The Assassins' Gate (56 page)

“Brick,” Safar's mother said. “Finish, please. I'm sick, I can't wait.”

“Do you want to take the land or do you want compensation?” the lawyer asked.

“We want the land,” Safar said.

The lawyer wrote that they wanted the land and money to build a new house. “Why didn't you go to the commission for people with damaged houses in 1991?”

“I did,” the mother said. “I gave them an application, but they didn't give us anything.”

An Arab man in his late thirties came over and said hello to the two women with a shy reserve. His name was Ayob Shaker and he had once been their neighbor. On the day of the deportation, he had helped other Kurds in the area load furniture on the buses. He was also a soldier in the Republican Guard, and when he came back to Kirkuk from Baghdad after the fall of the regime, he found a group of
peshmerga,
including another former neighbor, occupying his house. Though the property claims statute had been amended to allow Arabs displaced after the war to make claims as well, Shaker said that his children had been threatened by the
peshmerga,
and he was afraid to file for compensation.

“Believe me, nobody knows for sure, but mostly it's the Kurds who are running the city,” he said. “For me as an Arab, if I want a job I have to get a paper from a Kurdish party saying I'm not a criminal.” Chance had brought him to this office on the same day as the two women he used to greet every morning on his way to work. He felt that the very injustice he had once seen done to them was now befalling him. “The same thing,” he said. “The government did it to them. The
peshmerga
did it to us.”

The women agreed, and there was a moment of good feeling between the old neighbors.

“Only God and America can solve the problem,” the Arab said.

What about the new Iraqi government? I asked.

“I don't know,” the mother said. “Is there a government right now or not? I know nothing. I know there is day and there is night. I don't even remember my own name.”

The staff lawyer finished filling out the form. The daughter smiled and said, “I think that's it—there will be justice and our case will be finished.”

I asked the Arab if there will be justice in Kirkuk. He hesitated. “I don't think so. It's very difficult.”

The daughter said, “Why are you making things hard?”

“Because those who are now in the city don't understand each other,” he said. “I am a son of Kirkuk”—an original Arab—“and for thirty-five years nobody could hurt us. Now I'm feeling upset, because of my house.”

I asked the women if Kurds would ever do to Arabs what Arabs had done to Kurds.

“No, they won't do that,” the daughter said. “Believe me, I swear to God they won't do that.”

“They've done
more
than the Arabs,” Shaker said.

The daughter stiffened and coldly eyed her former neighbor. “Where is that?”

“I know one person who made half a tribe run away from their houses in the city.”

The warm feeling was gone. The daughter pointed out that Shaker had already forgotten what happened to the Kurds in Kirkuk. Abruptly, she excused herself and helped her mother out of the Iraq Property Claims Commission.

*   *   *

BECAUSE KIRKUK
wasn't yet the scene of large-scale combat, the city remained a hidden flaw in the broken Iraqi landscape. But what was a local dispute between neighbors would inevitably become one of the greatest obstacles to making Iraq democratic and keeping it whole. In the summer of 2003, I had a conversation with Barham Salih, who was then the prime minister of the regional government in Suleimaniya. A strong supporter of the American invasion and of Kurdish participation in a democratic and federal Iraq, he was also mindful of his constituents' ingrained suspicion of Baghdad and longing for independence. For twelve years, Suleimaniya was one of the two capitals of Iraqi Kurdistan, a de facto independent state under the protection of the allied no-fly zone. A generation of Kurds grew up speaking no Arabic and feeling no connection to Iraq, and the idea of rejoining a country that not long ago visited genocide and ethnic cleansing on Kurds was a hard sell.

“While I have accepted the fate history has landed my people with, I want to assure my kids and the new generations to come that the new Iraq will be fundamentally different,” Salih said. “If the Arabs of Iraq do not have the courage to come to terms with the terrible past that we have had and make right those terrible injustices that befell my people, I would have extreme difficulty convincing the doubters in Suleimaniya's bazaar that Iraq is our future.”

I went to see Salih again in June 2004, on his first day as deputy prime minister of the newly sovereign Iraqi interim government. After a year of occupation and insurgency, his mood was darker, and his interpretation of the interim constitution on Kirkuk was uncompromising. “The
indigenous
people of Kirkuk, the original communities of Kirkuk, should be the ones who decide the fate of Kirkuk—not those who were brought by Saddam or any outside power,” he said. The imported Arabs were victims, too, “tools for a vile policy, for Saddam wanted to create the environment for a permanent civil war between Kurds and Arabs.” But, Salih added, “Kirkuk is not Bosnia, and in fact the Kurdish leadership has demonstrated the utmost restraint in the way that it has handled Kirkuk. In Bosnia you'd have seen civil war.”

I asked Rowsch Shaways, one of two vice presidents of the interim government, what would happen if the imported Arabs refused to leave Kirkuk. Would they be loaded into trucks and driven south to Basra and Kut?

“Well, there should be a continuous campaign to persuade them,” he said.

Wouldn't the attempt to force Arabs out of Kirkuk lead to reprisals against Kurds in Arab regions of Iraq? “No, it's a different situation,” he said. “Kurds who are living in the south, they were coming here very normally, not through a campaign of changing ethnicity.” After the reversal of ethnic cleansing, Shaways said, “everybody can live where he wants. But before that you have to reverse the unjust policy which was done to strengthen the Baath Party and to change the composition of some regions.” The Americans had waited too long to resolve the problem of Kirkuk, he said, adding, “This is my opinion: Kirkuk is a part of Kurdistan.”

