New Yorker, NY
Sept 27 2004
THE NEXT IRAQI WAR
by GEORGE PACKER
What Kirkuk’s struggle to reverse Saddam’s ethnic cleansing signals
for the future of Iraq.
Issue of 2004-10-04
Posted 2004-09-27
Luna Dawood was twenty-four years old when Saddam Hussein paid a
surprise visit to her house in Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed city in
northern Iraq. She admits that she reacted like a teen-ager. It was
an October afternoon in 1983, and two Presidential helicopters landed
in an open field; tanks cordoned off the tidy middle-class streets of
the Arrapha neighborhood, home to employees of the state-owned
Northern Oil Company; and Saddam, flanked by a large security
entourage, showed up at the Dawoods’ kitchen door. The Baathists’
long-standing war against Iraqi Kurds was intensifying, and it
appeared that Saddam wanted to secure the loyalty of those who worked
in Kirkuk’s valuable oil industry. Even today, Dawood, whose father
was employed by the oil company, recalls Saddam’s visit a bit
giddily: he was handsome in his olive-drab military uniform, and
paused to admire the house and ask friendly questions. His cologne
was so overpowering that, for days afterward, Dawood couldn’t wash
the scent off the hand that had shaken the President’s, and the
living-room sofa smelled so strongly that it had to be given away.
Saddam refused coffee and chocolates, but a painting of a woman
drawing water from a tree-shaded river caught his eye–Dawood’s
brother, who was serving on the front in the Iran-Iraq war, had
painted it–and the President claimed it as a gift. The Dawoods are
Assyrian Christians, not Arabs, and when Saddam addressed Luna’s
mother in Arabic she replied in English, which she’d learned from the
British managers of the Iraqi Petroleum Company before it was
nationalized by the Baathists, in 1972. “That time is gone,” Saddam
scolded her. “You must learn Arabic.”
A Presidential trailer was parked in the Dawoods’ garden, and
neighbors lined up to go inside for a private audience with the
President. Saddam’s close adviser and half brother, Barzan
al-Tikriti, presented each petitioner with three thousand dinars from
a bag full of money. To her everlasting regret, Dawood was too
timorous to enter Saddam’s trailer. Her younger sister Fula did so,
and emerged with both the cash and a job at the oil company. One of
Dawood’s cousins entreated Saddam to release his brother, who was
serving five years in prison for comparing the face of a top Baathist
official to that of a monkey; Saddam replied that he couldn’t
interfere with the judicial system. Then he came out of the trailer
to tell the assembled residents that Iraq was at war with Iran to
protect the purity of Iraqi women from Ayatollah Khomeini’s rampaging
troops. The helicopters took off, and everyone assumed that Saddam
had left Kirkuk.
But the trailer remained in the Dawoods’ garden; their phone was cut
off, and security men gathered in the kitchen. Without explanation,
the family was told to spend the night on the second floor. At two in
the morning, unable to sleep, Dawood went to the window and looked
down at the garden. As if in a dream, she saw Saddam step out of the
trailer wearing a white dishdasha. The next day, he was gone.
The President visited Kirkuk again in 1990. This time, his helicopter
landed in the square in front of the municipal building. By then,
Dawood was working there, as an accountant in the finance department.
Saddam announced a campaign to beautify Kirkuk: the walled
citadel–the oldest part of the city, situated on a plateau across the
dry Khasa River bed from the modern city–was going to be cleaned up,
beginning with the removal of the eight or nine hundred mostly
Kurdish and Turkoman families living in its ancient houses. The next
day, fifty million dinars arrived at Dawood’s office from Baghdad.
She had forty-five days to dig through title deeds, some dating back
to 1820, and pay compensation to displaced homeowners.
The process of emptying out the Kirkuk citadel was the climax of a
forty-year campaign known to Iraqis as Arabization. Beginning in
1963, and continuing up to the eve of the American invasion last
year, the Baathist regime in Baghdad deported tens of thousands of
Kurds–some Kurdish sources put the number at three hundred
thousand–from Kirkuk and the surrounding region, forced other ethnic
minorities from their houses, and imported similar numbers of Arabs
to Kirkuk from the south. Dawood’s job in city government, which she
has held since the mid-nineteen-eighties, required her to distribute
dinars to families forfeiting their homes, sift through crumbling
property records, and handle the traffic of deportees at the
municipal building. She was a bureaucratic expediter of ethnic
cleansing.
I met Dawood during a trip to Kirkuk this summer. A slim, energetic
forty-five-year-old, she is unmarried, and, unlike most Iraqi women,
she wears Western clothes and carries herself with self-confidence.
She has wide, startled eyes and the kind of strong nose seen on
statuary from Nineveh, and when she talks about Kirkuk’s history
under Saddam her anxious smile reveals a row of crooked teeth. “It
was a tragedy I don’t want to remember,” she told me when we met in
her office. She then proceeded to remember everything. “They were
poor people,” she said. “Each one who came to take the money, in his
eyes you saw the tractor coming to take his house.” Crowds awaiting
deportation filled the hallway outside her office; women fainted. If
the secret police instructed her to delay paying someone they
intended to arrest, Dawood would quietly urge the reluctant man to
leave Kirkuk without his money.
At the end of one long day, an old Kurdish farmer approached Dawood’s
desk. She presented him with a consent form that granted the
government ownership of his family’s land in exchange for several
thousand dinars.
“I would like some water first,” the old man said before signing the
document. Dawood gave him a glass. He drank the water, signed the
form, and fell dead in her lap.
“The things I saw,” Dawood told me, “nobody saw.”
A few weeks before the American invasion in March, 2003, the
government in Baghdad sent a secret order to officials in Kirkuk:
immediately burn all paperwork related to the Central Housing
Plan–the regime’s euphemism for the ethnic-cleansing campaign. The
Baathists were meticulous record-keepers; outside the municipal
building, officials torched three large garbage containers filled
with papers, and the bonfire lasted for almost twenty-four hours.
Dawood decided to ignore the order. “I can’t burn these things,” she
said. “How can we compensate these people if these documents are
burned?” Her motives were not entirely altruistic. Dawood was a
Baathist (a requirement of the job), and she wanted to protect
herself against any accusations of misappropriating funds. She is
also an admitted busybody. “You know, I put my nose in everything,”
she said. “I want to know everything.” So she lied to her boss, and
instead of burning the files she secretly transferred them by car to
the house in Arrapha, which she still shares with Fula and another
unmarried sister. Most of the documents are now kept on the roof of
the municipal building, in an airless slant-ceilinged storeroom to
which only Dawood has the key. A waist-high sea of paper and dust
inside has yet to attract the interest of either Iraqi or American
officials, although among the documents that Dawood salvaged are
secret letters that expose the Baath Party’s sustained effort to
transform Kirkuk from Iraq’s most diverse city into a place dominated
by Arabs loyal to the regime. (The Arabization policy was never
publicly declared.)
