The Assassins' Gate (55 page)

Government jobs went to Kurds; the mayor and the police chief were Kurds; all the television networks were in Kurdish; the Arabs were being driven out of the city; the Arabs had no one powerful to back them: The list of Arab complaints was long, and it bore a striking resemblance to the predicament of the Kurds in Kirkuk under Saddam. To these men, the Kurds were now the benefiters. “There's more injustice now than under Saddam,” a bearded, tough-looking man named Ethir Mohamed insisted. “Even if Saddam did these things, what's our guilt? We did nothing to them.”

In Kirkuk, the Arab-Kurdish conflict was intensified by the insurgency. The Kurds were often considered collaborators of the Americans, while many of the imported Arabs sympathized with the Sunni or Shiite resistance forces. Moqtada al-Sadr often thundered that the Kurds were Muslim apostates and faced damnation; hundreds of Kurds fled to Kirkuk from Samarra and other Arab cities after being denounced in Sunni mosques as traitors. The Arab men in the cinder-block house were followers of Sadr's representative in Kirkuk; their mosque had been raided by American soldiers who discovered a cache of weapons and arrested around thirty people. All of the men vowed to stay in the city. “Kirkuk has turned into a jungle,” Ethir Mohamed said. “If someone comes to force me to leave, then either I'll kill him or he'll kill me. This is the law of the jungle.”

Among imported Arabs, I heard that the chemical weapons dropped on Halabja were actually sacks of plaster dust. This theory was offered by a fireman employed by the oil company, whose house in Arrapha looked directly across a field at the former mansion of Ali Hassan al-Majid—known, ever since he directed the gassing of the Kurds, as Chemical Ali. An Arab woman who was a retired teacher from the southern city of Kut said, “Iraq is part of the Arab nation, not the Kurdish nation. The Kurds are guests in Iraq—and they want to kick the Arabs out?” What I seldom heard was any acknowledgment of the crimes committed against Kurds in Kirkuk, or any shame at having been the benefiters. This only deepened the sense among Kurds, especially among the deportees who were returning, that it would not be possible for them to live alongside imported Arabs in Kirkuk.

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THE KURDISH PLAN
for Kirkuk was absolutely clear. The imported Arabs had to leave, every one of them, even those born in the city. The government should compensate them, and perhaps find them land and jobs in their provinces of origin, but allowing them to stay in Kirkuk would be to endorse the injustice of Arabization. After Kurdish deportees had been resettled, and the earlier demographic balance had been restored, the province would hold a census. (The 1957 census showed that the provincial population was almost 50 percent Kurdish.) The outcome of this census was a foregone conclusion to the Kurds: They would be the majority group in the province. Equally predictable was the result of the referendum that would follow: The province would vote to join the autonomous region of Kurdistan, and the city of Kirkuk would go with it.

None of this was stated in Iraq's interim constitution. Article 58, which delineated “Steps to Remedy Injustice,” was purposefully vague about the future of Kirkuk. It called for “the injustice caused by the previous regime's practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk” to be redressed. It stated that “individuals newly introduced to specific regions and territories … may be resettled, may receive compensation from the state, may receive new land from the state near their residence in the governorate from which they came, or may receive compensation for the cost of moving to such areas.” (Not “must.”) The status of contested cities like Kirkuk would be deferred until after the census and a permanent constitution, “consistent with the principle of justice, taking into account the will of the people of those territories.” This bland language raised more questions than it answered. Did justice belong to individuals, or to groups? Did it require only the restoration of confiscated property, or did it also require the restoration of Kirkuk's demography to the period before Arabization? Wouldn't forcing Arabs to return to the towns “from which they came” create new injustices and perpetuate the cycle of revenge?

Although there had been nothing like the apocalyptic communal bloodshed that some predicted, Kirkuk suffered a steady rise in insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, and a campaign of assassination against the city's leaders. Most of the murdered officials were Kurds, though a few Arab politicians and a tribal sheikh who had occupied disputed lands around the village of Amshaw fell victim as well. Arrests were seldom made in these cases. Kurds in Kirkuk cast suspicion on Turkish intelligence agents and their allies in the hard-line Iraqi Turkoman Front. The Turkish government repeatedly asserted that a Kurdish power grab in Kirkuk would be regarded as a prelude to an independent state and therefore a threat to Turkey itself, with its own minority population of rebellious Kurds. The Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, compared Kirkuk to Bosnia and issued a veiled warning: “Everyone is aware that this is the issue that could end up being the greatest headache for Iraq.”

Hasib Rozbayani was the Kurdish deputy governor for resettlement and compensation, the official responsible for the returning refugees. Rozbayani was a leading spokesman for the emerging policy of reverse ethnic cleansing. He had spent years teaching social studies and statistics in exile in Sweden, and, with a head of unruly curly hair, spectacles, and a habit of mumbling questions to himself as he talked, he had a mild professorial air. When we spoke in his living room, he was barefoot in sweatpants and an untucked shirt, and he kept absently picking up the automatic pistol that lay on the sofa beside him, then startling himself and setting it down again. Propped against his stereo system was a Kalashnikov.

Rozbayani left no doubt about the future of the imported Arabs. Their departure from Kirkuk was necessary for a variety of reasons, he said, including psychosocial ones: The Arabs suffered from guilty consciences, since most of them were criminals and former Baathists, which would make them uneasy about staying; they knew they didn't belong in the city and had no friends among the other groups; their continued presence would be a provocation to Kurds, inciting social conflict. Moreover, unemployment was already too high in Kirkuk.

Those Arabs who hadn't left Kirkuk before the census and referendum would not be allowed to vote there, Rozbayani said. He did not expect many Arabs to be living in Kirkuk by then. “They have to leave,” he said. Imported Arabs had to leave even if no one contested their house or land, because their fault was a collective one. After the census and the referendum on the status of Kirkuk, he told me, Arabs could return to the region—for a visit.

