At the traffic circles hulked bulky white statues commemorating the Kurdish revolution or a story from Kurdish folklore. Many had been sculpted after the 1991 uprising by art students under the supervision of their teachers, and were amateurish yet endearing, raw yet hopeful, embodying within them both the can-do attitude and the lack of sophistication of many Kurds, cut off from the rest of the world for generations.
DOMINATING PARTS OF the downtown was the University of Dohuk, housed in a scattered array of cold utilitarian edifices originally built by the Baath regime. The science faculty building had once been a prison; the administration building, a Baath Party headquarters; and the College of Medicine, a Baath army outpost. The university had been founded only after the 1991 uprising, largely through the efforts of Dr. Asmat Muhammad Khalid, whom I went to visit one morning early in my stay. I wanted to learn more about how semiautonomous Kurdistan worked. The new university seemed a good place to start.
At the university, I found a burly, white-haired dynamo of energy waiting for me in a sunny, book-lined room, seemingly exorcised of its Baathist ghosts. Dr. Asmat spoke moderately good English and swiveled enthusiastically in his high-backed leather chair behind a shiny desk as he told me the university’s story. Above him hung a photograph of Massoud Barzani, on another wall hung one of Mulla Mustafa.
Trained as an engineer, Dr. Asmat had first thought of establishing the university in 1970 while attending a conference, he said. But when he raised his hand and suggested it, everyone in the room, mostly Arabs, laughed in his face—“Dohuk is too backward for a university,” they said. The Kurdish region did have one university at the time, but it was in Suleimaniyah, the Kurds’ most sophisticated city. Dr. Asmat felt humiliated, but never forgot his idea.
The uprising and its aftermath provided Dr. Asmat with the opportunity he needed. He took his idea to Massoud Barzani, and on September 14, 1992, the Kurdish Parliament issued a decree establishing the University of Dohuk. It was to be composed of only two colleges at first: the College of Agriculture and the College of Medicine.
“Our start-up team was six persons,” Dr. Asmat said. “But how to build a university from nothing? We had no money, no teachers, no classrooms, nothing. Everything was destroyed. And our campus—all these buildings— was occupied by refugees. We had lecture rooms filled with refugees. One time I entered a classroom between women making bread on one side, and women washing clothes on the other.
“We had to ask the people of Dohuk for help. We called to carpenters to repair the buildings, professionals to teach the classes, and farmers to teach farming. People cleaned, and gave furniture and books. All volunteer.”
Now the university belonged to the International Association of Universities (IAU) and boasted nine colleges, various postgraduate programs, about two hundred professors, and over two thousand students. Tuition was free; its primary source of funding was the Kurdish government.
“But, wait—” I said as Dr. Asmat, apparently finished, stood up to usher me out the door. “I don’t understand. . . .” The Kurdish government was far from flush, I knew, and I was puzzled as to how the university had grown so large so quickly.
But Dr. Asmat had no more time to talk—graduation was only two weeks away, and he had much to attend to. He passed me on to the dean of the College of Medicine, Dr. Farhad Sulayvani. A wiry, bespectacled man of erect military bearing, Dr. Sulayvani seemed tall when sitting down, but was of average height when standing up. He didn’t look directly at me until well into our conversation—a mannerism that I often encountered in Iraq, where people also had the disconcerting habit of waiting, their faces expressionless, for me to fully explain myself before moving a muscle or saying a word. There’s much wariness here, I often thought, at first attributing the trait to recent history and caution before foreigners. Only later did I realize that the Kurds are wary when confronting one another as well.
Also one of the university’s founders, Dr. Sulayvani told me more about the school’s earliest days, when the College of Medicine had had no decent facilities, equipment, books, or trained staff. Its adjoining teaching hospital, though in operation for years under the Baath regime, had also had little trained personnel. After the uprising, Saddam Hussein ordered all Arab professionals out of the region, thinking that without Baghdad brainpower, Kurdistan would collapse. “But the Kurds proved him wrong,” Dr. Sulayvani said proudly, sitting up straighter than ever. Though improvement came only gradually, it did come—in the college’s case, through the help of other universities, aid organizations, the United Nations, and the smuggling in of everything from books to secondhand microscopes.
