13 March 2004

At a meeting in Moscow in 1972, Amir Abdullah, the late Iraqi Communist party central committee member, whose party’s brief flirtation with Saddam had landed him a non-descript ministerial post, turned to the only Kurd member of the delegation he was heading and said, "Will you stop bothering us with your Kurdish problem. We’re here to lobby support for Iraq and its leadership, not waste time on a side issue."

Barely two years later, Saddam went on a killing spree against the communists. Abdullah had to flee for his life, eventually finding refuge in capitalist Sweden. On deathbed a couple of years ago, he asked to be buried in Iraq. But at the time with proper Iraq under Saddam being off limits, Kurdistan ought to have been the logical alternative. Kurdistan, however, was deemed not sufficiently Arab in character, and was passed over in favor of Syria.

So, as it turned out, the communist, despite a lifelong commitment to internationalism, still had quite a bit of nationalism left in him. He wasn’t quite the cosmopolitan he thought he was; when the hour came, he felt he had a home to go to.

There is nothing surprising about Mr. Abdullah’s turnaround. As Terry Eagleton reminds us in The Idea of Culture, "nationalism . . . is perhaps the most tenacious of all identity cultures." Indeed, a sense of belonging to a language, a people, a place, and a culture may be weakened by exile or ideological flirtation, but it can never be entirely ruptured. Humanity is still a long way from reaching the perfection Hugo of St. Victor had hoped for in Didascalicon: "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land."

The ironic twist in Mr. Abdullah’s turnaround shows that the Kurd was not, after all, out of line in wanting his nation’s concerns to be heard in Moscow. It also shows that Mr. Abdullah’s own words were working against him: it wasn’t communism they were in tune with but the very Arab nationalism he mistakenly believed he no longer had a need for as a committed communist. This, too, is not surprising: what we call human consciousness is actually nothing more than the many daily interactions between the self and the world.

This anecdote maybe somewhat outlandish, but it does drive home an important point about Arab nationalism: it is too hyper to make room for the smaller nationalisms in its midst and is too obsessed with what Bernard Lewis calls "the politics of blame" to be able to view a minority’s nationalism with anything but hostility. This explains why Arab nationalism, while big on emancipation, justice, and freedom for itself, has always felt a need to block the very same things for others.

The situation in Southern Kurdistan is a good case in point. Up until the Iraq war, support for Kurdish statehood in Southern Kurdistan was unanimous among the Arab members in the Iraqi opposition. Kurdish statehood was seen as a bulwark against Arab political culture’s tendency towards authoritarianism and parochialism.

It now appears that these men’s commitment to a mentality of tolerance was only skin-deep. Adnan Pachachi, Colin Powell’s favorite Iraq Governing Council member, keeps saying federalism is "vague," a term whose ceaseless repetition betrays an obvious flaw in Mr. Pachachi’s understanding of democracy. His legal advisor, American-educated Faisal Istrabadi, sounds like a man all too eager to bury federalism in whatever patches of shady legal sophistry he can muster.

Not to be outdone, Mr. Pachachi’s Arab counterparts, as they make the rounds in Riyadh, Damascus, Washington, Paris, and other capitals, go even further, declaring that such totalities as Islam, Iraq, and unity are more weighty matters with the Kurds than federalism, as if the current Kurdish Referendum Movement, not to mention a minority’s lifelong struggle against injustice, were entirely a fictional affaire. To privilege totalities at a time when the world, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, has been moving steadily in the opposite direction is to be willing to repudiate a whole range of mindsets—which is what democracy is all about in the first place—except one: Preserving Arab hegemony in a multiethnic Iraq.

This—not Shiism—is the subtext of the latest maneuvering by al-Sistani and company. Al-Sistani’s objection to a clause in the interim constitution recently singed for Iraq is, on the one hand, an effort to position the Arab as both the savior and master of Iraq; on the other, it is a projection of a deeply rooted anti-Kurd feeling Arab political culture has always had the time for. The methods maybe different, but whether it is al-Sistani or Saddam or whoever, the political endgame is the same: Keeping the Kurds forever in a surrogate position, blocking rather than expanding their political participation, making sure that the vital nub of Iraq is predominantly Arab.