I told Rozbayani about a couple I'd met: The husband came from central Iraq in the 1960s; the wife was an “original Arab” whose family had lived in Kirkuk for generations. Their children grew up with playmates from a mixed Kurdish-Turkoman family next door. What should happen to this couple?

“They have to return,” he said.

“The wife is a native of Kirkuk.”

“She can follow him.”

My questions struck Rozbayani as misplaced humanitarianism, and he threw them back at me. “Of course, I accept brothership and friendship,” he assured me. “But we know openly that the Arabs have taken lands, occupied lands, they have gone to every house to investigate people, execute people, take their sons, their girls—and you will say, ‘Welcome, Iraq is for all people'? It's funny, I say.”

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MUCH OF
Rozbayani's and other Kurds' unhappiness was directed at the American-led coalition. They had expected something more than studied evenhandedness from the United States. A
peshmerga
living in an abandoned house in Amshaw asked me, “Why, when the Kurds are your friends, do you now treat us just the way you treat other Iraqis, including the Republican Guard?”

The first CPA representative in Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul Bremer, was a slim, brown-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman named Emma Sky. She spoke some Arabic and once worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the invasion of Iraq, Sky answered a request from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for volunteers to join the occupation authority. Being English- and Arabic-speaking put her in the minority at the CPA, and she was also out of step with its ideological assumptions.

“Bringing democracy—to many Americans it's like the new religion,” she told me in Baghdad. “People come here as missionaries. I've never had that as a mission. I don't have the sense of democracy as this good that we should be promoting around the world.” Rather than ignoring or breaking down the undemocratic tribal structure of Iraqi society, she said, the occupiers should see it as a natural outgrowth of a harsh environment and find ways to allow more people to participate within it. She found American nationalism, with its sunny certainties and its zeal, a strange and troubling force. I reminded her that it was not entirely different from British nationalism, which had once conquered half the world (including Iraq) in the name of the white man's burden. “Maybe we had it in the UK forty or fifty years ago,” Sky said. “Iraqis are always saying, ‘Oh, the Brits, you know how to do this far better than the Americans,' as if it's something genetic that's been passed down to you. My generation have never grown up with ruling other countries.” Yet she was well aware of following in the footsteps of her colonial forebears, and, as a result, of bringing a feel for Iraqis and their history that most Americans might not have. Perhaps because she knew the name of the British general who had “liberated” Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, Sky was better able to think skeptically about the current project than her American colleagues who did not. In Baghdad she visited Gertrude Bell's tomb; she was a little haunted by Bell and her suicide.

Upon arriving in Kirkuk, Sky saw that the most urgent task was to reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphalist attitude of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them here. As she traveled around the province, her prestige among Arabs soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave Sky his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she's a man, not a woman.” Sky believed passionately that Kirkuk could be a model for an ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum thinking,” she said. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate regions, where people don't have to deal with other groups. But can you have a country where people are happy with each other, where people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” She was instrumental in securing millions of dollars from Iraqi oil revenue to fund the new Kirkuk Foundation, which would give grants to local civic groups that were trying to avoid the logic of ethnic politics. Compared with the problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk's should be relatively easy to solve. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn't have irreconcilable differences—yet.”

Over time, with no apparent solution to the legacy of ethnic cleansing, many Kurds began to regard Emma Sky and the CPA as biased toward Arabs. When she met the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani in Suleimaniya, he snapped, “They call you Emma Bell.” His gibe captured the full irony of Sky's situation. She was trying to bring Europe's postcolonial values—diversity, tolerance, a sense that people could solve their problems if they would sit down together and talk—to a place where zero-sum politics had been the rule ever since her ancestress Gertrude Bell had drawn the map and set up the modern state in such a way that Sunni Arabs became the holders of power and Kurds saw their dream of nationhood dissolved.

Nor did it help Sky's cause that the CPA's mechanism for untangling and redressing grievances in Kirkuk—the Iraq Property Claims Commission, which Sky helped set up—didn't begin to hear claims until April 2004 and still hadn't issued its first decision by early 2005. Azad Shekhany, a Kurd who once directed the commission, concluded that the whole thing was an elaborate stall to keep the peace, and he put the blame on the CPA. “I understand they don't want to send the Arabs back to their original places, but they don't want the Kurds to be unhappy as well,” Shekhany said. “So they just delay everything by bureaucracy.”

The commission was receiving far fewer claims than anticipated—exactly 1,658 as of the July morning in 2004 when I visited its well-equipped and nearly empty offices. Two Kurdish women in billowing black robes—Jamila Safar and her mother, Khadija Namikh—were seated at a desk making a claim. In March 1991, during the uprising in Kirkuk and the north that followed the Gulf War, Safar told me, her father died. On the day of his burial, March 13, she and her mother returned from the cemetery to find their house surrounded by soldiers, Baath Party members, and men with masked faces who worked for Chemical Ali. “Are you Kurds or Arabs?” the men demanded. Everyone in the neighborhood was out on the street—Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomans, grouped by ethnicity. Tanks blocked the streets and helicopters circled overhead as the Kurdish men, including Safar's older brother, were bound and taken away in buses. The women and children were loaded onto other buses and driven into the mountains, where they were dumped and told to walk north. As Safar and her mother walked, they were bombed by aircraft overhead, and several neighbors died in front of them. They stayed at the Iranian border for three months. When they ventured back to Kirkuk, their house—along with two thousand others in the neighborhood—had been destroyed.

“Thank God, all I found was dust,” Safar said. “Thank God for our safety.”

A staff lawyer was filling out a lengthy form for them. “Was the house brick or clay?”