Since the American invasion, Kirkuk has become the stage of an ethnic
power struggle. Some observers say that the city could be a model for
national unity or could trigger a civil war; Kirkuk is compared to
New York and, more often, to Sarajevo. How the new Iraq corrects the
historical injustices recorded in Dawood’s files will reveal much
about the kind of country that Iraqis choose to live in–or if it will
remain a country at all.
Inside the storeroom, Dawood waded through the files and stooped to
inspect them with a kind of wit’s-end affection, like a mother with
too many unruly children. “Look–look–how many people?” she cried.
“How could I work this all? Do you know how much I have in my mind?
All this! All this! I must get it out!”
Kirkuk sits near the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, not far from
the southern border of Kurdistan, an autonomous region that broke
free of Baathist control in 1991. The vast oil fields outside the
city constitute around seven per cent of Iraq’s total reserves. In
part, the Arabization program was aimed at securing Baghdad’s
authority over this valuable resource, but primarily Saddam’s regime
was motivated by ideology. The history and demography of Kirkuk were
an affront to the fascist dreams of the Baath Arab Socialist Party.
Kirkuk is a dense, cosmopolitan city along a trade route between
Constantinople and Persia, and its layers of successive civilizations
had nothing to do with Arab glory. Around the city’s markets and the
citadel, residents still live and move in close quarters, and a
visitor finds the variety of faces, tolerant manners, public female
presence, and polyglot street life of a mixed city. Kirkuk feels
closer to Istanbul than to Baghdad.
One local historian, an elderly Arab named Yasin Ali al-Hussein, told
me that Kirkuk was built by Jewish slaves of the Babylonian
captivity; although scholars doubt this version, until the creation
of Israel, in 1948, several thousand Jews lived in the city’s twisted
back streets, many of them near the old souk at the foot of the
citadel. An Armenian church dates from the first millennium.
(Christians make up roughly five per cent of the population.) In the
fourth century B.C., Xenophon noted the presence of an ethnic group
that might have been Kurdish. Turkomans from Central Asia, ethnically
distinct from Turks, migrated to the region about a thousand years
ago. During Ottoman rule, which was established at the citadel in the
sixteenth century and lasted until the arrival of British troops,
during the First World War, many educated Turkomans became imperial
officeholders. More than a century ago, Arab immigrants began
settling around Kirkuk, mostly in the farmland west and south of the
city; these “original Arabs” are distinct in almost every way from
those imported by the Baathist regime. E. B. Soane, a British
intelligence officer who travelled through Mesopotamia in the years
before the First World War, observed, “Kirkuk is thus a collection of
all the races of eastern Turkey–Jew, Arab, Syrian, Armenian,
Chaldean, Turk, Turkoman, and Kurd–and consequently enjoys
considerable freedom from fanaticism.”
Fanaticism is the legacy of Saddam’s Arabization policy. Every aspect
of Kirkuk’s history is now violently contested. Kurds, Arabs, and
Turkomans all make claims of ethnic primacy in a city where there are
only pluralities. (According to the 1957 census, conducted before
Arabization began, the city was forty per cent Turkoman and
thirty-five per cent Kurdish.) Ali Bayatli, a Turkoman lawyer,
insisted that his people were direct descendants of the Sumerians and
therefore the first residents of Kirkuk, with unspecified rights.
Kurdish politicians have two slogans designed to end any argument:
“Kirkuk is the heart of Kurdistan” and “Kirkuk is the Jerusalem of
the Kurds.” Arabs, meanwhile, are angry about the sudden loss of
power that followed the removal of Saddam. Luna Dawood’s view of her
city’s future is grim. “It will be war till the end,” she said.
“Everyone says Kirkuk belongs to us: Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans. To whom
will it belong? We want America to stay here and change minds–to
teach what’s freedom, what’s human. That’s what our people don’t
know. They are animals.”
Fifteen miles outside the city, on a road heading northwest, I met
Muhammad Khader, a Kurdish farmer who was hoeing a vegetable garden
next to a cluster of ruined-looking houses. Khader had recently
returned to the area from Erbil, a city in Kurdistan, where he worked
as a butcher. After the American invasion, he and his two wives,
their ten children, and twenty-five other families followed American
and Kurdish soldiers south into Iraq, with the goal of reclaiming
Amshaw, their ancestral village, from Arab settlers. Khader, who wore
traditional Kurdish pants, which are drawn tight at the waist and
ankles but hang loose around the legs, took me up into the
surrounding hills. It was spring, and the vivid green grass was
studded with yellow wildflowers and blood-red roses, which are tragic
emblems in Kurdish poetry.
“This was the village,” Khader said, pointing at a pattern of grassy
humps on the hillside. Shards of terra-cotta pottery lay in the dirt.
“That was our house,” he went on. “Exactly here.” Farther up the
hill, a field of jagged headstones marked the village cemetery.
In 1961, the first phase of a long war between Iraq’s central
government and Kurdish guerrillas, known as peshmerga, began. The
rebel Kurds demanded linguistic and cultural rights, control over
regional security and financial affairs, and authority over Kirkuk
and its oil. In 1963, following the coup that first brought Baathists
to power, Iraqi soldiers attacked Amshaw and other villages. Khader
was three years old. “I remember it like a dream, a bad dream, with
children crying and people fighting and dying,” he said. The
villagers fled north, and were forced to retreat all the way to
Erbil. Amshaw was razed. In the ensuing years, the lands around
Amshaw were distributed to Arab tribes from the south, and new houses
were built for Arab settlers.
I asked Khader if his family was ever compensated for their loss.
“Are you making fun of me?” he said, staring in disbelief. “They took
everything. You see how I am now? That’s just how we left–no
blankets, nothing.”
Sabiha Hamood and her husband are Arabs who moved their family to
Kirkuk from Baghdad in the late nineteen-eighties, lured by a free
house and ten thousand dinars. “Arabs like us are known as the
benefitters,” Hamood said. “We came here just to live in a house. My
husband used to work in the Ministry of Housing, but it wasn’t enough
money to buy a house.” Like Hamood, the overwhelming majority of the
benefitters are Shia, and many were employed in the military, the
state security apparatus, or the civil service. The house offered to
Hamood’s family was in a middle-class Turkoman neighborhood called
Taseen, across the road from the Kirkuk airbase. Hamood convinced
herself that the former owner of her house had been handsomely
compensated and bore no grudge.
Several doors down is a two-story house that once belonged to the
family of Fakheraldin Akbar, a Turkoman woman who works with Luna
Dawood in the finance department. One day in 1988, the family
received a government letter declaring that a railroad was going to
be built through the neighborhood. “They gave us three days,” Akbar
recalled. “On the second day, policemen were standing outside the
door. We took our furniture and went to stay with an aunt who lived
along the road to Baghdad.” The family was awarded a sum that
represented less than a quarter of the value of the house. The
railroad was never built. Four or five years ago, attending a funeral
in her old neighborhood, Akbar decided to go and look at the house
for the first time since the family’s eviction. “I said to myself,
‘Let me just walk past the door. I won’t speak to them–why should I?
