thought, while remembering the Kurds" well-known reputation for smuggling. They had been honing that expertise ever since their division between the Ottomans and Safavids. And who better to smuggle contraband across borders than a borders-divided people?
"In recent years, the Internet had also been very influential," Dr. Sulayvani continued. Before its arrival in the safe haven in the late 1990s, the university, along with everyplace else, had had virtually no contact with the outside world. There was no mail-Baghdad didn"t let it in-and until only a few years before, phone calls had been prohibitively expensive. Now, though, thanks to satellite connections, international calls cost about 50 cents a minute, and the Internet, about $1 an hour. Those prices were still too high for many Kurds, but the middle cla.s.s could afford it.
My next stop was the College of Arts, a new building housing the language and literature faculties, and a library filled with books that had been hand-carried into Kurdistan by travelers. Here, I met two young language teachers-an English-Moroccan woman from Yorkshire, England, and a French-Kurdish woman from Paris. Both had moved to Kurdistan only a year or two before. The English-Moroccan, a devout Muslim with a porcelain complexion, enveloped in a raincoat and headscarf, was married to a Kurd and had four children. The French Kurd, a single woman in a formfitting black dress, with heels and curled hair, had originally come to Dohuk to visit relatives, but had liked it so much that she"d stayed, to become the university"s only French teacher.
The two women shared an office, where they sang praises of the Iraqi Kurds to me. They"re versatile people and, despite all the atrocities they"ve witnessed, very kind, said the English-Moroccan in her broad Yorkshire accent. They depend on themselves, they don"t wait for outside help, said the French Kurd, in her lilting Parisian one. They take good care of their country, they"re always cleaning, and are very well organized, both concurred. While silently agreeing with their first four points, I thought that, from a historical perspective at least, organization is not a Kurdish strong-point.
"The presentation of work here was terrible at first," said the French teacher. "Students would hand in homework written on dirty pieces of paper. They didn"t know. But now they"re getting better."
"Once I asked the students to write an essay about their most memorable moment," said the English teacher. "One student wrote that she came home one day when she was ten to find her whole family gone. She never saw any of them again." She sighed. "I can"t seem to forget that story. But everyone here has stories like that. When my husband was six, he was playing in the garden when a bomb dropped and killed his brother."
While she was talking, a tall, soft-spoken man in his forties, dressed in a brown suit and tie, came in. A graduate student in the English department, he was writing his master"s thesis on General Sherif Pasha, a Kurdish diplomat who"d been instrumental in negotiating the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, the nonratified, post-WWI agreement that could have led to an independent Kurdistan. The process was frustrating, as there were few books relating to his subject in Dohuk, and those were all in English or French. His English was serviceable, but for French, he had to rely completely on the French Kurdish teacher. She was happy to help, but spoke little Kurdish, and neither was completely fluent in English. Only bit by bit was his project progressing. Much like the university itself, I thought.
The soft-spoken man had spent many years as a peshmerga and as a refugee. He"d always dreamed of studying at a university, but had never before had the chance. Many of the students at the university were older. He didn"t find studying at his age especially difficult, but "sitting with little boys" was hard. Nonetheless, he was hoping to get his Ph.D.
"Everything is now possible in Kurdistan," he said with a sigh.
A BELL RANG, and the threesome gathered their books for cla.s.s. But before disappearing, they introduced me to a group of students who had just moved to Iraq from Iran. Like Dr. Shawkat, Majed, and his family, the students" parents had been forced to leave Iraq in 1975 due to the Algiers Accord. The accord had destroyed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds" lives, and every time I heard about it, my stomach churned, as the agreement had also marked the first great betrayal of the Kurds by the United States.
In 1974, following the breakdown of the 1970 March Manifesto that was to have granted the Kurds semiautonomy, war again broke out between Mulla Mustafa Barzani"s forces and the Iraqi army. But this time, the Kurds were in a strong fighting position, as they"d accepted significant military aid from the Shah of Iran, who was in turn receiving partial funding for that aid from the United States-a critical point, as Barzani did not trust the shah, but did trust the United States. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Baath regime was aligned with Russia, whereas Iran under the shah was a prominent U.S. ally.
The shah hoped to destabilize Iraq by providing the Kurds with everything from U.S. Hawk missiles to fighting forces. However, the shah never intended the Kurds to win their war, and, in the Algiers Accord of March 1975, abruptly abandoned them. The accord gave Iran, with the tacit approval of the United States, what it had really wanted all along-control of half the strategic Shatt al Arab waterway, which separates the countries and leads to the Persian Gulf. In return, the shah withdrew Iran"s aid to the Kurds.
