Blood and Belonging

by Michael Ignatieff

  They are party men, and they have fought for the Barzanis all their adult life. I soon notice that when he takes me to the other parties—say, to the PUK television station, or to the Communist Party HQ—Behjet becomes uneasy. These places are alien turf to him; the men with guns on the door eye him with equal suspicion. When I joke with Behjet about the long face he pulls whenever he is not among his own party, he laughs and says, “No, no, all Kurds are brothers,” but his face tells me something different.

  Behjet and Taha have guns. So, as far as I can see, does every other male. There are pistols worn in waistbands, pistol holsters gleaming from the inside pockets of suits, Kalashnikovs on shoulders, laid across tables in restaurants, hanging unattended on the backs of chairs, resting on the front seats of cars; ammunition clips inside the glove compartments; gun barrels sticking up among a tractorload of farm workers heading out to the fields in the morning light; guns lying beside men with bare feet, bent in prayer. Once again, as in Serbia and Croatia, I am in a world where power comes from the barrel of a gun. And not just power but prestige and male honor, too.

  Neither Behjet nor Taha flaunts his weaponry with the elaborately sexual display I had become used to at the Serbian and Croatian checkpoints. Perhaps this has something to do with being Muslim. At sunset, throughout our journey together, they retired to some quiet spot by the side of the road, removed their shoes, and quietly said their prayers. They did not touch alcohol, and this must have contributed to the dignified, casual, and desexualized way they handled weaponry. Among Europeans, by contrast, the gun culture at the checkpoints breaks a fundamental taboo. Most Europeans have lived since 1945 within states that enjoyed a monopoly on the means of violence. Such monopoly is the very core of what a nation-state is. As the Balkan nations broke down, this monopoly collapsed. Army arsenals were ransacked; hunting rifles came down from the attics; the arms traders moved in. For some young European males, the chaos that resulted from the collapse of the state monopoly offered the chance of entering an erotic paradise of the all-is-permitted. Hence the semi-sexual, semi-pornographic gun culture of checkpoints. For young men, there was an irresistible erotic charge in holding lethal power in your hands and using it to hold up an aid convoy; terrorize a column of refugees; threaten a journalist; make some innocent civilians lie in a ditch with their hands over their heads, cowering beneath your gunsights.

  In Kurdistan, by contrast, there has never been a state, so there has never been a monopoly of violence. The empires and nations that have ruled here never disarmed the peshmerga: they used them instead as militias and mercenaries. Guns are distributed to boys as soon as they reach adolescence. Carrying a gun is a sign that a boy has ceased to be a child and must behave like a man. The word peshmerga means not only “warrior” but also “the one who faces death.” The accent of meaning in the culture of the gun thus stresses responsibility, sobriety, tragic duty. For these reasons, therefore, I trust my peshmerga with their weapons. I can be sure there will be no crazy displays. Their weapons sit beside me on the front seat for two weeks, and after a day, I no longer give them any thought.

  Yet, if there are guns everywhere, who is the man who gives the orders? In the absence of a nation-state, there are no clear chains of command, no obvious lines of authority.

  Behjet and Taha belong to the party militias. But what about these police constables we pass, in blue-and-white uniforms, directing traffic with guns on their hips? What about these smart figures in military uniforms, with white puttees and red berets? These were the old Saddamic uniforms—based, I can see, on old British regimental models from imperial days. Who gives them their orders? On a quick drive through the teeming market streets of Dahuk, full of shoeshine boys and barrows piled high with cucumbers and tomatoes and white onions, I see party guns, police guns, and military guns.

  No one is exactly sure who is in charge. Some of the police and the army belong to the old Saddamic days, and are the oldest geological strata of order. Some of them must have been jash, collaborators with the old regime. (The worst of them, of course, the ones who tortured or took bribes, either fled or were done to death during the uprising of March 1991. The honest ones stayed, to keep the traffic moving in the crowded squares.)