I don’t know them, they don’t know me.'” The benefitters who were
given the house had painted over its beautiful wooden front door.
Ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk proceeded in piecemeal fashion, but the
Baathists were following a master plan. Their goal was to make Kirkuk
a predominantly Arab city, with a security belt of Arab neighborhoods
encircling it, especially along the vulnerable northern and eastern
edges, which faced Kurdistan. Accordingly, Kurds were forbidden by
law to build, buy, or improve houses in Kirkuk. Any Kurdish family
that couldn’t prove residence in Kirkuk from the 1957 census had no
legal right to live there, which meant that thousands of Kurds were
displaced to refugee camps in Kurdistan or to southern Iraq. Some
were given a choice: leave the city or become an Arab. This was
called “correcting” one’s nationality, and thousands of Kurds and
Turkomans agreed to undergo the humiliation in order to stay in
Kirkuk or hold on to a job or obtain a business license. Meanwhile,
one Kurdish neighborhood after another was torn down–allegedly, to
widen a road, build a munitions factory, expand a base. After 1980,
the teaching of languages other than Arabic was forbidden in city
schools. Kurds and other non-Arabs were frozen out of government
jobs; before the war, according to one Kurdish official, the oil
company had eleven thousand employees, of whom eighteen were Kurds.
Development in Kirkuk was allowed in only one direction: south,
toward Baghdad. The Arabization neighborhoods that arose have the
lethargic feel of an overgrown village, where women are shrouded in
black body-covering abayas; the new buildings were thrown up in
graceless concrete along wide, empty streets. The few Kurdish and
Turkoman neighborhoods in the center of town that survived demolition
became choked with traffic and were deprived of parks, sewers, and
public transportation. Over the years, ten or twelve families packed
into dilapidated compounds that had been built for two or three
families. The dried-up riverbed filled with garbage.
The climax of the regime’s persecution of Kurds came in 1988, when
the decimation of Kurdish villages in Iraq’s northern mountains
reached genocidal proportions and chemical weapons were used against
civilians in Halabja. Toward the end of that year, the governor of
Kirkuk wrote a letter to the Baathist official in charge of
Arabization, Taha Yasin Ramadan, who, in addition to being a lifelong
friend of Saddam’s, is a Kurd. (Iraqis know him simply as “the
Butcher.”) This letter, which was among the documents that Luna
Dawood salvaged, offers a report on an intensive phase of the
ethnic-cleansing campaign in Kirkuk, from June 1, 1985, to October
31, 1988. “We would like to inform you that we have followed the
strict orders and instructions that you made for our work, which
pushed us to work harder to serve the citizens, the sons of the
courageous leader of victory and peace, Mr. President the Patriot
Saddam Hussein (may God save him),” the governor wrote. What follows
is a detailed statistical account: 19,146 people removed from
villages “forbidden for security reasons”; registration documents of
96,533 people transferred from Kirkuk to Erbil province in
preparation for removal; 2,405 families removed from villages lying
near oil facilities; 10,918 Arab families, including 53,834 people,
transferred to Kirkuk from other provinces; 8,250 pieces of
residential land and 1,112 houses distributed to Arab families
transferred from other provinces. The letter noted that these
removals, transfers, and distributions created a net gain of 51,862
Arabs in the province and a net loss of 18,096 Kurds during this
period, making Arabs the largest group in Kirkuk for the first time.
The final phase of Arabization was beginning, the governor reported
in conclusion: “The displacement process from the city center is now
taking its course.”
Two years later, just before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam made his
announcement outside Kirkuk’s municipal building that all human life
be removed from the citadel. According to Gha’ab Fadhel, the director
of Kirkuk’s archeological museum, who oversaw the bulldozing of
dwellings, the purpose of the citadel project was simply to excavate
and restore ancient monuments. The eight hundred and fifty
Ottoman-era houses on the site were ill kept, unhygienically crowded,
and mostly occupied by poor renters. “Their removal had nothing to do
with politics,” he insisted. But the citadel was the heart of the
city. On the Muslim holiday of Eid, Christians joined Muslims to
celebrate at the Tomb of the Prophets, an ancient shrine where Daniel
and Ezra are apocryphally said to be buried. On Christian holidays,
the Muslims reciprocated.
At the souk near the citadel, the Turkoman owner of a women’s dress
shop recalled that, years ago, the citadel was the site of many
feasts. In the quiet of summer evenings, he said, the scent of
grilled meat would drift down into the market. “From what I hear,
Turkomans were living there,” he said.
“Why do you say that?” a Kurdish customer asked. “We were living
there, too.”
Across the alley from the shop, a Turkoman woman selling shoes and
purses told me, “We were the last family to leave the citadel.” Her
father, a wealthy trader in seeds, had a large house by the western
gate that overlooked the river. He built houses on the citadel for
Jews whom he employed as scribes. “We had relations with so many
people on the citadel,” she said. “Like family, not neighbors.” One
day, Baathists knocked at the door: the family had a month in which
to vacate their house. “The citadel was the most beautiful place,”
she said. “My childhood was there. I see it every day.” She pointed
to the remains of a stone wall, overgrown with yellow grass, just
visible above the shops across the alley.
The last houses inside the citadel were destroyed in 1998. By then,
nobody had lived there for eight years, and no one was allowed there
except members of a Republican Guard unit, who were positioned on the
citadel to suppress an uprising or attack. Last year, when a wave of
Kurdish peshmerga and American Special Forces soldiers swept down
from the north, the dream of Arab Kirkuk collapsed overnight.
A few weeks after the liberation of Kirkuk, in April, 2003, Jordan
Becker, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant with the 173rd Airborne
Brigade, was told by his company commander to sort out a problem in
Arrapha, the neighborhood where Luna Dawood lives. Among the
thousands of Kurdish deportees who had come back to Kirkuk to reclaim
houses and land–in some cases chasing Arab occupants out, in others
finding that the residents had fled–sixty-seven families were
squatting in the fine houses that had been abandoned by top Baathist
officials. These Kurds had been living for years in refugee camps in
the hills around Suleimaniya, one of the regional capitals of
Kurdistan. Becker, who had a shelf full of books on Kurdish language
and Middle Eastern history in his tent at the American base, was
given the mission to tell the Kurds that they had to vacate. At the
first house that he visited, the wife swore that if the Americans
made her leave she would set herself on fire.
Becker returned to the base and conferred with his captain. They
decided that he should try again, but this time Becker, a blue-eyed
Southern Californian who’s built like a cornerback, left his body
armor behind; in this less threatening guise, he sat down with the
family for two hours. “What I learned about these people is that they
have a sense of history, and historic patience,” he said. “They have
a sense of what’s best for their community, and when you convinced
them that they were going to drive a wedge between their community
and the Arabs, and between their community and the Americans, they
realized they didn’t want to do that.” Becker’s argument to the Kurds
was an abstract one: “If you have a house in a country that’s
unstable and violent, then all you have is a house. But if you have a
house in a country that’s stable and ruled by law, then you have a
lot more than a house.” Then he made his approach in more concrete
terms, telling the family, “Just because you won a war doesn’t mean
you’ll get shit for free. If you support law over victor’s justice,
though, you’ll be investing in the future of Iraq.” Becker smiled.