Laying the groundwork for the Algiers Accord had been America"s own Henry Kissinger, who encouraged the Kurds to escalate their revolution while knowing all the while that a Kurdish victory was not part of the plan. In the words of the 1975 Pike Report, commissioned by the congressional Select Committee on Intelligence, "It was a cynical enterprise, even in the context of a clandestine aid operation"; in the words of Henry Kissinger, "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work."
Within hours of signing the accord, Iran was withdrawing its forces and supplies from the Kurds. Mulla Mustafa Barzani was devastated. He was a pa.s.sionate believer in the United States, having even once proposed, probably without really thinking it out, that all Kurds relocate to America. "I trust America," he said in one 1973 interview. "America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds." In his disillusionment, Barzani decided to end the Kurdish national struggle, saying that its continuance would lead only to the ma.s.sacre of his people. Many in the rank and file were eager to continue the fight, but Barzani stood firm-a decision for which he was later harshly criticized. Over one hundred thousand Kurds, including KDP leaders, fighters, and their families, fled to Iran, to join the over one hundred thousand Kurdish refugees already there. Thousands of others surrendered, and thousands more were slaughtered by the Iraqi forces.
Upon arriving in Iran, the Iraqi Kurds were first placed in refugee camps, and then parceled out to towns and villages far from the Iraq-Iran border. The shah did not want them in Iranian Kurdish territory, where a combined Iraqi-Iranian Kurdish population could stir up trouble, and he was careful to put only a few Iraqi families in each town so that they had little power. Not until Iran"s Islamic Revolution of 1979 did the lives of the exiled Iraqi Kurds begin to improve, and later that same year, the KDP was allowed to hold its first postAlgiers Accord conference in Karaj, near Tehran, the KDP"s new headquarters.
Thereafter, the children of the Iraqi refugees grew up in Iran, learning the Persian language and Iranian ways. Yet their parents never forgot their homeland and, after the establishment of the safe haven, began moving back in large numbers. By the time of my visit, there were approximately forty thousand recently returned refugees from Iran in the KDP"s territory-all of whom had to be housed and fed, along with the many thousands who had lost their homes in the Anfal.
Most Iraqi Kurds I met felt that their people"s exposure to Iran had been a good thing. The returning refugees were bringing with them the Iranians" love of learning, entrepreneurial spirit, organization, and sophistication, they said. Iran is considerably more developed than is northern Iraq.
At the College of Arts, the refugee students were ecstatic to learn that I, too, had been to Iran and spoke some Persian. Gathering around me, they ushered me into a sunny cafeteria, where they plied me with multiple rounds of soda, candy, and tea. Covering the wall across from us was an enormous poster of New York City, complete with the World Trade Center.
We"re so, so happy to meet you, the students said over and over-you see, it"s very difficult for us here, we were born in Iran, and we speak Persian and only a little Kurdish. Everything is so different here-the people, the clothes, the food. There are no shops. There are no movies or parks. There"s no place to go for fun. We miss Iran!
"Do you want to go back?" I asked.
There was only a short moment of silence.
Oh, no! they replied. Yes, we miss Iran, but we had problems there. We were not free. People were prejudiced. Only here can we say we are Kurd without trouble.
AS I WANDERED around the university that day, I felt as if I had somehow landed in the middle of a giant jigsaw puzzle. The Kurds were trying to cobble together many odd-shaped bits and pieces-some half destroyed, others curious gems-to create something new out of the old. Some of the pieces weren"t quite fitting yet-the refugee students from Iran still hadn"t found their place, and the university"s quality of teaching still needed much work, I guessed, an impression confirmed by others later. But the enormity of what had been accomplished in ten short years was impressive, as was the Kurds" courage to forge ahead with what had basically been an impossible task. No one had told the Kurds that a university couldn"t be started from scratch without major funding, and so they had simply gone ahead and done it.
ON A SIDE STREET in downtown Dohuk squatted the Writers" Union, flanked by two oversized busts, one of Anwar Mai, a Kurdish historian, another of Saduq Bahaadin Amedi, a Kurdish cla.s.sical poet. Dr. Shawkat had suggested I visit the union to meet others of my ilk, and I"d agreed. But I had no idea what to expect as I scurried into the building one late afternoon, fat raindrops spattering around me.
