But, then again, if he thought the way I do, he would give up. Nationalism gives him hope, and in Trois-Rivières you need all the hope you can get. The curious thing, of course, is that it is such a Canadian style of hope. We Canadians believe in government. Social democratic interventionism is as much in my bones as it is in Dennis’s. The sad thing is that this common faith is leading us into different countries.
Although Dennis feels strongly, there is little or no aggression in what he says toward English Canadians. He did visit Niagara Falls once, and while he had some trouble making himself understood, he liked it “down there.” Had Dennis ever been in my hometown, Toronto? He shakes his head and grins. As for holidays, he and his wife would rather head south to the East Coast beaches in New Jersey and Massachusetts, or farther south, to Florida, where there are so many Quebecois in the winter that they run a newspaper in French just for them. This is part of a pattern I observe throughout my visit in Quebec. When you ask people where they go when they have a little free time, they all say the States. They never say Canada.
After a couple of beers, it is time for Dennis to head down to the arena for his hockey game with the works team. It’s one of those places from my Canadian childhood, a big, gloomy, vaulted place, bitterly cold, with a lozenge of white, gleaming ice in the middle, and no glass to keep the pucks from flying into the rows of hard, gray-painted bleachers where I take my seat.
This isn’t just any hockey arena. It’s like the sandlots of Santo Domingo, where the world’s best baseball shortstops grow up; or like the pitches in north London where Arsenal players learn how to curve a ball into the net. Trois-Rivières is one of those places where hockey is played best in all the world; it is from arenas like this one that the National Hockey League (NHL) draws its talent.
I have hockey in common with Dennis, as any Canadian does. I grew up listening to NHL games on the radio in the days before television. I have all the same names in my head that he does—Geoffrion, Béliveau, Richard—from the Canadiens’ teams of the 1950s and 1960s. I used to play in arenas like this.
I sit in the stand and I watch the Wayagamack boys play. Dennis is good: low, fast, crafty, hardworking, darting in and out of the play, digging pucks out from under people’s skates, hitting people when he has to, a big smile playing on his face. When he’s on the bench, he pushes the helmet back off his face, sips on a Coke, and roars, “Allez les boys! Allez les boys! Look at that guy’s acceleration! Tabarnak!”
I sit watching him, levering himself over the boards to join in a power play, wishing I still had my skating legs and wondering, finally, why I feel such fierce separation from a Canadian scene which is just as much mine as it is his. We share all these things, and yet we don’t. Language falls between us, even though I am bilingual. His Quebecois is not my French. We play the same game, in the same arenas, and we cannot quite connect. Class, perhaps? But it is much more than that: a question of language and old resentments and a history of bitterness, real and invented, which seems more robust and full of life than any of our understandings.
A scene like the hockey rink in Trois-Rivières sets you thinking about what exactly it is that people must share if they are to live together in a political community. Is it mere sentimentality to suppose that people ought to share the same rituals, the same cold nights under the bright lights of a hockey rink, in order to feel a common belonging? Nation-states, after all, can cohere even when the peoples who compose them share much less than I share with Dennis. The core of my separation from Dennis comes down to this: we cannot share a nation—we cannot share it, since I am English-speaking and he is French-speaking, and he was born in Quebec and I was not. Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state. I tell myself this might be just as well. Shared love for a nation-state might be a dangerous thing. Perhaps the gentleness, tolerance, and good-naturedness of so much of Canadian life depends, in fact, on the absence of a fiercely shared love. Yet one can sit in a hockey arena in Trois-Rivières on a Tuesday night, watching a young man skating his heart out, with a wild grin on his face, and wish, suddenly, that we did actually love the same nation and not merely cohabit the same state.
CHAPTER 5
KURDISTAN
BORDERS
The mystique of nations is to appear eternal, to seem like elemental features of the landscape itself. Yet the borders of a nation lay the mystique bare. There, you realize how unnatural, arbitrary, and even absurd the division of the world into nations actually is. Border walls may bisect villages; barbed wire may put two sides of the same street into different countries; checkpoints may exile one-half of a family from the other half; lines on the maps may divide the same ethnic group into two different nations; that sinister straight line of border watchtowers may violate the resolutely non-national contours of hill and valley.