“And they said, ‘That’s cool.'”
The Kurdish squatters left Arrapha. That was in the early weeks, when
the Kurds regarded the Americans as saviors and were willing to
postpone rectification a little longer. During my visit to Kirkuk
this summer, the historic patience of the Kurds was running out. In
his speech to the family in Arrapha, Lieutenant Becker had
articulated the policy of the occupation authority better than any
high officials had: old grievances must be settled with laws, not by
force; until new laws are in place, the status quo has to be
maintained. Yet, more than a year after the removal of Saddam, a
legal mechanism for resolving individual property disputes has barely
begun to function. As for a larger political solution to the status
of Kirkuk, the occupation authority avoided the issue entirely, and
the interim constitution signed in March by the former Governing
Council declared that Kirkuk’s future will not be resolved until
there is a permanent constitution. Meanwhile, the American forces in
the city function, as one soldier told me, “like a bouncer in the
middle of a nasty bar fight.” Kirkuk remains dangerously stalled,
while facts that could force the most extreme outcome steadily
accumulate on the ground.
Since the invasion, more and more Arabs have been uprooted from their
homes. A report by the refugee organization Global I.D.P. puts the
total number of Arabs displaced in the north at a hundred thousand,
although the absence of international organizations in Iraq makes it
impossible to reach an accurate count. Inside the bombed barracks and
helicopter hangars of an Iraqi Air Force base northwest of Kirkuk,
near the American base, I found a group of Arab squatters. Two old
men who spoke for the fifty-two families there said that Kurdish
fighters had chased them out of Amshaw, the small village that I had
just visited.
“We have young men who believe Amshaw belongs to them,” one of the
Arab men, Ali Aday, said. “I tell them, ‘My son, they say it belongs
to the Kurds.’ They say, ‘How can it? We were born and raised in
those houses.'” The old man pointed out that the number of Kurdish
families who had taken over Amshaw was just half the number of Arabs
who had fled–there were enough houses in Amshaw for twenty-five Arab
families to return and live together with the Kurds. “We just want to
know who will give us our rights,” Ali Aday said. American soldiers
in the area had given the Arab refugees blankets and food, and told
them to stay put until the problem could be sorted out by law. “Where
is the government that will give us our rights? Is it from America?
>>From the Iraqi government? We don’t know. It isn’t possible to just
leave us here without our rights.”
A mile away, a forlorn camp of seventeen tents stood in a field next
to a military pillbox. A ragged turquoise flag with a white crescent
moon and star–the symbol of the militant Iraqi Turkoman Front–hung
limply in the heat. The camp is also symbolic–the tents were
empty–but a handful of men were standing watch. They were Turkomans
who had been expelled in 1980 from Bilawa, a nearby settlement. They
showed me copies of property deeds from 1938, black negative images
of British documents; they also had Ottoman-era deeds, they said.
Part of their property had been taken over by the Air Force base, and
another part was occupied by a wealthy Arab, who refused to leave.
The Turkomans also claimed the land where the Arab refugees were
squatting in helicopter hangars. It was hard to imagine how all this
could be worked out.
“The solution is for people to go back to where they’re from,” one
Turkoman said. “Before Saddam, where were these Arabs? This is the
solution, exactly. We want it just like before Saddam.”
On the other side of the city, hundreds of Kurdish families had taken
up residence in the tunnels and under the grandstands of Kirkuk’s
soccer stadium, which was built in a razed Kurdish neighborhood. On a
dusty field beside the stadium, hundreds more families are living in
tents. The director of a Kurdish refugee organization estimated that
nine thousand families have returned to Kirkuk. Most of them were
expelled from Kirkuk a decade or more ago–taken by government truck
to the provincial border and dumped alongside the road–and have lived
in refugee camps ever since. More of them are returning to Kirkuk
every day–in August, by one account, five hundred people a day–even
though living conditions are squalid and almost no help has been
offered by the Americans, international aid groups, or the city
government. A Kurdish man named Farhad Muhammad echoed what the
displaced Arabs had told me. “I really don’t know who will give us a
house, because there are many, many governments in Iraq,” he said.
“We hope the new government won’t be like Saddam’s.”
Despite the lack of housing in Kirkuk, the Kurdish political parties
have begun to accelerate the return of Kurds in advance of an Iraqi
census and elections. Kurdish government employees in Suleimaniya
have been told to return to Kirkuk, and have been promised that their
salaries will be sustained until they find new positions. In Erbil
this June, forty Kurdish families originally from Kirkuk were ordered
to vacate the building in which they had lived for years as refugees
and which a politically connected businessman plans to turn into a
supermarket; they were given three thousand dollars apiece and sent
back to their home town. In July, I found a number of them in Kirkuk,
building simple houses illegally in the old Kurdish neighborhoods of
Azadi and Rahimawa. Some Arab leaders claim that Kurds, including
some who had never lived in Kirkuk, are moving to the city in an
attempt to tip the ethnic scale. One of them called the effort
“Kurdification.”
Meanwhile, Arab benefitters are leaving. Sabiha Hamood, the woman who
moved with her family from Baghdad in the nineteen-eighties, sold her
house this past spring, taking advantage of the inflated prices that
wealthy Kurds are willing to pay for nice homes. In Qadisiya, a
neighborhood in the south of the city that was built during
Arabization, I met a group of Arab men attending a funeral. They took
me back to a dingy cinder-block house, into which three families who
had been forced from their homes were squeezed. In the immediate
neighborhood, they said, a hundred Arab families had sold their
houses to Kurds and left the city. The men were Shia, former
policemen and soldiers, now unemployed and filled with grievances.
Riyadh Shayoob, who came to Kirkuk from Basra in 1986, when he was
five, had been driven from his house in a Kurdish area and been
refused employment by the new Iraqi police force. He was making a
meagre living selling trinkets in the souk, where he suffered
contempt and threats from Kurds. Some of them, he said, mockingly
sell CDs with images of Arab prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib.
“They told me, ‘Go back where you came from. Don’t stay in Kirkuk,'”
Shayoob said with a melancholy smile. “Before, I had Kurdish friends,
but now they don’t support me. They’ve turned against us.”
Government jobs, I was told, now go almost exclusively to Kurds. The
new governor and the police chief are Kurds, and all the television
networks are in Kurdish; the Arabs are being driven out of the city,
and they have no one powerful to back them–the long list of Arab
complaints bore a striking resemblance to the predicament of the
Kurds in Kirkuk under Saddam. To these men, the Kurds were now the
benefitters. “There’s more injustice now than under Saddam,” a
bearded, tough-looking man named Ethir Muhammad insisted. “Even if
Saddam did these things, what’s our guilt? We did nothing to them.”