Inside a gloomy front hall, I b.u.mped into an advance guard of five men-Dr. Shawkat had telephoned-who politely ushered me into a rectangular reception room, its perimeter lined with shiny baroque-style chairs. As we took our seats, at least a dozen other men also filed in and sat down. Most were middle-aged and dressed in neat dark suits. They looked at me expectantly, as a waiter bustled in with clinking gla.s.ses of tea, and my mind went blank. These men looked nothing like the scruffy bunch of writers I knew back in New York.
One of the men came to my rescue by delivering an introduction in broken English. Established in 1971 as a place for writers to work and congregate, the Writers" Union had somehow managed to survive through the difficult Baath regime years. But it was only since the uprising that the union had truly started flourishing. Before, writers had censored themselves or not written at all-they"d been afraid. Now, publications were everywhere, and even small Dohuk had its own Khani media center, which published a weekly paper and monthly magazine. The union"s size had doubled, to over 130 writers, mostly professionals who worked during the day as doctors, accountants, lawyers, or teachers. To work full time as a writer in Kurdistan was impossible. Publications paid little, if anything, and most books were self-published.
"What about women writers?" I asked, looking around at my all-male companions. "Are there any?"
Of course, the men said, nodding proudly, the union had many excellent women writers-nine, to be exact.
"Why aren"t they here?" I asked.
They are home, came the answer. As I was only just beginning to learn, most Kurdish women do not go out after about five P.M. unless in the company of their families, especially in a conservative city like Dohuk.
The introduction over, the men exchanged glances. Then, they looked at me appraisingly. How about a drink? they asked, a gleam in their eyes. Like many Kurdish men I met, they did not take the Muslim stricture against drinking alcohol too seriously. For a Kurdish woman to drink, however, was considered scandalous.
About a dozen of us then retired to the back of the building, the men talking in Kurdish, while I, suddenly acutely aware of being a woman out after dark in a culture where this was not done, self-consciously wondered what they were saying. The men had an easy, familiar air with one another, and I guessed that they met at the union often. Our retreat to the back had the feel of ritual.
We stopped outside a dismal room, furnished with stained sofas sagging around a scarred coffee table. Despite overhead fluorescent lights, everything in the room, including the air, seemed gray. "Women first," said one of the men, ushering me forward, and then chuckled-a reaction I encountered often in Iraq, where men seemed to find the Western courtesy highly amusing. I called them on it once or twice, only to be met with even louder chuckles. "Yes, we do think it"s funny," one man conceded once, "because women here come last, but perhaps this is our future!"
As beers, vodka, and pistachios arrived, I studied my companions more closely. One was a tall man with a big belly, bristling mustache, and thinning white hair. Another was a slight and dapper gentleman with fine features and a clipped mustache. A third was short and handsome with sparkling black eyes and black curls. In fact, each of the men around me was quite distinctive, and yet somehow, in their dark suits, in the grim room, they all seemed the same. It was partly the boxy cut of their jackets that did it, I thought, and partly something less tangible-the way they held themselves, perhaps, a shared a.s.suredness, coupled with politeness and reserve. Neither that evening nor at virtually any other point during my travels did the Kurds I met ask me any personal questions-not even whether I was married or had children. To have done so, one Kurdish woman explained to me, would have been considered rude.
We talked about literature and writing for a while. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack London were among my companions" favorite authors. One man was working on a history of Kurdistan structured around the life of his father, and another on a novel about a young peshmerga who "had forgotten his humanity." A third wrote romance poems penned in a historical mode, and a fourth wrote poems about the Anfal.
The men started telling jokes in Kurdish, one of which they translated for me. One day, the peshmerga arrested some of Saddam"s men. Holding them captive for months, the peshmerga fed them nothing but soup. Negotiations took place, and the men were released. They went into a Kurdish town, entered a restaurant, and ordered soup.
At this, all the men laughed, while I looked blank.
"It"s funny because they think soup is all the Kurds eat," someone explained.
I nodded as if I understood.
But the men saw through me, and they kindly tried again, this time with a joke that they said was very popular. A man in an airplane climbs out while in flight to fix the landing gear, which has jammed. He drops his wrench. One week later he goes back to his village. His father is dead. What happened? he asks. Oh, he was just sitting outside when a wrench fell out of the sky and killed him!
At this, all the men guffawed loudly, some slapping their knees, while I again tried to interpret what I had just heard. The jokes suddenly made the Kurdish world around me seem dense and impenetrable, and the Kurdish men, alien and remote.