The border I am now approaching is especially arbitrary. Behind me, the grasslands of southeastern Turkey. Ahead of me, the steep green hills of Iraq. In between, a long, two-lane, concrete bridge over a tributary of the Tigris River. I shoulder my pack and begin walking in the direction of the Iraqi hills in the dying light of a May afternoon.
What frock-coated gentleman in Sèvres or Lausanne decided that this side would be Turkey and that side Iraq? The same people—the Kurds—live on either side, 9 million on the Turkish side of the border and 3 million on the Iraqi side. Yet until two years ago, nothing at the border post took any notice of these people’s existence or even acknowledged that the border bisected their homeland. I am here because now, at last, things have changed. A hand-painted sign up ahead at the end of the bridge, in Arabic and English script, says: “Welcome to Kurdistan.”
What Kurdistan is this? The land the Kurds claim as their own stretches across five nation-states: Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Armenia. In the melancholy offices of Kurdish exile groups in London, I’ve seen the map of this Kurdistan of dreams, stretching from the Syrian Mediterranean on the west to Armenian Mount Ararat on the northeast to the oil fields of Kirkuk in Iraq and the mountains around Kirmanshah in Iran. This is the land which a tribal mountain people, descended from the ancient Medes, have settled and claimed as their own for four thousand years, only to see their claims denied by the Ottoman Empire and by the modern nations that rose upon its ruins. At the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire lay prostrate and Woodrow Wilson’s principle of the self-determination of peoples was briefly in the ascendant at Versailles, the Kurds were promised a state. But between the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which promised them this homeland, and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which ratified the new borders of Turkey, their claim was betrayed. Over this dream, the men in frock coats dropped their border lines like a net.
It has been the Kurds’ misfortune that their homeland is the meeting point of four of the most aggressive and expansionary nationalisms in the modern world: Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian. The Kurds are thus a people whose struggle for a homeland has been deformed and deflected by nationalisms more virulent than their own.
The Kurds have always been regarded as a threat to the unity of the Turkish state founded in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk. Guided by Atatürk’s centralizing, secular nationalism, the Turks set about forcibly assimilating the Kurds, denying them the right to speak their own language, to educate their children in it, or even to call themselves Kurds. Until a decade ago, official Turkey described the Kurds as “mountain Turks.” “Kemalism” fused nationalism with the rhetoric of modernization: the goal of a modern Turkey was to end the Ottoman heritage of backwardness. The Kurds, therefore, were victimized not just as an alien ethnic minority, fated to assimilate to the Turkish norm, but as a backward, barbarian people, fated to succumb to the modernizing energies of the Turkish state.
Likewise, to the modernizing nationalism of the Shah of Iran, the Iranian Kurds were a tribal throwback unaccountably standing in the way of a modern autocracy. Worse, they were Sunni Muslims, while most Iranians were Shi’as. After
the Shah fell in 1979, the Iranian Kurds hoped their chances of autonomy would improve, only to discover that the fundamentalist revolution of the ayatollahs was even more hostile to them than the Shah. Not merely did their stubborn mountain revolt stand in the way of the totalitarian control envisaged by fundamentalism; they were also religious renegades, Sunni obstacles in the path of Shi’ite universalism. Even now, Iran rockets Kurdish villages within Kurdistan and sends bomb-laden Mirages screaming over Iranian Kurdish villages inside the enclave.
The Ba’athist nationalism of Syria and Iraq was, at least in theory, less relentlessly centralizing than Turkey and less driven by ethnic intolerance. Iraqi Kurds were defined constitutionally as a national minority and retained the right to educate their children in Kurdish. Nominal autonomy was granted by recurrent Ba’athist regimes, but only as a result of stubborn revolt by Kurdish tribal and national leaders, the most famous being Mulla Mustafa Barzani.