In Kirkuk, the Arab-Kurdish conflict has been intensified by the
insurgency against the Iraqi government, which has recently grown
worse: in the past few weeks, two car bombings in Kirkuk have killed
at least forty people. The Kurds are often considered collaborators
of the Americans, while many of the imported Arabs sympathize with
the Sunni or Shiite resistance forces. Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical
Shiite cleric, has claimed that the Kurds are Muslim apostates and
face damnation; over the summer, several hundred Kurds fled to Kirkuk
from Samarra and other Arab cities after being denounced in Sunni
mosques as traitors. The Arab men in the cinder-block house were
followers of Sadr’s representative in Kirkuk, whose mosque was raided
in May by American soldiers. (They discovered a cache of weapons and
arrested around thirty people.) All vowed to stay in the city.
“Kirkuk has turned into a jungle,” Ethir Muhammad said. “If someone
comes to force me to leave, then either I’ll kill him or he’ll kill
me. This is the law of the jungle.”
Among imported Arabs, I heard various conspiracy stories–that mass
graves dug by Saddam’s regime are in fact archeological sites
thousands of years old, that the chemical weapons dropped on Halabja
were actually sacks of plaster dust. (This theory was offered by a
fireman employed by the oil company, whose house in Arrapha looks
directly across a field at the former mansion of Ali Hassan
al-Majid–known, ever since he directed the gassing of the Kurds, as
Chemical Ali.) An Arab woman who is a retired teacher from the
southern city of Kut said, “Iraq is part of the Arab nation, not the
Kurdish nation. The Kurds are guests in Iraq–and they want to kick
the Arabs out?” I seldom heard any acknowledgment of the crimes that
Arabs had committed against Kurds in Kirkuk, or any shame at having
been the benefitters. This only deepens the sense among Kurds,
especially among the deportees who have returned, that it is not
possible for them to live alongside imported Arabs in Kirkuk.
The Kurdish plan for Kirkuk is absolutely clear. All the imported
Arabs must leave–even those who were born in the city. The government
should compensate them, and perhaps find them land and jobs in their
provinces of origin, but to allow them to stay in Kirkuk would be to
endorse the injustice of Arabization. After Kurdish deportees have
been resettled, and the province’s earlier demographic balance has
been restored, the Kirkuk region will hold a census. (The 1957 census
showed that the population was almost fifty per cent Kurdish.) The
result of this upcoming census is a foregone conclusion to the Kurds:
they will be the majority group in the province. Equally predictable
is the result of the referendum that will follow: the province of
Kirkuk will vote to join the autonomous region of Kurdistan, and the
city will go with it.
None of this is stated in Iraq’s interim constitution. Article 58,
which delineates “Steps to Remedy Injustice,” is purposefully vague
about the future of Kirkuk. It calls for “the injustice caused by the
previous regime’s practices in altering the demographic character of
certain regions, including Kirkuk,” to be redressed. It states that
“individuals newly introduced to specific regions and territories . .
. may be resettled, may receive compensation from the state, may
receive new land from the state near their residence in the
governorate from which they came, or may receive compensation for the
cost of moving to such areas.” (Not “must.”) The status of contested
cities like Kirkuk will be deferred until after the census and a
permanent constitution, “consistent with the principle of justice,
taking into account the will of the people of those territories.”
This bland language raises more questions than it answers. Does
justice require only the restoration of confiscated property, or does
it also require the restoration of Kirkuk’s demography to the period
before Arabization? Wouldn’t forcing Arabs to return to the towns
“from which they came” create new injustices and perpetuate the cycle
of revenge?
Although there has been nothing like the apocalyptic communal
bloodshed that some predicted, several demonstrations in Kirkuk have
turned violent, and Kirkuk’s leaders have fallen victim to a campaign
of assassination. Most of the murdered officials have been Kurds,
though one was an Arab provincial councilman; a week ago, an Arab
sheikh who occupied disputed lands around the village of Amshaw was
ambushed and killed. Arrests are seldom made in these cases. Kurds in
Kirkuk cast suspicion on Turkish intelligence agents; the Turkish
government has repeatedly asserted that a Kurdish power grab in
Kirkuk would be regarded as a prelude to an independent state and
therefore a threat to Turkey, which has its own minority population
of rebellious Kurds. In July, the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah
Gul, compared Kirkuk to Bosnia and issued a veiled warning: “Everyone
is aware that this is the issue that could end up being the greatest
headache for Iraq.”
Hasib Rozbayani is the Kurdish deputy governor for resettlement and
compensation, the official responsible for the returning refugees.
Rozbayani is a leading spokesman for the emerging policy of reverse
ethnic cleansing. He spent years teaching social studies and
statistics in exile in Sweden, and, with an unruly head of curly
hair, spectacles, and a habit of mumbling questions to himself as he
talks, he has a mild professorial air. When we spoke in his living
room, he was barefoot and wearing sweatpants and an untucked shirt,
and he kept absently picking up the automatic pistol that lay on the
sofa beside him, then startling himself and setting it down again.
Propped against his stereo system was a Kalashnikov.
Rozbayani left no doubt about the future of the imported Arabs. Their
departure from Kirkuk is necessary for a variety of reasons, he said,
including psychosocial ones: the Arabs suffer from guilty
consciences, since most of them are criminals and former Baathists,
which would make them uneasy about staying; they know they don’t
belong in the city and have no friends among the other groups; their
continued presence would be a provocation to Kurds, inciting social
conflict. Moreover, unemployment is already too high in Kirkuk.
Those benefitters who haven’t left Kirkuk before the census and the
referendum will not be allowed to vote there, Rozbayani said. He does
not expect many Arabs to be living in Kirkuk by then. “They have to
leave,” he said. Imported Arabs have to leave even if no one contests
their house or land, because their fault is a collective one. After
the census and the referendum on the status of Kirkuk, he told me,
Arabs could return to the region–for a visit.
I told Rozbayani about a couple I’d met: the husband came from
central Iraq in the nineteen-sixties; the wife is an “original Arab”
whose family has lived in Kirkuk for generations. Their children have
grown up with playmates from a mixed Kurdish-Turkoman family next
door. What should happen to this couple?
“They have to return,” he said.
“The wife is a native of Kirkuk.”
“She can follow him.”
My questions struck Rozbayani as misplaced humanitarianism, and he
threw them back at me. “Of course, I accept the idea of brothership
and friendship,” he assured me. “But we know openly that the Arabs
have taken lands, occupied lands, they have gone to every house to
investigate people, execute people, take their sons, their girls–and
you would say, ‘Welcome, Iraq is for all people’? It’s funny, I say.”
Much of Rozbayani’s and other Kurds’ unhappiness is directed at the
American-led coalition. They expected something more than studied
evenhandedness from the United States. A peshmerga now living in an
abandoned house in Amshaw asked me, “Why, when the Kurds are your
friends, do you now treat us just the way you treat other Iraqis,
including the Republican Guard?”