So the university did have some other resources besides the government, I thought, while remembering the Kurds’ well-known reputation for smuggling. They had been honing that expertise ever since their division between the Ottomans and Safavids. And who better to smuggle contraband across borders than a borders-divided people?
“In recent years, the Internet had also been very influential,” Dr. Sulayvani continued. Before its arrival in the safe haven in the late 1990s, the university, along with everyplace else, had had virtually no contact with the outside world. There was no mail—Baghdad didn’t let it in—and until only a few years before, phone calls had been prohibitively expensive. Now, though, thanks to satellite connections, international calls cost about 50 cents a minute, and the Internet, about $1 an hour. Those prices were still too high for many Kurds, but the middle class could afford it.
My next stop was the College of Arts, a new building housing the language and literature faculties, and a library filled with books that had been hand-carried into Kurdistan by travelers. Here, I met two young language teachers—an English-Moroccan woman from Yorkshire, England, and a French-Kurdish woman from Paris. Both had moved to Kurdistan only a year or two before. The English-Moroccan, a devout Muslim with a porcelain complexion, enveloped in a raincoat and headscarf, was married to a Kurd and had four children. The French Kurd, a single woman in a formfitting black dress, with heels and curled hair, had originally come to Dohuk to visit relatives, but had liked it so much that she’d stayed, to become the university’s only French teacher.
The two women shared an office, where they sang praises of the Iraqi Kurds to me. They’re versatile people and, despite all the atrocities they’ve witnessed, very kind, said the English-Moroccan in her broad Yorkshire accent. They depend on themselves, they don’t wait for outside help, said the French Kurd, in her lilting Parisian one. They take good care of their country, they’re always cleaning, and are very well organized, both concurred. While silently agreeing with their first four points, I thought that, from a historical perspective at least, organization is not a Kurdish strong-point.
“The presentation of work here was terrible at first,” said the French teacher. “Students would hand in homework written on dirty pieces of paper. They didn’t know. But now they’re getting better.”
“Once I asked the students to write an essay about their most memorable moment,” said the English teacher. “One student wrote that she came home one day when she was ten to find her whole family gone. She never saw any of them again.” She sighed. “I can’t seem to forget that story. But everyone here has stories like that. When my husband was six, he was playing in the garden when a bomb dropped and killed his brother.”
While she was talking, a tall, soft-spoken man in his forties, dressed in a brown suit and tie, came in. A graduate student in the English department, he was writing his master’s thesis on General Sherif Pasha, a Kurdish diplomat who’d been instrumental in negotiating the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the nonratified, post-WWI agreement that could have led to an independent Kurdistan. The process was frustrating, as there were few books relating to his subject in Dohuk, and those were all in English or French. His English was serviceable, but for French, he had to rely completely on the French Kurdish teacher. She was happy to help, but spoke little Kurdish, and neither was completely fluent
in English. Only bit by bit was his project progressing. Much like the university itself, I thought.
The soft-spoken man had spent many years as a peshmerga and as a refugee. He’d always dreamed of studying at a university, but had never before had the chance. Many of the students at the university were older. He didn’t find studying at his age especially difficult, but “sitting with little boys” was hard. Nonetheless, he was hoping to get his Ph.D.
“Everything is now possible in Kurdistan,” he said with a sigh.
A BELL RANG, and the threesome gathered their books for class. But before disappearing, they introduced me to a group of students who had just moved to Iraq from Iran. Like Dr. Shawkat, Majed, and his family, the students’ parents had been forced to leave Iraq in 1975 due to the Algiers Accord. The accord had destroyed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds’ lives, and every time I heard about it, my stomach churned, as the agreement had also marked the first great betrayal of the Kurds by the United States.
