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Of Halabja, the Kurds, and American Politics

By: Dr. Sabah Salih

November 26, 2004

Each of the many tombstones in this football-size cemetery bears a cluster of names.  There are families of three, five, six, or even seven.  There are little brothers and sisters, young mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.  There are the Kawas, Azads, Rizgars, as well as the Sheerns, Chinars, and Ronaks, and many others.  These ordinary names address you in silence, bit by bit telling their stories.  March was at its peak, having transformed the hilly landscape into a kaleidoscope of translucent greens, reds, yellows, and whites.  Snow had melted from the nearby mountain slopes but the peaks were still brilliantly white. Two brothers were playing with a toy car they themselves had fashioned out of scrap metal left behind by the army.  A young mother was breastfeeding her three-month-old while her two-year-old slept peacefully at her side.  A grandmother was making the rounds in the neighborhood in search of listeners for her usual litany of complaints against old age.  A grandfather, bedridden by a stroke, was counting his blessings, having all those obedient grandchildren for company.   For these, and for many others, life suddenly stopped.

No, nature was not to blame.  This was the work of man—an Arab man, a Muslim man too. In fuller detail, a museum near the cemetery tells these people’s stories.  The simple mud houses are intact.  The occupants’ basic belongings are still there.  There are also the animals, the chickens, the ducks, and the geese.  There are dozens of cheap rubber shoes strewn around, men’s in black, women’s and children’s in bright blues, reds, and yellows.  They had sat down for lunch, a simple meal of yogurt and bread and hot tea.  This was to be their last meal.  No more laughter, no more cries, no more dreaming.  Unknown to them, a silent killer was on the loose—a killer like nothing they had seen before, a killer that even nature did not have anything like it in its arsenal. Some five thousand lives would perish.  It would be the end as well for the birds and animals. Brooks and the streams would become deadly. 

The unspeakable horrors confront you the moment you enter the museum: mothers and children in a tight embrace, fathers desperately trying to shield small children from something they had no idea what it was.  It was something so unusual, so unexpected; it was something the world had made a solemn promise after Hiroshima not to use again.  But now the world was caught off guard a second time.  This time around the culprit was an Arab man, a Muslim man.  For his monstrous action he had found justification in the Koran; he even named it after a verse from the book: Anfal. 

In that year, 1988, Halabja made the headlines.  The scenes were too horrific to be ignored.  But the spin almost immediately began.  Arab League representative at the time, Clovis Maqssoud, briskly made the rounds in Washington and New York, first, denying that the attack had even occurred and, then, when confronted with the evidence, rushed blindly to defend Saddam.  The pattern was repeated throughout much of the Arab and Muslim regions, where Israel and the West were, once again, roundly condemned for conspiring to defame an Arab ruler.  Elsewhere, the Turks, always at the ready to try and defame anything Kurdish, described the chemical attack as much ado about nothing.  Much of Europe didn’t want to be bothered either; everyone was after the mighty dollar and Saddam had plenty to spare.  America under Ronald Reagan was in this too.  After a gentle slap on the wrist, Iraq’s Tariq Aziz left George Shultz’s State Department a satisfied man. 

Then came Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and, suddenly, Halabja was here, Halabja was there, Halabja was everywhere.  Halabja was now repackaged to provide moral justification for London and Washington’s decision to evict Saddam from Kuwait by force. For George Bush senior Halabja was proof that Saddam was worse than Hitler.  For Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Halabja was proof why the world needed to keep Saddam in a box and why the world needed to be continuously wary of his intentions.  In the end Saddam was cut down to size but was left in power, something the dictator rightly interpreted as a nod from London and Washington that the fuss over Halabja was just a fuss and not much else. Shortly afterwards, when the regime went on a killing spree against the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, both London and Washington kept their distance from Halabja, preferring now to describe events in Iraq as a largely internal affair.  Then came Bill Clinton’s turn to have his way with Halabja.   Portraying himself as a man of peace, Clinton nonetheless felt a need to periodically bomb Saddam, now openly thumbing his nose at America. Once again, Halabja was conveniently called upon to provide the moral justification.  The affable Bill Cohen, Clinton’s second defense secretary, after one such bombing, chose Halabja’s most potent image—a dead man lying face down on the door step of his home holding a baby in his arm—to quash the rising anti-war rhetoric. Halabja, in a classic case of appropriation, was now made to serve a non-Kurdish agenda. 