  Then comes the new Kurdish army: you see them drilling around the headquarters of the Dahuk governorate, awkward sixteen-year-olds, in ill-fitting military fatigues and dirty white Puma running shoes, learning to march and shoot and fight for the first time. But they seem to be a new force; the backbone of the new state’s fighting force remains the peshmerga, the traditionally dressed warriors of the party militias.

  Behjet and Taha drive me to headquarters to drink the obligatory glass of sweet tea with the party bosses, receive their formal blessing, and set off on our journey. Usually nothing can be begun or concluded in this part of the world without such tea ceremonies.

  But there is no tea ceremony today, for the party headquarters is in a state of convulsion. It is election day for the seven posts in the party directorate for the Dahuk region. The big men come and go up and down the steps of the primary school. You can tell they are big men, because they do not wear the sober brown or gray-green khaki of the regular peshmerga; their shalvar are made of light, airy linen, with dramatic stripes down the seams and purple cuffs on the tunics; as they enter the building, an aura of deference expands around them; it is whispered that so-and-so was in charge of the military defense of Dahuk during the uprising of 1991; of another small, bustling, barrel-chested man with superb red jemadane on his head and an unruly sheaf of papers under his arm, it is said that he was commander of the mountain heights above the city.

  The grandees saunter up and down the front porch of the primary school, awaiting the result of the vote count inside, clicking their worry beads, discoursing in low whispers, in front of a life-sized portrait of Mulla Mustafa with his dagger in his shuttik.

  Inside, the count is going on in a large blue classroom, the light through the windows gauzy with cigarette smoke, the tiles underfoot littered with butts, the room buzzing with the whispers and rumors of the hundred peshmerga who are standing at the back watching the count. Some of them are writing the results down on cigarette papers; shaking their heads, concentrating on what is happening at the front of the room. A man at a table picks up a ballot paper, calls out the name of the person voted for, and one of the tallymen standing at eight blackboards around the room makes a mark beside the name mentioned. Scrutineers cluster around the man reading out the names on the ballot papers to make sure he reads only what is there. This is an open count, a public ritual conducted so that everyone can see that the elections are free and fair. It all happens with indescribable speed and elegance, the names read out, the tallyman grunting that he has heard, the sound of his chalk scratching a point, the next name read out, in a steady, untroubled flow, while, behind, the huge crowd watches intently as chalk marks pile up beside the names. Some of the candidates are women, but there is not a single woman in the room. Kurdish democracy, like Kurdish warfare, is a man’s affair.

  Over the next two weeks, I visit the Kurdish Parliament in Arbil and stare down from the visitor’s gallery at the members, about a hundred of them, with eight women among them, some in traditional Kurdish costume, some in business suits, and a few religious leaders in magnificent robes and turbans. I can see that this is a real Parliament, a place of genuine debate, in contrast to the cowed circus which Saddam used to convene once a year to show foreign visitors how well he treated “his” Kurds. But the most impressive evidence of nascent Kurdish democracy is this electoral count in a small-town schoolroom, with the men at the back, smoking, whispering, and scribbling on cigarette papers. What I can’t decipher is the relation between ancient and modern, between the tribe and the party, between the democratic equality of the election and the deferential, honorific relations between leaders and men.

  I get an important clue about these questions one night, much later, when I am sitting on the
darkened veranda of a house overlooking Sulaymaniyah, with the KDP party boss of the town, Muhyeddin Rahim. He is a thin, dark, wily man, tightly coiled and smart, who spent fifteen years representing the Kurdish cause in the U.S.A., from the basement of his house in suburban Washington, which was nicknamed the Pentagon of the Kurdish cause. We drink scotch together, with the bottle under the table, so as not to give offense to the peshmerga who post guard from the shadows of the veranda. “Off the record, Mulla Mustafa himself said to me,” Muhyeddin confides in his smoky voice, ‘Drink what you want. But be responsible. Do not lose your dignity. Do not throw yourself in the trash.’” Muhyeddin speaks in an inimitable Kurdish-American slang. He loves going “off the record”; he calls journalists “you guys.” He could be a Washington lobbyist, but he is not. He wears his jemadane at a jaunty angle on the top of his head, like a matador’s cap; and all night long, armed men approach his table, in a deferential crouch, to whisper in his ear, to pass him an urgent phone call, to clear away the dishes, to refresh his glass, to light his cigarettes, to bring him a new pack of Marlboros when he runs out.

