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Constructing Kurdistan: Why shouldn't Iraq become a bi-national fed?

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  • Constructing Kurdistan: Why shouldn't Iraq become a bi-national fed?

    Constructing Kurdistan
    Why shouldn't Iraq become a bi-national federation?



    Dr. Brendan O'Leary, the Lauder Professor of Political Science and
    director of Penn's Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical
    Conflict, is working until the summer as a constitutional advisor to
    the Kurdistan Regional Government. His office is in the Kurdistan
    National Assembly at Hewlr, as it is known in Kurdish, or Erbil, as it
    is called by Arabs and Turks. Together with Khaled Salih and John
    McGarry he is editing The Future of Kurdistan for the University of
    Pennsylvania Press.

    In the first of three letters, O'Leary describes his impressions ofthe
    Coalition Provisional Authority's conduct. His next letter will focus
    on Kirkuk; the last will focus on the nature of Kurdistan.

    By Brendan O'Leary


    One of the purposes of Penn's Solomon Asch Center is to assist in the
    reduction of national and ethnic conflict, which is why I accepted the
    invitation to act as a constitutional advisor to the Kurdistan
    Regional Government and the Kurdistan National Assembly. My brief is
    to advise on federation, power-sharing, electoral systems, the
    protection of minorities,and the planned transitional law.

    The Kurdistan entity currently comprises four million people, mostly
    Kurds, but also small numbers of Turkomen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and
    Arabs. It was established in strange circumstances after the 1991 Gulf
    War. The United States and the United Kingdom had just failed to
    support the Kurds' uprising against Saddam Hussein-though they had
    encouraged it. Saddam's bloody revenge prompted a mass Kurdish exodus
    from Iraq that was only halted when international public opinion
    forced the U.S. and the U.K. to create a `safe haven' and a `no fly
    zone' in what was misleadingly called `northern Iraq.=80=9D The safe
    haven eventually led to an autonomous Kurdish government, shielded
    from Saddam, but without formal international recognition.

    The territory of Kurdistan in Iraq is less than the full region where
    Kurds are-or have been-demographically dominant, and less than the
    unit that Saddam Hussein was willing to concede during autonomy
    negotiations with Kurdish leaders between 1970 and 1974.

    `Actually existing Kurdistan' is also much smaller than =80=9CGreater
    Kurdistan.' The latter is the dream of the wider Kurdish nation. It
    describes the entirety of `the land of the Kurds' under the Ottoman
    Empire that was partitioned after World War I. It was entirely
    digested by four consumers: Turkey, Iran, and the new inventions of
    Syria and Iraq (then respectively under the control of the French and
    British empires). European decolonization of the Middle East after
    World War II left the Kurds as the largest nation in the Middle East
    without a state of their own. Since then Kurds have been subjected to
    coercive assimilation and expulsion by the four governments that have
    attempted to digest them, and to genocidal assaults by both Turkish
    and Iraqi governments; and both British and American governments have
    betrayed commitments they gave to successive Kurdish parties,
    especially the Kurds of Iraq.

    Erbil, the place from which I write, was a sea of tranquility by
    comparison with the rest of the former Iraq-until February 1 of this
    year, when the headquarters of the two main parties, the Kurdistan
    Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, were destroyed
    by suicide bombers, leaving over 100 people dead. Among those killed
    was Sami Abudulrahman, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Regional
    Government and the Secretary of the KDP, a man with whom I worked, and
    whom I deeply admired. The impact of these bombings on the local
    population has been similar to the impact of September 11 in the
    U.S. Our negotiating team is still recuperating from our deep losses.



    `Well sir, I wouldn't start from here,' is the response attributed to
    the proverbial Irishman interrogated on the right road to take. True
    to my national origins, that's the first advice I would give American
    and British officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of
    Iraq, and their overseers in Washington and London.

    The CPA is bunkered inside Saddam's major palace, more insulated from
    the surrounding societies than the ousted dictator was. It rapidly
    dissipated the goodwill the Coalition enjoyed in liberating Iraq's
    Arabs, Kurds, Chaldo-Assyrians, Turkomen, Muslims, Christians,
    Yazidis, and Jews from Saddam and his party, the Ba'athists.