More recently, in the run-up for the current war in Iraq, demand for Halabja soared.  It now occupied the center stage in the Bush administration’s moral argument for going after Saddam.  This was not entirely bad for Halabja.  Bush gave it a voice, legitimacy, and recognition.  For that the Kurds were understandably grateful.  But something big was left out of Halabja: it’s Kurdishness.  Halabja was now offered as proof of Saddam’s determination to acquire and use chemical weapons.  But sadly Halabja as part of a wounded nation’s struggle against successive Arab tyrannies was largely left out—a strategy Colin Powell repeated at Halabja itself during his September 2003 visit; at the opening of the museum, Powell delivered a speech that was designed to undercut rather than promote Kurdish nationalism.  He portrayed Halabja as a largely Iraqi, not a Kurdish, affair.  The Turks, the Iranians, and the Syrians, not surprisingly, were gratified.

Then, as the American presidential race got into full swing, Halabja was pushed aside.  For many in the John Kerry camp, the very mention of Halabja was tantamount to an oath of allegiance to Bush and the Republican Party.  In some quarters, Halabja would even get the standard Michael Moore response—a lie, the whole thing was a lie, and you know it,” followed by, “ Who the Kurds? You mean, Bush’s stooges?”  If there was one thing the Kerry campaign succeeded in solidifying, it was this willful disregard for Kurdish suffering.  Eager to be seen trying to build bridges with the Arab and Islamic worlds, John Kerry felt a need to impose a tight embargo on the Kurdish narrative.

The actual villain, indeed, for Kerry was not the man responsible for genocide against the Kurdish people but Bush and his policies.  Kerry never got tired of reminding what he called “Middle Class America” that the effort to oust the dictator was “the wrong war at the wrong time.”  In doing so, Kerry brought considerable harm to the Kurdish cause.  Kerry’s rhetoric, by refusing to make statements about Saddam’s horrendous crimes against the Kurdish people, invalidated the horrors of Halabja for his supporters, turning a killing field into a mere footnote of no significance.  To be critical of Bush, for Kerry simply meant to be uncritical of Saddam. For the Kurds, this was like sending icicles down their throat.

For their part, the Republicans, forced by circumstance to take up much of the traditionally leftist vocabulary of liberation and democracy and big government, have been a little more forthcoming in giving the Kurdish narrative a hearing—but only when suiting their purposes. And now that the elections are over and Condoleezza Rice is taking over the State Department, there is hardly any mention of the Kurds.  The anti-Bush camp, smarting from its defeat, is too busy trying to figure out how to win in 2008 than to worry about the fate of a people it treated with cold indifference. And the administration, buoyed by the Republican victory, is in no mood to listen to anyone but its own voices. 

The result has been a situation where the majority of pundits and academics who opposed the intervention in Iraq in the first place are now trying to rehabilitate Saddam and portray his regime as the real victim. Fascist butchers are being hailed as the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers, and as Christopher Hitchens writes in “Bush’s Secularist Triumph” (slate.com, Nov. 9, 2004), “blood-maddened thugs in Iraq” are routinely referred to as “the voice of the oppressed,” which is another way of saying that the real oppressor is Bush, not Saddam.  The intellectual atmosphere is such that if you do not revile Bush and condemn the whole foray into Iraq with blind obedience, as America’s greatest current writer, novelist Tom Wolfe, observes in The Guardian (Nov. 1, 2004), you would be considered something like a child molester.  For Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Bush doesn’t just “battle primitivism”; he “courts primitivism” (Nov. 7, 2004).  For her colleague, Thomas Friedman, Bush has made it difficult for Americans to agree on “what America is” (Nov. 4, 2004). 