When Saddam Hussein came to power in the 1970s, new oil wealth, coupled with Western and Russian military support of his regime, made possible a rapid transition to nationalist totalitarianism. Saddam used Arab nationalism to legitimize two imperatives: to modernize Iraq, and to make himself the most powerful and feared leader in the Middle East. The Kurdish revolt, begun in 1961 by Mulla Mustafa, and continued on and off ever since by his sons, presented the most substantial opposition to Saddamic totalitarianism and forced modernization. Saddam has not succeeded in mobilizing the Arabs’ long-standing popular ethnic hostility toward Kurds. Instead, he has fought them simply because they are the most consistent challenge to his particular form of despotism.
These four nationalisms have bedeviled the Kurds’ own struggle to create a common national identity. Many Turkish Kurds speak only Turkish and recognize only the Roman alphabet. This divides them from Iraqi Kurds, who in most cases have kept their language and use the Arabic alphabet. Both the Iraqi and the Turkish governments have proven themselves adept at exploiting such Kurdish differences. As in all nationalist struggles, there are those who resist and those who collaborate. In Kurdish, such collaborators are contemptuously called jash (“little donkeys”). Saddam organized them into militias to fight the nationalist peshmerga, or warriors. Kurds themselves admit that, for all the shared talk about a common homeland, they have actually fought each other more often than they have fought side by side. And besides the divisions sown among them by their neighbors, there are the divisions indigenous to the Kurds themselves: tribal and familial feuds, different linguistic dialects—Kurmanji in northern and western Iraq; Sorani in the south and east. Nationalist movements have chipped away at these tribal, regional, and linguistic divisions that plague the Kurds, trying to create a unity that will at last make the nation possible. Yet unity of purpose and vision remains elusive, and the question remains, with the Kurds as with other stateless peoples, like the Palestinians: Can nationalism create a nation?
How, in the absence of a state, in the face of such divisions, have the Kurds managed to survive as a people? Their secret, I suspect, may lie in their very traditionalism. This would reverse what is usually said about them, namely, that their tribalism is a source of political division and weakness. Of course it is. But tribalism is also a subliminal source of cohesion, even for urban Kurds. As a people they have made the transition from a tribal to a national form of collective belonging within two generations, but their national consciousness is still shaped by the tribal bond. Their very backwardness, their stubborn enclosure within tribal loyalties, has protected them against assimilation and integration.
As I approach the little concrete hut at the end of the bridge, where I hand in my passport, I can make out on the roof a bright new painting in acrylic of Massoud, Mulla Mustafa’s son and heir as leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. It has replaced the portrait of Saddam which used to hang there and was shot away in the first hours of the Kurdish intifada in March 1991.
At the sign “Welcome to Kurdistan,” there is no real border post, just some brown-faced boys with automatic weapons who smile and say, “Allo, Mistair.” A jet thunders overhead, so high up in the blue that you cannot see it, and the boys glance up and smile. “America,” they tell me, returning my passport.
These jets, which patrol the no-fly zone over Iraq from their base in Incirlik, Turkey, are what stand between the Kurds and Saddam Hussein. How long they will fly, how long they will protect the Kurds, no one knows. The fate of stateless people is sealed in other people’s capitals.
The sign at the border may say “Welcome to Kurdistan,” but the frontier itself bisects the dream homeland. Only 2.8 of the estimated 25 million Kurds are to be found in Iraqi Kurdistan, most of them Iraqi Kurds by origin. Kurdistan is not a state, just an enclave. It has no flag of its own. It is not even allowed to call itself Kurdistan. Technically, it remains a part of Iraq and the Iraqi dinar remains the currency. It was set up in the spring of 1991, after Iraqi helicopter gunships chased the Kurds into the mountain passes. Allied forces drove the Iraqi army south, and Allied planes set up an air exclusion zone north of the 36th parallel, under which the Kurds were given the right to shelter, to return from camps in Iran and Turkey and rebuild their homes.
But if it is not a state, it is certainly acting like one. It has held elections, it has a Parliament, a police force, the rudiments of a civil administration. Since Saddam has sealed it off from the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan is kept alive by the international aid convoys and Turkish trucks that rumble across the bridge. Yet there can be little doubt that the Kurds of Iraq believe that from this kernel, the enclave, one day a state will grow.
