The Loom of Time, page 34
The geopolitics of it all were complicated in the extreme. Though Russia was supporting Assad against the Kurds, it was also using the Kurds and particularly the People’s Protection Units as a means to soften Erdoǧan’s Turkey, even as Russia was cooperating with Erdoǧan in other spheres. The United States, as we know, was backing the Kurds against ISIS, to the chagrin of Turkey.[11]
Again, on account of the sheer complexity of it all, we must regard the post–Cold War history of Kurdistan—or the northern part of the Fertile Crescent in Syria and Iraq—as a species of anarchy. Therefore, the struggle to forge coherent and responsive governance is particularly acute here.
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I arrived in the middle of the night in Sulaymaniyah, the main city of the eastern part of Iraqi Kurdistan, controlled by the Talabani clan. (The western part with the capital of Erbil is controlled by the Barzani clan.) The airport was a small and cramped shed-like structure that recalled to me airports in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. There was a grim makeshift quality to the place. Because flights to Sulaymaniyah often arrived in the middle of the night, the line at passport control was long and snaking. There was a separate line for changing money, needed in order to purchase visas at $70 in yet another line. I sensed an atmosphere of haggling and negotiation. But I reminded myself that except for places that unexpectedly descend into war or economic collapse, airport buildings and procedures tend to improve over time. Someone reading these words in a few years may well laugh and say, “That was then, before the nice airport was built.” Dawn was not far off by the time I located my luggage, escaped the scrum, and left the airport. I found a driver to take me to my hotel. The city had grown immensely since my last visit in 1986, more than a third of a century ago, when it was an overgrown and hilly village, a jumping-off point for visiting with Kurdish guerrillas fighting both Iraq and Iran. It was now raining lightly, and the roads were marked by puddles and potholes. The few sidewalks I saw were broken. Development was ever-present but ramshackle, except for the odd hotel, luxury goods store, and steak house, which were all spanking new and brilliantly lit like stars in the vacant black heavens. The obsessive urban planning that defined a place like Saudi Arabia was altogether absent. The hotel was a gleaming space-age tower, but the construction and interior decorating already betrayed the mark of coming decay. It was the only skyscraper in the city. The cash machine provided U.S. dollars rather than local Iraqi dinars, which, as I learned, were used interchangeably with dollars. You paid in dollars and got change in dinars, or vice versa. Credit cards were rarely accepted outside of a few hotels. This was a cash economy where your pockets bulged. What all these immediate first impressions suggested is that I was in a place in a very fragile phase of development: legally part of Iraq, functionally independent; legally a democracy, functionally divided between two clans.
I was also conscious of being in a rather remote, isolated place, notwithstanding the crosscurrents of dynamic change happening in so many other parts of the world. Kurdistan was not only landlocked among somewhat hostile neighbors all around, but also “sky-locked,” as one expert had put it to me before my arrival, since those same neighbors controlled the air access to Kurdistan that limited the number of flights here to a few, often arriving in the middle of the night.
Morning came and with it a dramatic view of domed mountains in all directions, naked and yellowy-gray in the early spring. Driving around town Sulaymaniyah suddenly appeared more normal and less intimidating than in the predawn hours, with some nicer storefronts and signage, and a more even pattern of development. I chided myself for my nighttime gloom. The signs were in English and Arabic script, though Kurdish, as I’ve said, is an Indo-European language closer to Persian than to Arabic.