In 1974, following the breakdown of the 1970 March Manifesto that was to have granted the Kurds semiautonomy, war again broke out between Mulla Mustafa Barzani’s forces and the Iraqi army. But this time, the Kurds were in a strong fighting position, as they’d accepted significant military aid from the Shah of Iran, who was in turn receiving partial funding for that aid from the United States—a critical point, as Barzani did not trust the shah, but did trust the United States. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Baath regime was aligned with Russia, whereas Iran under the shah was a prominent U.S. ally.
The shah hoped to destabilize Iraq by providing the Kurds with everything from U.S. Hawk missiles to fighting forces. However, the shah never intended the Kurds to win their war, and, in the Algiers Accord of March 1975, abruptly abandoned them. The accord gave Iran, with the tacit approval of the United States, what it had really wanted all along—control of half the strategic Shatt al Arab waterway, which separates the countries and leads to the Persian Gulf. In return, the shah withdrew Iran’s aid to the Kurds.
Laying the groundwork for the Algiers Accord had been America’s own Henry Kissinger, who encouraged the Kurds to escalate their revolution while knowing all the while that a Kurdish victory was not part of the plan. In the words of the 1975 Pike Report, commissioned by the congressional Select Committee on Intelligence, “It was a cynical enterprise, even in the context of a clandestine aid operation”; in the words of Henry Kissinger, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
Within hours of signing the accord, Iran was withdrawing its forces and supplies from the Kurds. Mulla Mustafa Barzani was devastated. He was a passionate believer in the United States, having even once proposed, probably without really thinking it out, that all Kurds relocate to America. “I trust America,” he said in one 1973 interview. “America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds.” In his disillusionment, Barzani decided to end the Kurdish national struggle, saying that its continuance would lead only to the massacre of his people. Many in the rank and file were eager to continue the fight, but Barzani stood firm—a decision for which he was later harshly criticized. Over one hundred thousand Kurds, including KDP leaders, fighters, and their families, fled to Iran, to join the over one hundred thousand Kurdish refugees already there. Thousands of others surrendered, and thousands more were slaughtered by the Iraqi forces.
Upon arriving in Iran, the Iraqi Kurds were first placed in refugee camps, and then parceled out to towns and villages far from the Iraq-Iran border. The shah did not want them in Iranian Kurdish territory, where a combined Iraqi-Iranian Kurdish population could stir up trouble, and he was careful to put only a few Iraqi families in each town so that they had little power. Not until Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 did the lives of the exiled Iraqi Kurds begin to improve, and later that same year, the KDP was allowed to hold its first post–Algiers Accord conference in Karaj, near Tehran, the KDP’s new headquarters.
Thereafter, the children of the Iraqi refugees grew up in Iran, learning the Persian language and Iranian ways. Yet their parents never forgot their homeland and, after the establishment of the safe haven, began moving back in large numbers. By the time of my visit, there were approximately forty thousand recently returned refugees from Iran in the KDP’s territory—all of whom had to be housed and fed, along with the many thousands who had lost their homes in the Anfal.
Most Iraqi Kurds I met felt that their people’s exposure to Iran had been a good thing. The returning refugees were bringing with them the Iranians’ love of learning, entrepreneurial spirit, organization, and sophistication, they said. Iran is considerably more developed than is northern Iraq.
At the College of Arts, the refugee students were ecstatic to learn that I, too, had been to Iran and spoke some Persian. Gathering around me, they ushered me into a sunny cafeteria, where they plied me with multiple rounds of soda, candy, and tea. Covering the wall across from us was an enormous poster of New York City, complete with the World Trade Center.
We’re so, so happy to meet you, the students said over and over—you see, it’s very difficult for us here, we were born in Iran, and we speak Persian and only a little Kurdish. Everything is so different here—the people, the clothes, the food. There are no shops. There are no movies or parks. There’s no place to go for fun. We miss Iran!