The first representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul
Bremer, the head of the C.P.A., was Emma Sky, a slim, brown-eyed,
thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman. Sky speaks some Arabic and once
worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the
invasion of Iraq, she volunteered to join the occupation authority.
Upon arriving in Kirkuk, she saw that the most urgent task was to
reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphant attitude
of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them
here. As Sky travelled around the province, her prestige among Arabs
soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave
her his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she’s a man, not a
woman.”
Sky believes passionately that Kirkuk can be a model for an
ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum
thinking,” she told me in Baghdad. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It
all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate
regions, where people don’t have to deal with other groups. But can
you have a country where people are happy with each other, where
people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell
you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” Compared with the
problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk’s can be solved
relatively easily. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn’t have
irreconcilable differences–yet.”
Over time, many Kurds began to regard Emma Sky and the C.P.A. as
biased toward Arabs. When she met the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani
in Suleimaniya, he snapped, “They call you Emma Bell.” The reference
was to Gertrude Bell, the British colonial official who lived and, it
is said, took her life in Baghdad. Fluent in Arabic and in love with
the culture, Bell was admired by large numbers of Arabs. After the
First World War, she drew up the boundaries of the modern state of
Iraq, in which Sunni Arabs became the holders of power and Kurds saw
their dream of nationhood dissolved.
Nor did it help the Coalition’s cause that its scheme for untangling
and redressing grievances in Kirkuk–the Iraq Property Claims
Commission, which Sky was instrumental in setting up–didn’t begin to
hear claims until April and still hasn’t issued its first decision.
Azad Shekhany, a Kurd who once directed the commission, concluded
that the whole thing was an elaborate stall to keep the peace, and he
put the blame on the Coalition. “I understand they don’t want to send
the Arabs back to their original places, but they don’t want the
Kurds to be unhappy as well–so they just delay everything by
bureaucracy,” Shekhany said.
The commission has received far fewer claims than anticipated–exactly
1,658 as of the July morning when I visited its offices, which were
well-equipped and nearly empty. Two Kurdish women in billowing black
robes–Jamila Safar and her mother, Khadija Namikh–were seated at a
desk making a claim. In March, 1991, during the uprising in Kirkuk
and the north that followed the Gulf War, Safar told me, her father
died. On the day of his burial, March 13th, she and her mother
returned from the cemetery to find their house surrounded by
soldiers, Baath Party members, and men with masked faces who worked
for Chemical Ali. “Are you Kurds or Arabs?” the men demanded.
Everyone in the neighborhood was out on the street–Kurds, Arabs, and
Turkomans, grouped by ethnicity. Tanks blocked the streets and
helicopters circled overhead as the Kurdish men, including Safar’s
older brother, were bound and taken away in buses. Safar and Namikh,
along with other Kurdish women and children, were loaded onto a
different set of buses and driven into the mountains, where they were
dropped off and told to walk north. As the two women walked, they
were bombed by aircraft overhead; several neighbors died in front of
them. Safar and her mother stayed at the Iranian border for three
months. When they ventured back to Kirkuk, their house–along with two
thousand others in their neighborhood–had been destroyed.
“Thank God, all I found was dust,” Safar said. “Thank God for our
safety.”
A staff lawyer was filling out a lengthy form for them. “Was the
house brick or clay?”
“Brick,” Safar’s mother said. “Finish, please. I’m sick, I can’t
wait.”
“Do you want to take the land, or do you want compensation?” the
lawyer asked.
“We want the land,” Safar said.
The lawyer wrote this down, and the fact that they needed money to
build a new house. “Why didn’t you go to the commission for people
with damaged houses in 1991?”
“I did,” the mother said. “I gave them an application, but they
didn’t give us anything.”
Ayob Shaker, an Arab man in his late thirties, came over and said
hello to the two women with a shy reserve. He had once been their
neighbor. On the day of the deportation, he had helped other Kurds in
the area load furniture on the buses. He was also a soldier in the
Republican Guard, and when he came back to Kirkuk from Baghdad after
the Americans had deposed Saddam he found a group of peshmerga,
including another former neighbor, occupying his house. Though
Kirkuk’s property-claims statute was amended recently to allow Arabs
displaced after the war to make claims as well, Shaker said that his
children had been threatened by the peshmerga, and he was afraid to
file for compensation.
“Believe me, nobody knows for sure, but mostly it’s the Kurds who are
running the city,” he said. “For me as an Arab, if I want a job I
have to get a paper from a Kurdish party saying I’m not a criminal.”
Chance had brought him to this office on the same day as the two
women he used to greet every morning on his way to work. He felt that
the very injustice he had once seen done to them was now befalling
him. “The same thing,” he said. “The government did it to them. The
peshmerga did it to us.”
The women agreed, and there was a moment of good feeling between the
old neighbors.
“Only God, and America, can solve the problem,” the Arab said.
What about the new Iraqi government? I asked.
“I don’t know,” the mother said. “Is there a government right now or
not?”
The staff lawyer finished filling out the form. The daughter smiled
and said, “I think there will be justice and our case will be
finished.”
I asked the Arab if there would be justice in Kirkuk. He hesitated.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s very difficult. Those who are now
in the city don’t understand each other. I am a son of Kirkuk”–an
original Arab–“and for thirty-five years nobody could hurt us. Now
I’m feeling upset, because of my house.”
I asked the women if Kurds would ever do to Arabs what Arabs had done
to Kurds. “No, they won’t do that,” the daughter said. “Believe me, I
swear to God they won’t do that.”
“They’ve done more than the Arabs,” Shaker said.
The daughter stiffened and eyed her former neighbor coldly. “How is
that?” she asked.
“I know one person who made half a tribe run away from their houses
in the city,” he responded.
The warm feeling was gone. The daughter pointed out that Shaker had
already forgotten what had happened to the Kurds in Kirkuk. Abruptly,
she excused herself and helped her mother out of the Iraq Property
Claims Commission.
Because Kirkuk isn’t yet the scene of open combat, the city remains a
hidden flaw in the broken Iraqi landscape. But what is now a local
dispute between neighbors will soon become one of the greatest
obstacles to making Iraq democratic and keeping it whole. In the
summer of 2003, I had a conversation with Barham Salih, who was then
the prime minister of the regional government in Suleimaniya. A
strong supporter of the American invasion and of Kurdish
participation in a democratic and federal Iraq, he was also mindful
of his constituents’ ingrained suspicion of Baghdad and their longing
for independence. For twelve years, Suleimaniya was one of the two
capitals of Iraqi Kurdistan, a de-facto independent state under the
protection of the Allied no-fly zone. A generation of Kurds grew up
speaking no Arabic and feeling no connection to Iraq–and the idea of
rejoining a country that not long ago visited genocide and ethnic
cleansing on Kurds is, understandably, a hard sell.
“I want to assure my kids and the new generations to come that the
new Iraq will be fundamentally different,” Salih said. “If the Arabs
of Iraq do not have the courage to come to terms with the terrible
past that we have had and make right those terrible injustices that
befell my people, I would have extreme difficulty convincing the
doubters in Suleimaniya’s bazaar that Iraq is our future.”