No wonder, these days al-Sistani’s male-privileging prose (On his Web site, he speaks of the "sons of all sects" but not of the daughters!) is so big on concepts like "unity" and "country" and "an elected national assembly"—concepts whose noisy repetition is carefully calculated to pave the way for an all out frontal attack on Kurdish nationalism when conditions permit. Until then, as Nicholas Blanford writes in the Christian Science Monitor of March 8, Shiite vigilantes will lay the groundwork for further colonization of Kirkuk and beyond. It is obvious that al-Sistani’s theocracy-friendly vocabulary is here not so much to serve the faithful but the intolerant. As Dexter Filkins writes in the New York Times of March 8, what the Shiites cannot stand is for the Kurds to have a meaningful say in Iraqi politics. They are even objecting to the bare minimum the interim constitution grants the Kurds. Immediately after the singing ceremony, the Shiite block made it clear that they intended to rewrite portions of the constitution dealing with Kurdish federalism before June 30, when the Americans plan to transfer authority to the Iraqi people. Al-Sistan’s name, much like Saddam’s, is now on its way to acquire the force of an absolute, trying not just to rob the Kurd of the power of self-definition but also to make it sound like there is absolutely nothing more to be said about the Kurds other than what the Ayatollah has so far said.

The other issue for the Shiite is, of course, the sphere of culture. They know full well whoever dominates cultural life dominates politics as well. The realities they have put in place in southern Iraq— what the New York Times’s David Rieff describes in an essay of February 1 as "a slow-motion Islamicization"—are the harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the country if the Shiite project is not blunted. So far their success has been by default, but it is unlikely that it would be reversed.

Obviously, al-Sistani and company are looking way beyond their turf: it is not just the whole Iraq they have in mind; it is the whole region: they know pushing around the Kurds is the surest way to endear themselves to the regional powers.

As a national project, this ill will towards Kurdish nationalism raises its ugly head in even the most unexpected situations. On February 4, at a forum on the future of Iraq, devoted solely to a discussion of an op-ed piece by emeritus president of New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie H. Gelb, the air suddenly got thick with Arab ire as Al-Hayat’s Ragida Dergham began grilling Mr. Gelb on his so-called hidden agenda. At issue was Mr. Gelb’s contention in the piece that the only viable solution for Iraq was a three-state solution. The usual so-called Middle East experts, as was to be expected, expressed, politely, their misgivings, with Columbia University’s Gary Sick even insisting—much to Mr. Gelb’s disbelief—that the Kurds he had been talking to were not in favor of partition at all. (One wonders which Kurds Mr. Sick had been talking to!)

For Ms. Dergham, the real issue was not that the Kurds of Southern Kurdistan were entitled to a state of their own, if they so wished, but that Mr. Gelb was in effect giving voice and authority and currency to an idea that could only come from those harboring sinister designs on the Arab people.

With astonishing self-assurance, Ms. Dergham grounds her point in the now all-too-familiar politics of blame and the passions it incites, charging "the neo-conservatives, extremists among them," for hatching up the idea. Her Stalinist question ". . . why on earth did you do it?" is at one level a covert smack at Kurdish nationalism; at another, a gesture of allegiance to Arab political culture; still at another, a rebuke to an idea and the person floating it. It is also a negation of journalistic open-mindedness.

None of that was lost on Mr. Gelb, as his notably terse but appropriate reply indicates: "I actually did it as part of the neo-conservative, Zionist, Jewish conspiracy." This is irony at its best: it brings to light the unstated, the buried, the ideologically kept under wraps.

These words do not function in isolation; they are part of the very lexicon of Arab political culture, secular and religious. The symbols and banners may be somewhat different, but lurking beneath them is the very same ideological network that the secular and the religious routinely tap into when confronted with Kurdish nationalism.