  I ask him what is most on his mind, and he says, right away, “Outside support.” He is afraid of the fickleness of the Western conscience, our wandering moral attention span. If we do not keep our eyes on Kurdistan, Saddam will snatch it back. Muhyeddin eyes me through the cigarette smoke. “No offense, but we cannot afford to trust anyone.”

  How are your people doing? I ask him. “Terrible. There are a million people in Sulaymaniyah,” he goes on. “What do we have? A cigarette factory that doesn’t work because we are short of raw materials. And a cement factory that doesn’t work because we can’t import fuel oil to run the machines. So everybody is unemployed. I don’t know how long we can go on.” He takes a long drag on his cigarette. “Come to my office. I’ll show you what it’s like.”

  So I did. The minute he got out of his red Toyota, the petitioners began crowding around; old women in tears thrust tightly wrapped knots of paper into his hand, detailing some injustice, some wrong they thought he could solve; a farmer whose leg was blown off when his tractor ran over one of Saddam’s mines hobbled up on crutches, pulled up his trousers, and showed us his stump; one old woman brought forward an old man driven crazy when their sons were taken away and shot; and as Muhyeddin slowly edged his way through the crowd toward his office, beggars began pulling at his clothes, whispering, “Give me a pound of sugar, give me a pound of flour …” It was a medieval scene, powered by a medieval belief: if you could only speak to the good king, all your troubles would vanish. But they do not vanish. Muhyeddin is a warlord, a party leader, not the good king who works miracles.

  He himself is astonished that in the space of a year life has lifted him up from his Washington basement and dropped him back here to become boss of his hometown. And he is a warlord, though he would find the word too “Hollywood.”

  I ask him who owned this house in the old days. “A friend of a friend,” he says, looking at me slyly. “He’s in Baghdad now.”

  Muhyeddin stares out at Sulaymaniyah by night. “When I left here, fifteen years ago, there were no houses on this whole hillside. I came back, I hardly knew the place.” There must have been moments, in the Washington suburbs, when he wondered whether he still knew anything about the homeland whose cause he had made his own. I ask him whether it was hard to come home. No, he says happily, that would be your kind of problem, not mine.

  Besides, he says, we are a modern party. We are not a tribe. He doesn’t like this word “tribal.” It strikes him as condescending. When the modern Kurdish parties began, the power of the tribal chieftains, the agha, was immense. The people were in servitude to them. But now the power in the land is in the hands of the parties.

  He takes another secret call, confers with an aide, and then sneaks another clandestine sip of whiskey. Then I ask him, “Haven’t you, hasn’t the party leader, Massoud Barzani, simply become the new tribal chieftain?” No, no—he waves his hand. You misunderstand. Where are the landed estates of the Barzani family? Where is their great wealth? (Now, the Talabanis—the Barzanis’ great rivals—I could tell you about them, but that is another story.) Unlike Talabani, Barzani’s power comes, not from tribal connections, but from his example. He has fought for his people all his life. That’s why he has respect.

  “Look,” Muhyeddin says, waving down at the curfewed streets of Sulaymaniyah. “Out there is one of Barzani’s brothers. He does nothing for his people. I am not obliged to give him respect. So enough of this tribal business.”

  He makes me realize I am in the grip of a developmental fiction, according to which peoples must pass through stages, first the tribal, then the national, first the “backward,” “primitive,” and “traditional,” then the modern and “impersonal.” The Kurds upset this fiction. There are no neat stages, no befores and afters, no neat lines between ancient and modern, between tribal and national. They are alternating identities, reconciled within single lives. In suburban Washington, on a day off, around the house, Muhyeddin would have worn running shoes, a T-shirt, and chinos, and would have had a can of beer in his hand. For meetings with the State Department, there was the business suit. Back in Sulaymaniyah there are the shalvar, shuttik, and jemadane. He “is” all these uniforms: from the traditional comes devotion to his people; from the modern comes a cynical awareness of what is possible. He is both, and because there is a Kurdistan, he can be both.