I went to see Salih again this past June in Baghdad, on his first day
as deputy prime minister of the newly sovereign Iraqi interim
government. After a year of occupation and insurgency, his mood was
darker, and his interpretation of the interim constitution on Kirkuk
was uncompromising. “The indigenous people of Kirkuk, the original
communities of Kirkuk, should be the ones who decide the fate of
Kirkuk–not those who were brought by Saddam or any outside power,” he
said. The imported Arabs were victims, too, “tools for a vile policy,
for Saddam wanted to create the environment for a permanent civil war
between Kurds and Arabs.” But, Salih added, “Kirkuk is not Bosnia,
and in fact the Kurdish leadership has demonstrated the utmost
restraint in the way that it has handled Kirkuk. In Bosnia, you’d
have seen civil war.”
I asked Rowsch Shaways, a Kurd and one of two vice-presidents in the
interim government, what would happen if the imported Arabs refused
to leave Kirkuk. Would they be loaded into trucks and driven south to
Basra and Kut?
“Well, there should be a continuous campaign to persuade them,” he
said.
Wouldn’t the attempt to force Arabs out of Kirkuk lead to reprisals
against Kurds living in Arab regions of Iraq? “No, it’s a different
situation,” he said. “Kurds who are living in the south, they were
coming here very normally, not through a campaign of changing
ethnicity.” After the effects of Saddam’s ethnic cleansing have been
reversed, “everybody can live where he wants,” Shaways said. “But
before that you have to reverse the unjust policy that was done to
strengthen the Baath Party and to change the ethnic composition of
some regions.” The Americans have waited too long to resolve the
problem of Kirkuk, he said, adding, “This is my opinion: Kirkuk is a
part of Kurdistan.”
Of the top Kurdish officials, I imagined that the person who would
find the question of Kirkuk most vexing was Bakhtiar Amin. He grew up
in Imam Qasim, a once beautiful Kurdish neighborhood near the
citadel, where homes with spiralled Ottoman columns have been allowed
to decay to the point of collapse. Amin and his family were expelled
from Kirkuk during Arabization; his relatives were jailed and
tortured. Amin, who is forty-six, lived in exile for years, working
as a human-rights activist in Europe and founding the International
Alliance for Justice. Now he is the first human-rights minister of a
sovereign Iraqi government. But, when we sat down in his spacious
Baghdad office to talk about justice in Kirkuk, Amin made it clear
that he was speaking as a Kurd.
After recounting the history of Kurdish oppression in great detail,
the minister warned me that the situation in Kirkuk was becoming
explosive. The Americans, who were overburdened by the daily chaos in
Baghdad, Falluja, and Najaf, “want to keep the calm there–the calm of
a cemetery.” Amin added, “It’s important not to be naïve with your
foes and Machiavellian with your friends. Patience has its limits for
victims as well.” The only solution, he insisted, was to return the
demography of Kirkuk to what it was before Arabization, and help
Arabs to resettle in the south.
I asked how he would answer an Arab youth who said, “Mr. Human Rights
Minister, Kirkuk is my home. I don’t have another. Why must I leave?”
Amin replied that he would introduce the young Arab to a young Kurd
who had lost his house and grown up in a tent, and whose brother or
sister had died of starvation or cold. He said that he would tell the
young Arab, “Your father, your mom, they are from a different area
and they came here and they took these people’s house, and this is
what they did to those children. And I will help you to have a decent
life where your parents came from.”
Earlier this year, Kurdish leaders had considerable success in
shaping the language of Iraq’s interim constitution, which enshrined
the rights of minority groups and envisioned a federalist republic
with significant regional autonomy. Over the past few months,
however, many Kurds have lost confidence in the effort to create a
unified Iraq. They are increasingly alienated from their American
allies, who always seem more ready to soothe the recalcitrant Arabs
than the dependable Kurds. Several Kurdish politicians told me that a
repetition of 1975, when the U.S. withdrew its support for the Kurds
and abandoned them to the Baathist regime, now seems entirely
possible. In May, the U.S. fuelled such suspicions when it yielded to
a demand of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and left out any mention
of the interim constitution in the U.N. Security Council resolution
that blessed Iraq’s restored sovereignty. When it became clear that
Kurds would get neither the Presidency nor the Prime Ministership,
Kurdish politicians, including Barham Salih, were so incensed that
they briefly withdrew from Baghdad to the north. On June 1st, the two
Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, sent a cri de
coeur to President Bush that was subsequently made public. “Ever
since liberation, we have detected a bias against Kurdistan from the
American authorities for reasons that we cannot comprehend,” they
wrote, and warned that if the interim constitution “is abrogated, the
Kurdistan Regional Government will have no choice but to refrain from
participating in the central government and its institutions, not to
take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of
the central government from Kurdistan.”
The episode had the feel of an extreme reaction born of extreme
experience, a kind of historical neurosis in which Iraq’s Kurds and
Arabs both are trapped. Samir Shakir Sumaidaie, a former Governing
Council member who was recently appointed Iraq’s Ambassador to the
U.N., said that he understood why the Kurds had reacted so strongly.
“I cannot blame a Kurd for feeling anger,” he said. “But I can plead
with him to contain his anger, because angry people often do stupid
things, and they end up hurting themselves. Arabs, on the other hand,
must acknowledge the injustice that has been done to the Kurds. By
acknowledging the injustice, you take the poison out of the system.
I’ve told this to Arabs in Kirkuk: we must admit what was done in the
name of Arab nationalism to the Kurds, and of which you were perhaps
the unwitting instrument.” The Kurds’ anger, he said, will cool only
when they begin to see justice done–“especially for the families that
suffered most in Kirkuk.” When Sumaidaie makes these arguments to his
fellow Iraqi Arabs, he told me, the response is grudging.
“Nationalism ignites nationalism,” Sumaidaie said. “I think we should
get away from nationalism and move toward humanism.”
On September 9th, Masoud Barzani escalated his rhetoric again,
saying, “Kirkuk is the heart of Kurdistan, and we are ready to wage a
war in order to preserve its identity.” A self-described Iraqi
liberal who is an official of the interim government told me that
more and more leaders are reacting to Kurdish threats with an
attitude of “good riddance.” Keeping the Kurds happy, they think,
might not be worth the cost. “The truth of the matter is, the Arabs
of this country–eighty per cent of the population–are getting tired
of these threats of secession,” he said. “And one day their answer
will be: ‘Secede.'”
Nevertheless, during several visits to Kirkuk, I kept meeting
citizens of every ethnicity who still wanted to live together and
were willing to surrender part of their own historical claim to the
city in order to coexist peacefully with other groups. The idea of a
multi-ethnic city, I realized, is not just a desperate piece of
cheerful public relations from American and British officials.