Kurdistan is something new under the sun in international law—the first attempt by the UN to protect a minority people against the genocidal intentions of its nominal ruler. Until Kurdistan, the international community stopped short of “interventions” that challenged the territorial integrity and sovereignty of nation-states. With the creation of the Kurdish enclave, it endorsed the idea that the duty of humanitarian intervention overrode the principle of the inviolability and integrity of sovereign states. If Kurdistan works, other nations that believe they can abuse indigenous minorities with impunity may see such enclaves hacked out of their territory. Kurdistan is all that remains of George Bush’s “new world order.” It remains the only place where a new balance between the right of people and the right of nations for the post-Cold War world was drawn.
Now that the world’s most numerous stateless people have a small place they can call their own, I wonder what it will do to them. Stateless peoples have a way of making visible the securities that people with states take for granted. The best way to find out what a nation-state means to a people, what it does to their character, is to spend time among a people who have never had one of their own.
AS MY TAXI grinds up the steep road past Zakho to Dahuk, I catch my first glimpses of Kurdistan. On the rocky, dusty verges of the highway, there are tents, some with U.S. Army markings, some with UNHCR markings, and inside them, lit by kerosene lamps, I see neat pyramids of Marlboro cigarettes, Mars bars, Turkish chocolate, bars of soap, packs of margarine, biscuits, packs of sugar and flour. Outside other tents I see neatly stacked rows of plastic jerry cans, filled to the brim with pink petrol, guarded by boys whose hands and faces are darkened with axle and engine grease. Since Saddam has blockaded Kurdistan’s borders, a desperately poor economy is kept going only by the ingenuity of the mule drivers who bring cooking oil and soap over the mountain passes from Iran, the Turkish trucks that thunder up this road, and these oil-smeared boys who sell smuggled petrol from jerry cans by the roadside. The boys are barefoot and look cold in the darkness. Yet somehow the atmosphere is not of poverty and desperation but of wonder and mystery— cheekbones and brown skin in the chiaroscuro of kerosene lamps, the bowed shapes of the tents, the flaps held back to reveal the smuggled treasures within. The boys stand by the flaps, their faces lit by the kerosene lamps, their eyes beckoning me to enter.
PES
HMERGA
A white Toyota LandCruiser pulls up outside the front door of the dank hotel in Dahuk where I have spent my first night. I am pleased to see it. As I’ve already discovered in Croatia and Serbia, the four-wheel drive is the vehicle of preference for the war zones of the post–Cold War world, the chariot of choice for the warlords who rule the checkpoints and the command posts of the factions, gangs, guerrilla armies, tribes fighting over the bones of the nation in the 1990s.
In this case, the LandCruiser is provided courtesy of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), the organization of Massoud Barzani. The KDP dominates in Dahuk and in northwestern Kurdistan, while the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), run by Jalal Talabani, has its strongholds in the Sorani-speaking eastern and southern portions. They share power between them in a coalition, but the gulf between them is wide and the history of mutual betrayal is long.
The KDP provides not only the LandCruiser—for a fee, of course—but also security protection. Behjet and Taha are to be my peshmerga, my warriors, while I travel. They wear the jemadane, the black-and-white turbaned headdresses of the male warrior, a short, tight-fitting brown military tunic, a magnificent waistband of colored cloth called the shuttik, tightly wound into four ascending, intertwining strands tied at the side. Their trousers, called shalvar, balloon out dramatically and conclude in a pair of finely woven white cotton slippers, called klash. Both men have thick black mustaches and the watchful and dignified faces of mountain tribesmen. Behjet, the senior driver, wears a pistol in a worn leather case stuffed into his shuttik, while Taha shoulders a Kalashnikov on his back. Behjet’s right knee joint is rigid—a war wound— and he walks with a pronounced limp. When he drives, he pinions his leg straight against the accelerator. When I tell him that he is to be my shepherd and I am to be his sheep, he smiles gravely. A shepherd is nearly as dignified a thing to be in Kurdistan as a peshmerga, and now he is to be both.
Blood and Belonging Page 21