The talk turned to politics, and the world became familiar again, with many men talking at once. Some cheeks, including mine, were flushed. The alcohol was taking effect.
"We want the United States to attack Saddam!"
"We don"t care what it costs. Even if he bombs us again!"
"Our situation is not secure. He must go!"
I would encounter this same basic conversation everywhere I traveled in Iraqi Kurdistan. With memories of past atrocities all too fresh in people"s minds, and an all-too-intimate understanding of Saddam Hussein"s s.a.d.i.s.tic capabilities, most Iraqi Kurds had no doubts about where they stood regarding a possible war.
More surprising was their att.i.tude toward Americans. Because the United States has let the Iraqi Kurds down on several significant occasions, with disastrous consequences, I had expected to find a fair amount of anti-American sentiment in Kurdistan. Yet most Iraqi Kurds I met not only seemed to regard those past betrayals as water under the bridge, but also viewed the United States as by far the greatest and most honorable country in the world. More than any other nation, the United States was protecting their no-fly zone and could be their possible future savior. I heard constant praise heaped upon the States, coupled with little skepticism about the American way of life, and even met Kurdish babies dressed in snugglies with an American-flag design. "Kurdistan is a small country, so we need the help and protection of a bigger country," Majed explained to me one day. "And who will help us? Not the Muslim states, not Europe. Only the United States."
Such idealization of the United States can lead only to trouble in the long run, I thought. But I also recognized that given their precarious situation, the Iraqi Kurds had no patience for complexity. They needed a white knight in shining armor.
As an American, I was a prized visitor in Kurdistan. With the 2003 war then still a year away, there were only a handful of Americans of non-Iraqi origin in northern Iraq. Many Kurds viewed my visit as an indication that help would soon be on its way. Everywhere I went, people asked me not if but when I thought the United States would bomb Iraq.
The men at the Writers" Union fell to talking in Kurdish among themselves again, and I turned to the impeccably dressed gentleman sitting next to me. A doctor with an air of gentle sadness about him, he spoke good English.
"No one knows what the future hides," he said quietly. "And no one knows the effect of this situation now. People say that it has no effect, but I am a doctor, and I am sure that after eleven years of living this way, of not knowing the future . . . It is very hard to live your life without knowing the future. The psychological strain is very great."
His words trailed off. Although I was quite sure that no one else in the room had heard or understood his English, I thought I felt the bravado around me drain away. Everyone, myself included, seemed to be sinking deeper into the stained sofas as the air turned a darker gray.
Hasan Slevani, the short, handsome man with sparkling eyes and black curls, drove me home to Majed"s. He worked in the governor"s finance office and stopped by the Writers" Union every evening after work, staying until about nine P.M. He also had six children.
"Your wife must be very busy," I said, picturing the poor woman home alone with six children every evening while her husband was out socializing.
"Yes, she is," he said matter-of-factly, "but we have wonderful children. You must stay with us. My children are learning English and would love to practice with you."
I nodded but didn"t commit myself. It had been a long day.
"What do you think of the life here?" Hasan asked as we turned onto a near empty street, the sky above us black crystal, the stars seemingly close enough to touch.
I struggled to respond, but before I could, he answered the question himself. "It is hard, but it is beautiful."
"What do you think of the Writers" Union?" he asked a moment later.
Again I struggled to respond, but again he answered the question himself. "Talk is something very small, but it is very beautiful."
EARLY ONE EVENING, Dr. Shawkat and I finally went to meet the governor of Dohuk, Nechirvan Ahmad. Arriving at his guesthouse just as the sun was setting, orange and pink splintering over black hills, we retired to a large reception room, where the governor immediately launched into a detailed but impressively succinct history of modern Iraqi Kurdistan, translated by an able interpreter. He ended with the implementation of the U.N. Security Council Resolution 986, the so-called "oil-for-food program."
First pa.s.sed in December 1996 and aimed at relieving the suffering caused by the international economic sanctions imposed on Iraq for its refusal to disarm its nonconventional-weapons program postGulf War, the resolution allowed Iraq to export oil, but only in order to buy food and other humanitarian goods. The resolution further stated that 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 it was the United Nations that administered the north"s program. Overall, 986 was the largest humanitarian a.s.sistance program in the world and in U.N. history.