    The CPA's officials mostly can't speak Arabic, but their decrees are
    translated into Arabic. They do not even attempt to have their
    regulations translated into Kurdish, though it is the mother-tongue of
    between a fifth and a third of the former Iraq's population. Soldiers,
    KRG officials, and NGO personnel tell me that the CPA's officials
    spend more time signing and being lobbied for contracts than in
    evaluating their merits. The American Army has a counter-insurgency
    program in Arab regions, especially Sunni Arab dominatedregions; the
    best that can be said of it is that it is producing more results than
    the search for weapons of mass destruction. Judging by their published
    or leaked outputs, the CPA has spent little time seriously reflecting
    on constitutional reconstruction or design.

    British officials of the CPA play to their national stereotypes:
    scoffing at Americans' alleged naÃ'veté behind their backs,
    but otherwise displaying full deference towards the world's
    hegemon. They think they have superior wisdom; it' s true that they
    are more accustomed to govern other peoples. The other members of the
    `coalition of the willing' play symbolic rather than substantive
    roles: Denmark, for example, has 200 troops in Iraq, rehabilitating
    buildings in Basra. The `coalition' moniker adds a veneer of
    internationality to what is in fact government by `the special
    relationship' that the British always want, to the mild embarrassment
    of the Americans. Yet there is nothing special about the caliber of
    their joint governance. The British are usually a week behind their
    American colleagues, holding loyal to a policy line that has often
    just been re-appraised, unknown to them, in Washington.

    The CPA is mocked even by its own officials as Can't Provide
    Anything. It veers between the options preferred by different factions
    in the Republican administration in Washington: those who want a
    sustainable democratic and liberal reconstruction of the former Iraq,
    and diverse others, mainly in the State department and the CIA, who
    are bent on no more than achieving presentable` stability,' securing
    America's perceived material interests, placating Turkey, a quick
    exit, and handing any outstanding embarrassments to that convenient
    scapegoat known as the United Nations.

    The one achievement of American crisis management that is apparent to
    me is that American TV and Web-pages regularly count only the daily
    American military war dead-and not the daily toll of local civilians
    killed by all agents to the conflict.

    The CPA has created a Governing Council which does not govern, and
    does not act as a council. Its business is conducted in Arabic. Its
    internal procedures are chaotic and opaque, and its resolutions are
    frequently vetoed by =80=9CThe Administrator,' as L. Paul Bremer III
    is officially styled. He is said often to remind the Council before it
    begins `deliberations,' through a translator, that he has this veto
    power. He is said to be tough, but insensitive. Visiting Kurdistan, he
    asked, `Who is that?' on seeing the ubiquitous portrait of Mustafa
    Barzani. This would be analogous to a foreign diplomat visiting
    America and asking `Who is that?' on seeing a portrait of George
    Washington. As I write, he has not yet vetoed an outrageous resolution
    (passed at the end of December in the absence of representatives from
    Kurdistan) repealing secular marital laws that benefit women in favor
    of chauvinist propositions from the Shari'a, presumably because he
    does not want to hand an issue to Islamists.

    There are two merits to the Governing Council. One is that it contains
    the embryo of an authentic collective presidency, an institutional
    arrangement that might serve a future federation quite well. But given
    its overly large composition (25 members plus 25 substitutes), and its
    poorly defined relationships to the CPA and 25 `ministries' in
    Baghdad, it does not resemble a functioning executive. The second
    merit is the attempt to make it representative=80'in the absence of
    the possibility of well-administered elections-of the peoples of the
    former Iraq. Shi'a Arabs (13 councilors) and Sunni Arabs (five)
    andKurds (five) are on the council in rough approximations to their
    estimated demographic shares, and smaller minorities (two) are also
    present. But only three womenwere appointed by The Administrator, and
    one of them has been assassinated=80'and not replaced.

    There was little evidence that the Shi'a or Sunni councilors were
    politically representative when they were appointed, though the
    perceived power of some them has since grown. The most powerful Shi'a,
    Iranian-born Ayatollah Sistani, sits at home issuing fatwas-to which
    Governing Council members and Americans feel obliged to respond. The
    leaders of the two largest Kurdish parties, Massoud Barzani and Jallal
    Tallabani, by contrast, represent organizations that have won the
    lion's share of past votes in Kurdistan. The exiled politicians, Arab
    refugees from Saddam's rule, initially brought in to guide the CPA are
    seen, however unfairly, as collaborators.