This summer, I met Muhammad Abbas, an Arab in his twenties, whose
family had moved to Kirkuk when he was six; his father had been sent
to the city to fulfill his military service. Abbas described the hurt
of losing Kurdish friends after the war. “I don’t want to leave,
because I’ve gotten used to this place, to the way of living here,”
he said. He had recently been detained overnight by Kurdish police
officials for having no ID card. “Maybe if this had happened during
Saddam’s time I would have been locked up for days,” he said. “And a
Kurd might have been tortured.” Abbas said he thought that Arabs and
Kurds could live together in Kirkuk if the politicians allowed them
to do so. “We’re human beings and they’re human beings,” he said. “In
my opinion, the city of Kirkuk–the Kurds have every right to it. They
have more rights in Kirkuk and they deserve Kirkuk. But still, we
can’t just go anywhere and leave the house. Where would we live?”
On the other side of town, in the neighborhood of Imam Qasim, I met a
young Kurdish engineer named Sardar Muhammad. He and his wife and
children share a small house with his two brothers and their
families. “If there had been no war, in fifteen years you would have
found no Kurds at all in Kirkuk,” he said. When the American invasion
seemed imminent, Muhammad went down into his basement and cut a
square out of the plaster wall, behind which there was a concealed
room. He planned to hide there if the Baathists started rounding up
young Kurdish men, as they had done in 1991. Instead, the Baathists
fled the city. Since the removal of Saddam, Muhammad’s family has
built a new outhouse and extended the kitchen, and they filled it
with new appliances. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money,”
Muhammad said. “But I wasn’t sure I would keep this house. I didn’t
know if I’d need the money in the future for food.” A few years ago,
his wife dropped out of school, because there was no chance for a
Kurdish woman who didn’t correct her nationality to find a job. After
the liberation, she reënrolled and obtained her degree. “Before, we
didn’t know when we’d be arrested or expelled,” Muhammad said. “Now
we have hopes for the future.”
As for the Arabs who had once enjoyed rights and privileges that were
denied his family, Muhammad was of two minds. It would be easier for
everyone if they left. “But their kids, when they’re born here,
there’s a kind of relationship to the land, and it’s not those kids’
fault that they’re in love with the place where they were born,” he
said. “It’s unfair for them to have to leave.” The only reason for
Kirkuk to join Kurdistan, he said, was that Arabs didn’t treat Kurds
fairly. If the new government in Baghdad could insure that all Iraqi
citizens would be treated equally, he would gladly live under its
flag instead of in Kurdistan.
Kirkuk has suffered inordinately from bad ideas, and the old ones
have engendered some that are new: the idea that the historical clock
can be turned back forty years, or that Iraq can be carved up among
its Sunni, Shia, and Kurds without enormous bloodshed and countless
individual tragedies. The weakest idea in Iraq may be the idea of
Iraq itself. As Barham Salih told me, “There is no Iraqi identity
that I can push my people to today. I want to have an Iraqi identity,
but it does not exist.” Samir Shakir Sumaidaie said, “To get away
from what Saddam did, where ethnic identity is what mattered most, to
a society where citizenship is what matters–that transition is not an
easy transition. We have to make it, though.”
The obsession with ethnic identity may be the ultimate legacy of
Saddam’s rule, his diabolical revenge on his countrymen. Nowhere can
this be more strongly felt than in Kirkuk. “Saddam is gone, but we’re
not through with him,” an Arab there said. “Even if he’s not here,
it’s like he planted problems for the future.”
On my last evening in Kirkuk, I went to see the citadel with Luna
Dawood. She wore high-heeled sandals; although her hair was
uncovered, she had pinned it up as a gesture of respect. She had
visited the citadel only once, in 1988; after the residents were
removed and the houses destroyed, she developed an aversion to the
place.
At sunset, we made our way through the souk, past little Kurdish
shops that sold bread, yogurt, and ancient-looking tools, and then we
followed an alley that led us to the top of the plateau. The citadel
spread out before us, a vast and nearly empty field of dirt and dead
grass and broken stones and scattered monuments. A pack of wild dogs
roamed menacingly, and the sole human inhabitants were an old
Turkoman and his family. They were squatting in the marble dwelling
of a long-departed imam. The Turkoman told us that he had once lived
in a house a few yards away. He brought his family back after the
liberation of Iraq, and somehow he had been allowed to stay. “This is
my original place,” he said. “I’m a poor man; I have nowhere to go.
Where should the poor man go?”
We crossed the field, toward an octagonal gold-and-blue tower that an
Ottoman pasha had built for his dead daughter, and the ancient clay
minaret of the Tomb of the Prophets. Dawood, who had been walking in
stunned silence, suddenly said of her fellow-Kirkukis, “They are
stupid. They destroyed their history.” At the far end of the citadel,
perched above the dead riverbed, was the abandoned house of the
Turkoman woman who sold shoes and purses in the souk. Behind it, the
orange ball of the sun was sinking. On one of the house’s walls,
someone had painted, “Long live the Turkomans–they are crowns on the
heads of the Kurds.” There was graffiti on other walls, too: “Kirkuk
is the heart of Kurdistan,” “The citadel of Kirkuk is the sign of the
Kurds,” and “The citadel of Kirkuk is a witness of its Turkomanness,
whatever the conditions.” On the courtyard wall of another
half-ruined house, someone had painted, “The Turkoman people are
brothers with the Kurdish people,” but someone else had painted over
“Kurdish people.”
“Ghosts are here,” Dawood murmured. “I can hear them in the night.
Under the ground, my mother said when we were children, there’s a
road from Kirkuk to Baghdad. Underground, there’s a door
somewhere–for people who wanted to escape Kirkuk.”
Her disquiet grew as we approached the Tomb of the Prophets. “This
isn’t the citadel I know. I told you, I came once before. But there
was a road, and people. I don’t even know where that road was.” She
said that she had come with three friends, one of them a Muslim,
after she had a dream about the prophet Daniel.
We stood before the entrance to the alleged tomb of Daniel and Ezra.
Down below, in the city, muezzins were beginning the evening call. I
went inside the bare chamber and waited for Dawood to follow, but at
the doorway she recoiled with a muted cry. I followed her out.
“It was gold!” she exclaimed. When she visited the shrine after her
dream, the tombs and walls had been covered in gold leaf; all of it
had been scraped off. “Now I’m feeling depressed,” Dawood said. “I
can see the difference between that time and this visit. I can’t feel
the holy mystery of the place. I’m even afraid to go inside.”
It was getting dark, and we started back. Dawood was silent again.
Just before the opening to a path that descended to the souk, there
was a square hole in the ground. She stopped. “I remember the well we
just saw. I remember there were trees. Now I’m remembering–I visited
this place as a child.”
Dusk had settled over the souk. The market stalls were closing up
amid the last calls of prices, and the sweepers were cleaning up the
day’s trash. Dawood spoke so quietly that she might have been a ghost
herself. “What is a human being worth, if they steal such a place?
Right now, being human means nothing to me. I’m very sorry you
brought me to this place. I shouldn’t have come.”