At one level, such antagonism should not be taken seriously at all, for, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek ably demonstrates in “Over the Rainbow” (London Review of Books, Nov. 4, 2004), it is not some benign truth that the anti-Bush rhetoric is registering but rather the usual ideological baggage that comes with preaching at the already converted.  Rather than being an example of deep thinking, it is in fact a prohibition against thinking: its aim is totalitarian, promoting one particular point of view—and it is just that—over all the others.  One of its ridiculous assumptions is that in reelecting Bush the American people have once again shown themselves to be the bad guys and, by extension, the Europeans to be the good guys, even though the vast majority of the descendents of the Enlightenment opted to side first with tyranny in the run-up to the war and now openly in Hitchens’s words with “theocratic saboteurs in Iraq.”  Another is that such rhetoric is a complete misreading of America: the Americans reelected Bush because the majority of them are like Bush.  To believe otherwise is to believe in an imaginary America.  As Tom Wolfe succinctly puts it, “I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions.” 

But at another level, such antagonism has been very damaging to the Kurdish narrative; in the Left’s vocabulary the Kurd is no longer a victim but a collaborator with an imperial power bent on sucking up the last drop of an oppressed people’s oil.  As vague and sloppy as this line of thinking is, its emotional impact cannot be ignored: many easily fall for it.  Sadly, for them thinking about Iraq remains forever locked within the ideological simplicity of such framework.  It is a rhetoric within which the beheaders and silencers of the word are glorified as  “nationalist” fighters and those opposing them as misguided colonial servants.  To believe in such rhetoric is to be willing to abdicate thinking, or, to paraphrase Jurgen Habermas, to commit oneself to the opposite of truth, reason, and justice.     

Dogma aside, these days the Kurdish narrative is being harmed in another way.  The Bush administration is quietly and not so quietly trying to undercut the Kurdish identity.  This is no exaggeration. In all their official and no-so official references to Kurdistan, American officials make the point not to mention the K-word—Kurdistan.  Theirs is indeed a vocabulary designed to preserve Iraq as an Arab entity and give the Kurds at best a subordinate role.  The administration’s intellectual ally, the Nixon Center, has even gone as far as lecturing the Kurds pompously on why Arabic, rather than English, ought to be their second language; in the words of Damjan De Krenjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev, who probably until very recently couldn’t even locate Kurdistan on a map, for the Kurds not wanting to learn Arabic is tantamount “to embrace their resentments” (Financial Times, Nov. 20, 2004).  Writing from the gaudy corridors of the American academy, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole advocates in all serious the scraping of the very idea of Kurdistan as a cultural and geographic entity in favor of an Iraq organized around its 18 provinces, something even Saddam’s pan-Arab agenda never dared to raise.  What makes this kind of thinking possible is not the resources of logic and dialect and a willingness to give a story a fair hearing but the willingness to suspend all that, as Paul Bremer was in the habit of sheepishly doing every time the Kurdish situation was on the agenda. 

The point here is that the Kurdish point of view does not seem to matter anymore, neither to the Bush administration nor to the ever increasing coterie of so-called Middle Experts like Cole and many others—despite the fact that Kurdistan, as a people and a culture and a shared experience, has really no connection to Iraq, as Boston Globe’s Thanassis Cambanis (Nov. 14, 2004) and The Independent’s Charles Glass have recently found out with relative ease (Nov. 23, 2004).    Not making an effort to understand the Kurdish reality is to engage in a colonialist enterprise of the worst kind: disregarding a people’s right to be heard.   

A recent visit to Kurdistan by former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and Qatar, Mark G. Humbley, confirms much of what I have been saying.  Speaking recently at the World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts, Mr. Humbley said, “There is no consular office, no financial help coming from us.  We could also support more English language programs.  Right now, they are learning English from the French” (moshea@repub.com, Nov. 20, 2004).

Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA ssalih@bloomu.edu