    The CPA's staff, in the absence of any deep knowledge of the societies
    they are charged to govern, and lacking any well-grounded advice from
    representative politicians among the Arabs, operate as if they are in
    America-on the presumption that a future Iraq should want to be like
    the America they think they know. They say that `All should be
    Iraqis,' just as =80=9CWe are all Americans.' They insist that Iraq
    is, or at least should be, a nation, when it is just the remnants of a
    state. They make the standard error of students starting Political
    Science 001, confusing state and nation (a state is a sovereign
    independent territory; a nation is a community with a shared political
    identity). Iraq has never been a nation. The Ba'athist regime tried to
    make Iraq one nation, an Arab nation. Arabization included expelling
    Kurds from Kirkuk, moving Arab settlers from the south to the north,
    and genocidal poison gassing. Kurds, a different nation by history,
    language and dialects, customs and mores, resisted. Iraq is mainly
    bi-national, and no future constitution that fails to respect this
    reality will be feasible.

    CPA officials think that Iraq should have a federation like
    America=80=99s, ` non-ethnic' and symmetrical-that is with each region
    being identical in powers. They forget that in the development of
    America's so-called non-ethnic federation, political care was taken to
    ensure that each new state had a white, English-speaking
    majority. Trying an analogous model in the former Iraq is a recipe for
    armed conflict with Kurdistan. Nevertheless, Mr. Bremer proposed a
    model of an 18 `governorate' federation, based on the provinces of
    Saddam Hussein, which would effectively have abolished Kurdistan's
    integrity. In return, he received `a flea in his ear,' as we Irish put
    it, from the Kurd leaders.

    The largest rump of the former Iraq, demographically and
    territorially, was Arab Iraq. It was the site from which the worst
    organized racial and religious bigotry, and grossest abuse of human
    rights, were organized by the Ba=80=99athists. By contrast,
    Kurdistan, a smaller location, was the site of the most promising
    experiments in democratic governance and decent treatment of ethnic,
    religious, and linguistic minorities in the 1990s, though it was not
    without its own internal conflicts.

    Given these realities, and the fact that Kurdistan's soldiers fought
    alongside the Coalition's forces, one would think that a top priority
    of CPA officials would be to protect a better-run region from an
    overly strong central government. But not so far. The Administrator,
    judging by his November-January proposals, thinks that Iraq's
    federation should be even more centralized than America 's. Of course,
    his and the CPA's centralist dispositions donot just flow from
    misapplication of lessons from American history. Three other
    imperatives matter.

    One stems from the management of the black gold: oil. Despite the
    well-validated criticism of centralized rentier-oil regimes as recipes
    for despotism, corruption, or both, the CPA believes that a
    well-managed federal government with monopoly jurisdiction over oil
    production and its revenues is the best administrative model
    available. A conservative economist willing to confirmthe validity of
    this belief should be genetically engineered.

    The ugly truth is that the attempted promotion of a centralized
    `federation,' including the centralized control of oil and natural
    resources, is motivated by a second imperative: an ill-considered
    effort to appease both indigenous Arab Iraqi and wider Arab public
    opinion. That policy, so the thinking goes, will coerce Kurdistan's
    re-integration into Iraq-instead ofletting it extend its jurisdiction,
    and therefore its tax-base, to Kirkuk (on which more in my next
    letter).

    This appeasement policy creates tension within Washington. Those who
    want the full-scale reconstruction of Iraq as a liberal democracy know
    that building on Kurdistan as it is, or as it might fairly be
    expanded, makes the most sense; whereas those who prioritize breaking
    the Ba'athist resistance and the Al-Qaeda-related pan-Arab networks,
    or who are anxious for a quick exit, want to minimize the difficulties
    with Arab public opinion. Their focus is often on America's electoral
    clock.

    Kurdish analysts of contradictions note that America does not in
    general appease Arab opinion in and over Palestine, but rather sides
    with Israel, an ethnic and religiously defined state, as its
    democratic ally. Yet, as the occupying power in Iraq, they think
    America is inclined to sell-out its democratic allies in
    Kurdistan. And they find it remarkable that America accuses them of
    trying to create an ethnic entity and seeks to calm those inclined to
    support Ba' athists, Shi'a fundamentalists, and the terrorists who
    organized September 11.