The first place I visited was the national museum housed on the site of what had been an Iraqi torture center during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The nondescript building, divided into a seemingly endless jigsaw of damp gray prison cells, had once been packed with inmates, with no heat and very few toilet facilities. It was claustrophobic in the extreme. One’s imagination ran riot here, contemplating what exactly had happened in the long decades of the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the failed 1991 Kurdish uprising and massively violent Iraqi reaction, which led to a no-fly zone imposed by the United States against Saddam’s regime. One room had been inhabited by fifteen-year-old boys declared by the Iraqi authorities to be eighteen, so they could be legally executed. A boy had scrawled on a cement wall: “I am about to be executed by Ba‘athism.” There were also a series of rooms lined with thousands of mirrors and points of light, each one symbolizing one of the hundreds of thousands of Kurds massacred by “the Ba‘athist occupiers.” Kurdish schoolchildren silently crowded the museum during my visit, streams of them, looking intently at photos of the torture victims. This place was a real shrine to a certain tragic period in Kurdish history. In 1999, I had experienced the same level of communal memory, built on devotion to the dead, at the museum in Yerevan dedicated to the victims of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians. Outside on the museum grounds, Soviet-era tanks and artillery pieces, employed by Saddam against the Kurds, stood like rotting dinosaurs, as if they were centuries rather than decades old.
In the nearby parks of Sulaymaniyah, there were numerous statues of Kurdish poets from the past. Poets were revered here, another sign of collective memory. Modernity and the nationalism that accompanied it were ever-present in Sulaymaniyah. Traditional dress featuring hijabs, men’s scarves worn in the jamana style, and baggy trousers was generally confined to old people in the local bazaar with its teahouses and Persian-style mosque. Nevertheless, it became clear to me that I was in the midst of a very well defined nation without an identity crisis. The problem here, as I was about to learn, wasn’t identity or borders even. It was basic governance. After all, the cash economy coupled with the absence of credit cards meant that vast amounts of money could not be adequately traced.
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I was in a hip, elegant café in Sulaymaniyah, with soft jazz playing in the background. Men and women dressed in dark colors and wearing designer glasses were at tables alone, working with their computers. Here I conducted an interview with the president of the Middle East Research Institute, Dlawer AlaʽAldeen. Since he was based in Erbil, it was the first and only interview by Zoom that I conducted in all my journeys. He wore a jacket and tie and spoke with a British-trained accent: a learned academic who spoke with authority.
“The Kurdish region has fared well only when compared to the rest of Iraq,” he told me. “Ours is a different, lesser scale of failure. The rule of law is weak here but at least there are no armed non-state actors.” Iraq proper was a failed state, he and everyone else in Kurdistan would go on to tell me, consumed by an ethnic and sectarian spoils system in which meritocracy had little place. In Baghdad the prime minister was always a Shi‘ite, the speaker of the parliament a Sunni, and the president a Kurd, who each brought along convoys of ethnic compatriots into the government.
But AlaʽAldeen took no solace from this fact. “We in Kurdistan could have been at such a higher level of development, like Malaysia, for example, and ahead of Tunisia,” he said. “Instead we are like Lebanon,” an exceedingly brittle and immeasurably corrupt state. “The Kurds are experts at survival,” he went on. “But survival leaves little room for creativity and institution-building. The Talabani and Barzani clans for decades were state-destroyers, again, in order to survive against hostile surrounding forces. But now we have to build a state. We have no one to blame but ourselves for wasting much of the past twenty years since the American invasion of Iraq. We now have the legal protection provided by the Iraqi constitution. None of our neighbors, however bad their intentions, would stop us from separating the judiciary from the executive branch of government, for example. Instead, governmental structures in Kurdistan have evolved naturally, and that is a bad thing. There is a great danger in leaving the growth of a state to the law of nature,” he explained. “Building institutions and a separation of powers is the way out of nature. And institution-building does not necessarily equate with democracy. Institutions have to come first. Look at the success of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. They are not democratic but they work and there is the rule of law.” Indeed, to repeat, you could not escape from Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore anywhere in the Middle East. So many aspired to that model of development in which rule of law, dignity, and justice took precedence over elections.
But then AlaʽAldeen turned positive.
“We now have a civil society that never existed before. It started twenty years ago [after the American invasion], whereas in the rest of Iraq civil society is much more recent. Just look where you’re sitting now,” referring to the café that he saw in the background on his computer screen, which could not have existed without a measure of freedom and globalization. “Because of the spread of civil society the leaders and politicians have to play by new rules. They have to present themselves differently, and that leads them to adjust in other ways. The private sector is also expanding, and will eventually be less corrupt than it is now. There is no going backward here, given that security is not really an issue.”
