In the New Iraq, Symbols Matter

By: Dr. David Romano

April 24, 2005

For the first time in its history, Iraq freely elected a president this week.  Also for the first time, that president is Kurdish.  Jalal Talabani heads the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and for most of the fifty odd years of his political life he lived as a peshmerga rebel, fighting the government in Baghdad from mountain hideouts in Iraqi Kurdistan.  Now, Saddam Hussein and other former Ba’athist leaders watch the television images of Talabani’s swearing in ceremony from their prison cells.

Although the post of President is largely ceremonial, the symbolism of a rebel leader of the formerly oppressed Kurdish minority of Iraq taking up the post matters a great deal. To date, Iraqi government leaders have done an admirable job avoiding sectarian conflict and trying to minimize inter-ethnic animosity.  Elevating a Kurd to the post of President and a Sunni to Speaker of Parliament helps.  The security problems and insurgency in Iraq will eventually be contained, but the unity and identity of the country may well prove to be a more intractable problem.

The proportion of Kurds and Arabs in Iraq is comparable to anglophones and francophones in Canada.  Just as many Quebeckers focus on their past colonization, oppression, and expulsions by the English, Iraqi Kurds have a much more recent list of abuses to cite, including attempted genocide and the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages in 1988.  A much larger percentage of Iraqi Kurds than Quebeckers also appears to want to separate and form their own country – it’s even quite difficult to find anyone in Iraqi Kurdistan who wouldn’t ideally prefer to secede their region from Iraq, if it weren’t for the threat of civil war and invasion from neighbouring Turkey, Syria and Iran.

In Canada, Pierre Trudeau’s solution to the threat of separatism was to refashion the country in genuinely multicultural ways, elevating the French language to an equal footing with English everywhere possible.  His speeches and those of Prime Ministers after him jumped back and forth from English to French, and virtually no opportunity was missed by the federal government to remind Quebeckers that Canada was their country as well, just as French as it was English.

Since the fall of Saddam’s regime, however, too many easy opportunities were missed to adopt similar symbols of inclusiveness and multiculturalism in Iraq.  It took a huge voter turnout and extremely difficult bargaining for the Kurds to get one of their own elevated to the ceremonial post of President. There remains much too much resistance from Arab Iraqis to many of the gestures of inclusiveness towards Iraqi Kurds that we know so well in federations such as Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, however.

Iraqi central government pronouncements and publications still occur exclusively in Arabic, and even the new Iraqi Dinar has only Arabic writing on it.  The cost of adopting the Canadian approach and printing the new currency in Arabic and Kurdish would have been negligible, but the symbolic impact on Iraq’s Kurdish population would have been monumental – no Kurd alive today (in Iraq or in Syria, Turkey and Iran, where they also form a large minority) has ever seen state currency with Kurdish language writing on it.  For most of the twentieth century, the Kurdish language was in fact effectively banned or banished from public discourse in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria.

At the same time, Arab Iraqis continue speaking of the “Arab state of Iraq.”  Iraqi Kurds, who do not consider themselves Arab, hear this and reason that nothing has changed in the mentality that underlay the Iraqi state since the beginning.  In Canada, we have only to imagine what francophones’ reaction would be to pronouncements about the “English state of Canada.”  In fact, only Quebec sovereignists speak in these terms today.

Recently, municipal government officials in the contested city of Kirkuk also held a press conference with many foreigners and U.S. officials present.  The majority of Kirkuk’s municipal government is Kurdish (another election result, with a contentious census of Kirkuk still on the horizon for later this year), and these officials made the unexpected decision to conduct their proceedings in Kurdish.  As Americans and other foreigners scrambled to replace their Arabic translators with Kurdish ones, Arab Iraqis grumbled loudly or walked out.  One stated “I don't object to Kurdish, but the language used should be understood by all members.”  The incident reminded me of a remark that a Université de Montréal constitutional law professor once made to me: “If Quebeckers didn’t insist on conducting much of their federal government business in French, the language would be ignored and struggles about its status lost.”

A final example of symbolic opportunities missed in Iraq relates to the country’s flag: Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (Jalal Talabani’s main rival for leadership of Iraqi Kurds), demanded last year that the flag be changed.  He stated that he could not fly the flag that adorned the military units responsible for massacring hundreds of thousands of his people, and the red, white and black colours of the flag were Arab nationalist colours.  The Interim Governing Council agreed to his request and designed a new flag, which to this day remains unused.  The only specimen I ever saw was for sale in a shop in Iraqi Kurdistan, and I now wish I had bought it, since it will likely become a rare collector’s item.

So while Talabani sets up his Presidential office in Baghdad, Barzani has decided to remain in the mountains of northern Iraq as head of the Kurdistan Regional Government.  Only the Kurdish national flag flies from Barzani’s buildings.  The two leaders represent the Kurds’ ambiguous position in the new Iraq – one foot in the center of national politics, and the other in the mountainous north, ready to try and separate if it turns out that for Iraq, plus ça change, plus c’est pareil…

David Romano

DND Post-Doctoral Fellow, McGill University

Senior Research Fellow, Montreal Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies

Ph.D. University of Toronto

E-mail: dromano@chass.utoronto.ca