“Do you want to go back?” I asked.
There was only a short moment of silence.
Oh, no! they replied. Yes, we miss Iran, but we had problems there. We were not free. People were prejudiced. Only here can we say we are Kurd without trouble.
AS I WANDERED around the university that day, I felt as if I had somehow landed in the middle of a giant jigsaw puzzle. The Kurds were trying to cobble together many odd-shaped bits and pieces—some half destroyed, others curious gems—to create something new out of the old. Some of the pieces weren’t quite fitting yet—the refugee students from Iran still hadn’t found their place, and the university’s quality of teaching still needed much work, I guessed, an impression confirmed by others later. But the enormity of what had been accomplished in ten short years was impressive, as was the Kurds’ courage to forge ahead with what had basically been an impossible task. No one had told the Kurds that a university couldn’t be started from scratch without major funding, and so they had simply gone ahead and done it.
ON A SIDE STREET in downtown Dohuk squatted the Writers’ Union, flanked by two oversized busts, one of Anwar Mai, a Kurdish historian, another of Saduq Bahaadin Amedi, a Kurdish classical poet. Dr. Shawkat had suggested I visit the union to meet others of my ilk, and I’d agreed. But I had no idea what to expect as I scurried into the building one late afternoon, fat raindrops spattering around me.
Inside a gloomy front hall, I bumped into an advance guard of five men—Dr. Shawkat had telephoned—who politely ushered me into a rectangular reception room, its perimeter lined with shiny baroque-style chairs. As we took our seats, at least a dozen other men also filed in and sat down. Most were middle-aged and dressed in neat dark suits. They looked at me expectantly, as a waiter bustled in with clinking glasses of tea, and my mind went blank. These men looked nothing like the scruffy bunch of writers I knew back in New York.
One of the men came to my rescue by delivering an introduction in broken English. Established in 1971 as a place for writers to work and congregate, the Writers’ Union had somehow managed to survive through the difficult Baath regime years. But it was only since the uprising that the union had truly started flourishing. Before, writers had censored themselves or not written at all—they’d been afraid. Now, publications were everywhere, and even small Dohuk had its own Khani media center, which published a weekly paper and monthly magazine. The union’s size had doubled, to over 130 writers, mostly professionals who worked during the day as doctors, accountants, lawyers, or teachers. To work full time as a writer in Kurdistan was impossible. Publications paid little, if anything, and most books were self-published.
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“What about women writers?” I asked, looking around at my all-male companions. “Are there any?”
Of course, the men said, nodding proudly, the union had many excellent women writers—nine, to be exact.
“Why aren’t they here?” I asked.
They are home, came the answer. As I was only just beginning to learn, most Kurdish women do not go out after about five P.M. unless in the company of their families, especially in a conservative city like Dohuk.
The introduction over, the men exchanged glances. Then, they looked at me appraisingly. How about a drink? they asked, a gleam in their eyes. Like many Kurdish men I met, they did not take the Muslim stricture against drinking alcohol too seriously. For a Kurdish woman to drink, however, was considered scandalous.
About a dozen of us then retired to the back of the building, the men talking in Kurdish, while I, suddenly acutely aware of being a woman out after dark in a culture where this was not done, self-consciously wondered what they were saying. The men had an easy, familiar air with one another, and I guessed that they met at the union often. Our retreat to the back had the feel of ritual.
We stopped outside a dismal room, furnished with stained sofas sagging around a scarred coffee table. Despite overhead fluorescent lights, everything in the room, including the air, seemed gray. “Women first,” said one of the men, ushering me forward, and then chuckled—a reaction I encountered often in Iraq, where men seemed to find the Western courtesy highly amusing. I called them on it once or twice, only to be met with even louder chuckles. “Yes, we do think it’s funny,” one man conceded once, “because women here come last, but perhaps this is our future!”
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 6