His voice was not alone. As others would tell me, despite the apparent failures here, despite the unpaid salaries and the dead-broke refugees who had fled Iraqi Kurdistan, despite insufficient press freedom, and despite the squandered oil wealth, an emerging global civilization expressed through social media and the internet meant that the Loom of Time was perhaps slowly at work here, too.
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Nevertheless, Kurdistan’s problems could not be minimized.
Sarwar Abdulrahman was both an historian and a parliamentarian. His office offered a view of the dreary and cruddy sprawl that is Sulaymaniyah, so far from the pulsing neon and Plexiglass dynamism of even troubled East Asian societies like Malaysia, which Dlawer AlaʽAldeen had specifically mentioned as marking a level of development that Kurdistan should already have achieved. Abdulrahman was different in style than AlaʽAldeen, less sophisticated in dress and language, less international, but bearing a similar message.
“In a recent election only 30 percent of the people voted. Boycotting elections is the only means of protest, since both ruling families, the Barzanis and Talabanis, are deeply unpopular. After the American invasion, we learned that while one dictator went away, other smaller dictators came to take his place.” Here he mentioned not only the two ruling clans but also the brilliant and sophisticated Kurdish president of Iraq and former prime minister of Kurdistan, Barham Salih, whom foreigners were especially enamored of. Abdulrahman was not impressed, however, as Salih despite his international connections had made too little difference when he had been in power here, despite bringing an American university to Sulaymaniyah.
“We are just surviving, not developing,” Abdulrahman went on. “How can we develop when those in power are filling their pockets?” Then he spoke passionately about the many schools that badly needed renovation and the malls that had been built through cash payoffs. As for the new civil society, he said that even that requires better functioning institutions in order to make a difference. Nevertheless, unlike the disastrous Arab Spring in artificial territories like Syria and Libya, he said that “our people will not destroy order” because despite the different clans, there was still a real ethnic state here, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.
Was ethnicity enough to maintain order? I wondered. Egypt with its overwhelming Sunni Arab population still required a police state. So did Saudi Arabia, which also had relatively few broad-based ethnic or sectarian divisions, despite the various tribes and the Shi‘ites in the Eastern Province. Turkey might teeter following the end of Erdoǧan’s rule, I thought, and yet its Turkish-Kurdish divide might be only a small factor in its future instability. As for Kurdistan itself, it was surrounded by historical enemies, and the mountainous terrain did indeed help provide its people with a unique identity. But the further removed the persecutions of the Saddam era became, and the more plugged into a global culture its young people became, the less of a defense against disorder a singular ethnicity might provide its people. The state would have to deliver more in terms of honesty, efficiency, and development or there could be an explosion here, I thought. For Kurdistan clearly lacked the social contract between ruler and ruled that was so impressive to witness in Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf Arab states. I thought of the basic theme in the late Samuel Huntington’s classic work, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), which was that modernity produces tumult. As soon as one level of political and social development was reached, populations, which were always ungrateful, craved more privileges. Revolutions and uprisings were thus never-ending and woven into the fabric of history. A few years down the road, after the novelty of new personal freedoms wears off, the Saudi population might then demand political freedoms and less oppression. That’s why I felt, early in my visit, that I was surely seeing Kurdistan at a transitory moment. Since it was obvious to me, if history was any guide, that people here would not forever accept the status quo. And that was the key to the Loom of Time. It was another way of stating Huntington’s assertion about the permanence of change and upheavals, peaceful and otherwise. To suggest that the Arab Spring failed and that was that, well, this misjudged the meaning of history, which was that other risings would surely come, in different forms, subtle and not, and may already be under way. Meanwhile, all I could do was listen to people here. And if I heard the same thing repeatedly, it might mean that I was on the right track.