    The last imperative that inclines the CPA towards re-centralizing Iraq
    is its officials' deference towards Turkey, the neighboring state that
    still practices coercive assimilation, and still criminalizes requests
    for education in Kurdish. Turkey has acknowledged neither the
    historical genocide of the Armenians, nor its own genocidal actions
    against `its' Kurds-until recently officially known as `mountain
    Turks.' Turkey is attempting to build a homogenized nation-state
    around a Turkish ethos and ethnos. Its officials tell you that
    terrorism by the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party of Turkey) is `the
    real problem,' and that a federal Iraq will expand the ambition and
    range of Kurdish terrorists. The PKK is indeed a problem, though its
    existence and conduct are a predictable reaction to the state it has
    raged against. But the PKK is not in any manner supported by the
    Kurdistan Regional Government, nor by the two major parties in what
    Turkey calls `northern Iraq'-what we here call Kurdistan.

    Turkey's external relations with its neighbors on ethnic matters are
    perhaps the exemplary case of national egoism in our world. Its
    politicians vary between demanding the recognition of its puppet
    protectorate, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or insisting
    that any unified Cypriot federation protects its co-ethnics in their
    unit, with their own clear majority. But this ethnic stance on Cyprus
    does not stop Turkey from having the gall to protest against Kurds in
    the former Iraq allegedly constructing an `ethnic unit=80=9D in a
    future federation. The CPA defers to Turkish rhetoric, saying, in
    English or through Arabic translators, that it does not want an ethnic
    federation. Kurds replyby saying that they do not want an ethnic
    federation but one that recognizes nationality.

    It is disappointing that the culturally blinkered predispositions of
    the CPA are reinforced by recent erroneous `wisdom' in American
    political science, one that counsels against `ethnic federations'
    (which is how some denigrate Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, and
    India). It does not follow, of course, that because some bi- or
    multi-national federations have failed that all must doso- just as
    mono-national federations like that of the U.S.A. are not guaranteed
    export successes (see, for example, the history of much of Latin
    America).

    Successful multi-national or bi-national federations are the products
    of voluntary pacts, created by negotiation, and combine both effective
    self-government for nations in their territories and power-sharing for
    all within the federal government. What is there to be afraid of in
    such a vision?

    At Penn I tease students by confronting them with the suggestion that
    the state they know least about is Canada, and by claiming that if the
    political-science wisdom now prevalent in America was right, then
    Canada should not exist. As my friend Professor John McGarry of the
    Queens University Ontario observes, the Canadian federation is a
    bi-national and bi-lingual federation; it has a distinctive society in
    Quebec, both in its legal system and in its ethos, but it divides up
    English Canada symmetrically; it permits asymmetry in the powers and
    policy decisions of its provinces; it leaves the provinces in charge
    of natural resources but has formulae for revenue-sharing; since its
    foundation it has had no civil war; it has survived as long as the
    U.S.A. has survived since its civil war.

    In short, the CPA's Americans shouldn't start from an American
    template, and its British officials, heirs to the inventors of Iraq,
    would benefit from humility. They might reflect more vigorously on
    democracies that are not part of the coalition-for example, Belgium,
    Switzerland, and Canada. India too, from which the British once sought
    to govern Iraq, might inform intelligent thinking on the management of
    a postcolonial multi-ethnic state. The Administrator has sought to
    preclude such discussion of alternative models of federation before
    the creation of a transitional law-though he acknowledges that sucha
    law will bias the eventual institutional outcomes.

    By the time I write my next letter I hope he and his team will have
    stopped trying to tell others where to go. It is they who are here on
    sufferance, alienating their friends and encouraging their
    enemies. They say they want to go, and to return sovereignty to
    `Iraqis' by the summer. The hotel near where I am writing is the
    `northern' post of the CPA. It is completelybooked by its staff for
    the next three years. Was that an error in the contract?

    Look for Brendan O'Leary's future letters from Iraq in the`Gazetteer'
    section in May/June and July/August.


    © 2004 The Pennsylvania Gazette
    Last modified 02/27/04
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