It was the oil-for-food program, more than anything else, that had turned everyday life in the safe haven around, the governor said. Whereas before there had been hunger, now every denizen of the north automatically received a ten-item monthly rations basket that would otherwise have cost the average family its entire monthly income. Starvation had been eradicated, and child mortality rates were declining. According to a 2000 UNICEF report, the mortality rates for children under age five in northern Iraq had fallen to 72 per 1,000 in 1994 to 1999, as compared to 80 per 1,000 in 1984 to 1989, while they had more than doubled in Baath-controlled Iraq, to 131 per 1,000 in 1994 to 1999 as compared to 56 per 1,000 in 1984 to 1989. So how dare Saddam Hussein claim that it was economic sanctions that were causing Iraqi children to die of starvation? the governor asked. It was a question that I was to hear often in Iraqi Kurdistan and wondered about myself, though there were mitigating circ.u.mstances. The under-agefive child mortality rates in northern Iraq in 1984 to 1989 had probably been abnormally high due to the Anfal, and, after 1991, the safe haven began receiving far more humanitarian aid than did the rest of the country.
"You wouldn"t believe the difference between 1992 and now," our host said. "We have many thousands of new housing units and hundreds of new kilometers of road. One example: ten years ago, Dohuk had only one secondary school. Now, we have twelve secondary schools, a technical school, Dohuk University, and an Inst.i.tute of Fine Arts."
Later, I got the official statistics for all of Iraqi Kurdistan from the Ministry of Reconstruction and Development. Between 1992 and 2002, the Kurdistan Regional Government, with the support of the United Nations and other nongovernment agencies, had rebuilt an impressive 65 percent of what had been destroyed by the Baath regime. Well over half of the 4,000 or so ruined villages-out of an original 4,655-had been rebuilt, and more than 80,000 families had been resettled. However, about 140,000 displaced families, or 800,000 people, still awaited new homes.
COMMUNICATION WITH MAJED and his family was difficult. Only Majed spoke English, but he was far from fluent, and my Persian didn"t extend beyond basic conversation. The women of the house and I spent much of our time communicating in gestures, often to the frustration of all involved, and to my discomfort, as I worried whether the family was regretting taking me in for such a long period. I didn"t always know how to comport myself during the long evenings when they were socializing together. Would it be better for me to join them, perhaps making them feel forced to entertain me, or stay in my room, and perhaps offend them? But if the family tired of me, they didn"t show it, as everyone took me under their wing, answering my questions, showing me around Dohuk, and introducing me to friends and neighbors.
Because of the language barrier, I spent more time talking to Majed than to anyone else in the family. A tall and reserved man in his early forties, with light brown, bristle-cut hair and the Kurdish mustache, he was the next-to-oldest son of his martyred father, Sayyed Saleh. A well-known peshmerga, Sayyed Saleh had joined the KDP in 1955, at age fifteen, only to be arrested and sentenced to death without trial a few years later. But the 1958 coup d"etat of Brigadier Karim Qa.s.sem had saved him, and in 1961, he rejoined the Barzani revolution, to live and fight in the mountains, with only brief interruptions, for over thirty years, dying in battle in 1992.
Throughout Majed"s childhood, Sayyed Saleh had come home when he could, sometimes staying for a few days, sometimes for a few hours, and occasionally for a few months. But sometimes, too, years would go by between visits, and Majed didn"t always recognize his father when he arrived. How had Majed"s mother endured it? I wondered.
After the Algiers Accord, Sayyed Saleh had not been able to come home to help his family escape to Iran. Majed, then age thirteen, his mother, and four siblings had gone on their own, making an eleven-day trek over the mountains with the help of other peshmerga. Upon arrival in Iran, they were placed in a refugee camp and, a short time later, sent to a small village where they and one other family were the only Kurds in town. Joined by Sayyed Saleh, they lived there until 1978, under constant surveillance, needing a police pa.s.s to leave the village. "We had a hard time," Majed said. "We were among strangers, and they were Shiites. In school, they would ask us, are you Muslim or are you Sunni? They didn"t understand that Sunni is Muslim."
After the Islamic Revolution, the family was allowed to move to Iranian Kurdistan, and Sayyed Saleh returned to the mountains, while Majed and his older brother obtained scholarships to study in Europe, through the help of the KDP. Majed saw his father for the last time on January 4, 1985. Sayyed Saleh would live for another seven years, but between his peshmerga activities and Majed"s studies, the two would not meet again.
"It doesn"t matter how sad I get sometimes, remembering," Majed said to me one rainy afternoon while playing with his oldest daughter, whom he adored, lavishing on her the attention that his father had never been able to pay him. "Still I am happy, working for my nation and for my family."