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Zmkan Ali Saleem was the program director of the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University in Sulaymaniyah. He had been studying Iraq firsthand for decades. When I told him that I was searching for middle grounds of governance in the Greater Middle East, between anarchy and tyranny, he interrupted:
“In Iraq there is still no middle ground, particularly in Baghdad. Various political groups, militias, patronage networks buy off the government in a very unstable, violent system which fails to provide even security and basic services to the population. That, in turn, has led to resentment and never-ending protests. As for Kurdistan, it is a duopoly composed of the Barzani-run Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP] and the Talabani-run Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK]. The level of corruption is extreme, as oil and other business revenues are used to buy patronage networks. The KDP is stronger and less fragmented than the PUK, since its power is concentrated in the hands of fewer people. When you get to Erbil, run by the KDP, you will see how wealthier, more developed, and organized it is, compared to Sulaymaniyah, run by the PUK, which gets fewer services and less of the oil revenue.”
He explained that this bleak situation had gone on for over three decades—not since the American invasion of 2003, but ever since the First Gulf War of 1991. The aftermath of the 1991 war had led to the no-fly zone over northern Iraq, resulting in Saddam withdrawing his forces from the region. That led to the infusion of international NGOs and massive Turkish aid, as Turkey decided to work with the Barzanis and Talabanis against Abdullah Öcalan’s PKK.
“It is fascinating to watch,” he went on, “how a restricted circle of clan leaders, who have failed to build a real state, can restrain an entire population for three decades. In Kurdistan the duopoly acts with impunity.”
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“This place is like Disneyland: strange, funny, ironic,” said Hiwa Osman in a playful but at the same time serious tone. I was in another café that might have been in Paris or Manhattan, with young people in small groups or alone with their computers. The only thing that might have identified it as Kurdistan was that everyone was smoking. Osman was a journalist and intellectual. He also made the point that Kurdistan should be at a much higher level of development, instead of being a sleepy “kleptocracy” with desultory protests by teachers and civil servants achieving little, as though they were carrying out obligatory exercise in a prison yard. You couldn’t open a small business without making payoffs. Even though $10 billion in oil revenue came in annually as part of an agreement with Iraq, and the United States and the countries of the European Union paid for the military and a plethora of donor projects, it was still hard to say where all the money ended up.
“Look,” he said, “Sulaymaniyah is a place where practically every family has shed blood over the decades for the country’s independence. Everyone feels like they have paid a price for freedom. Yet there is still no social contract like in the states of the Arabian Gulf where no one has paid a price for their prosperity. Kurdistan,” he continued, “is a place of general apathy. Voter turnouts aren’t 30 percent. They’re actually below 20 percent. Yes, there are free elections, but no accountability, while the men with guns rule. Is democracy the best system for everyone? It is an interesting question.”
He then spoke about the PUK region of eastern Kurdistan, reinforcing what others had told me. Even when the grand old man of local politics and former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani was alive, the PUK was a nest of powerful little men and various factions surrounding the leader, who governed “PLO-like” in the corrupt manner of Yasser Arafat. It was just so hard to get anything administrative done here, the reason why Sulaymaniyah languished. When I told him my impressions of the airport, he nodded his head in agreement. Even allowing for the mass killings of the Saddam regime, Osman said that “in terms of services—schools, hospitals, public transportation—Saddam was better.” Saddam, he told me, would make an unannounced visit to a hospital, select a patient arbitrarily, and if that patient was not being properly attended to, “Saddam would just execute the hospital administrator.” It was altogether brutal. Such a regime might have collapsed in mass bloodshed during the Arab Spring much like Syria’s, had George W. Bush not toppled it in 2003. But it had its benefits compared to the current situation. As for the future here, Osman did not think that liberalism was necessarily the reigning aspiration of the majority of young people. “The mosques on Fridays are packed with poor youth, the ones you don’t see in these cafés, who are susceptible to ideology. Political Islam is one possible future for Kurdistan. Don’t count it out.”