  It is time to go. He asks me where I am headed next. I say Halabja. He snaps his fingers behind him, whispers an order to a crouching figure, and then says, “It is arranged.” What this means I discover only the next day, when I come into the lobby of my hotel. There, waiting for me in the driveway, is his own personal armored jeep as escort, with a machine gun mounted on the roof of the cab and half a dozen tanned and smiling peshmerga in combat fatigues. It takes me a while to realize that they are there only partly to protect me. The road to Halabja is not especially dangerous. The real reason for the escort lies in the anthropology of warlord etiquette and display. The point of the escort is to show me respect, and to demonstrate the power, influence, and authority of the man who had been smoking Marlboros and sipping scotch on the veranda beside me.

  THE REPUBLIC OF FEAR

  Behjet, Taha, our escort, and I set off on our travels, up the dizzying mountain roads through the passes, down into the grass-green valleys, past the clusters of low, flat-roofed, two-room adobe houses that rise up the hillside and shelter with their backs to the crags. From Dahuk to Barzan, village after village, dynamited or bombed during Saddam’s reign, is coming alive again. Piles of concrete blocks lie by the road; the sound of pickaxes, the slop of cement, the thud of shovels are to be heard everywhere. The turbaned shepherds are returning to the upland meadows with their flocks. The marshlands are being turned into rice paddies; the huge plains are sown with wheat. And everywhere there are signs of Western charity. Dutch, Swiss, German agencies have paid to rebuild the villages that Saddam laid waste. New dispensaries are opening; fresh-water supplies and outdoor latrines are being laid on; water pumps are purifying the streams. The cycle of infectious disease is being brought under control. A homeland is coming to life, and everywhere people are glad to see you. The little barefoot boys selling almonds by the side of the road cry “Allo Mistair” when they see my white face. The girls in purple kiras, bent under a weight of firewood, pause on the goat tracks and wave shyly at the LandCruiser. By the Bailey bridges, over the brown rushing rivers, the guarding peshmerga salute in greeting.

  Two years ago, such an opening of arms to outsiders would have been unthinkable. Saddam’s agents would have shadowed any foreign visitor here and questioned anyone he spoke to. Two years ago, I would have met averted gazes, closed faces, turned backs. Perhaps, too, in the most traditional mountain villages, I would have met with the suspicion visited upon all outsiders. All this has changed, with the coming of Kurdistan. Foreign-aid workers tell me they have never worke
d in a more welcoming environment. The reason is obvious: without us, without the aid, the overflights, the fitful but ongoing international attention, there would be no homeland, no Kurdistan. We—the outside world—have helped a people become a nation. Every person knows this. And so they wave greetings at white faces.

  When I stop to get a closer look at the rice paddies, just being sown, the men in turbans slop out of the mud and come up and shake my hand. “Allo, Mistair,” one says to me. “When you cut Saddam’s throat for us?”

  A good question. Saddam still haunts Kurdish dreams. As if to remind Kurds that he is there, just across the mountains, he orders the electricity supply, which comes from Mosul, turned off so that Dahuk is plunged into darkness. As if to remind the Kurds that he still holds their economic fate in his hands, he withdraws the 25-dinar note from circulation. Since most Kurds hold their money in wads of 25-dinar notes, the effect is to wipe out the value of their savings at a stroke.

  His grotesque chalets and palaces seem to be squatting on top of every mountain view; his prisons and barracks dominate every valley. These buildings are an exercise in the architecture of intimidation. The marble facings, the monumental terraces and gardens all say to the Kurds: You are nothing, I am everything. But the Kurds have taken their revenge. The palaces have been sacked and burned and ripped apart. Squatter families have run their washing lines up over the barracks and prisons. In Arbil, a family has even moved into Saddam’s execution center, near the Parliament. A woman has set up her oven and bakes nan in the room where Kurds were once shot; goats ramble about in the cells; children pile up stones and bricks in the gutted window embrasures to provide protection against the wind and rain.