Of the top Kurdish officials, I imagined that the person who would find the question of Kirkuk most vexing was Bakhtiar Amin. He grew up in Imam Qasim, the old Kurdish neighborhood near the citadel. He and his family were expelled from Kirkuk during Arabization; his relatives were jailed and tortured. Amin, in his mid-forties, lived in exile for years, working as a human-rights activist in Europe and founding the International Alliance for Justice. He then became the first human-rights minister of a sovereign Iraqi government. But when we sat down in his spacious Baghdad office to talk about justice in Kirkuk, Amin made it clear that he was answering as a Kurd.

After recounting the history of Kurdish oppression in great detail, the minister warned me that the situation in Kirkuk was becoming explosive. The Americans, with their hands full in the rest of Iraq, “want to keep the calm there—the calm of a cemetery.” Amin added, “It's important not to be naïve with your foes and Machiavellian with your friends. Patience has its limits for victims as well.” The only solution, he insisted, was to return the demography of Kirkuk to what it was before Arabization, helping Arabs to resettle in the south.

I asked how he would answer an Arab youth who said, “Mr. Human Rights Minister, Kirkuk is my home. I don't have another. Why do I have to leave?” Amin replied that he would introduce the young Arab to a young Kurd who had lost his house and grown up in a tent, whose brother or sister had died of starvation or cold. He would tell the young Arab, “Your father, your mom, they are from a different area and they came here and they took these people's house, and this is what they did to those children. And I will help you to have a decent life where your parents came from.”

*   *   *

KURDISH POLITICIANS
and the constituents they represented wanted a guarantee that the future in Iraq would not repeat the past. After the fall of the regime, the Kurds negotiated hard with the Americans and their fellow Iraqis on two tracks: They sought as much power as possible in Baghdad and a strengthened autonomous region in the north. They understood that the interim and permanent constitutions would be the key to their desires, and they put their considerable skills to work on these documents, often outmatching the young, inexperienced Americans and divided Iraqis with whom they dealt. They were increasingly alienated from their American allies, who always seemed readier to soothe the recalcitrant Arabs than the dependable Kurds. Several Kurdish politicians told me that a repetition of 1975, when the United States withdrew its support and abandoned them to the Baathist regime, now seemed entirely possible. This kind of talk had the feel of an extreme reaction born of extreme experience, a kind of historical neurosis in which Iraq's Kurds and Arabs were both trapped.

Samir Shakir Sumaidaie, the interim Iraqi ambassador to the UN, said, “I cannot blame a Kurd for feeling anger. But I can plead with him to contain his anger, because angry people often do stupid things, and they end up hurting themselves. Arabs, on the other hand, must acknowledge the injustice that has been done to the Kurds. By acknowledging the injustice, you take the poison out of the system. I've told this to Arabs in Kirkuk: We must admit what was done in the name of Arab nationalism to the Kurds, and of which you were perhaps the unwitting instrument.” Kurds' anger, he said, would cool only when they began to see justice done, “especially for the families that suffered most in Kirkuk.” When Sumaidaie made these arguments to his fellow Iraqi Arabs, he told me, the response was grudging. Kurdish intransigence over Kirkuk, with occasional threats of war and separation, was having its answer among Arabs. “Nationalism ignites nationalism,” Sumaidaie said. “I think we should get away from nationalism and move toward humanism.”

A government official in Baghdad who was a self-described Iraqi liberal told me that more and more leaders were reacting to Kurdish threats with an attitude of “good riddance.” The benefits in keeping the Kurds happy might not outweigh the costs. “The truth of the matter is, the Arabs of this country—eighty percent—are getting tired of these threats of secession,” he said. “And one day their answer will be: ‘Secede.'”

*   *   *

NEVERTHELESS
, during three visits to Kirkuk, I kept meeting citizens of each ethnicity who still wanted to live together. In particular, Kirkukis who had spent their whole lives in the city seemed more willing to surrender part of their own historical claim to it in order to coexist peacefully with other groups. The idea of a multiethnic city, I realized, still existed in the minds of people in Kirkuk; it was not just a desperate piece of cheerful public relations from American and British officials.

An Arab in his twenties named Mohamed Abbas, whose family had come to Kirkuk when he was six for his father's military service, described to me the hurt of losing Kurdish friends after the war. “I don't want to leave because I've gotten used to this place, to the way of living here.” He had recently been detained overnight by Kurdish police for having no ID card. “Maybe if this had happened during Saddam's time, I would have been locked up for days,” he said. “And a Kurd might have been tortured.” Abbas thought that Arabs and Kurds could live together in Kirkuk if the politicians allowed them to do so. “We're human beings and they're human beings,” he said. “In my opinion, the city of Kirkuk, the Kurds have every right to it. They have more rights in Kirkuk and they deserve Kirkuk. But still, we can't just go anywhere and leave the house. Where would we live?”

On the other side of town, I met a young Kurdish engineer named Sardar Mohamed. He had somehow survived all the years of ethnic cleansing in the old Kurdish neighborhood of Imam Qasim, where he and his wife and children were squeezed into one house with his two brothers and their families. “If there had been no war, in fifteen years you would find no Kurds at all in Kirkuk,” he said. When the American invasion seemed imminent, Mohamed went down into his basement and cut a square out of the plaster wall, behind which there was a concealed room. He planned to hide there if the Baathists started rounding up young Kurdish men, as they had done in 1991. Instead, the Baathists fled the city. After the fall of the regime, Mohamed's family experienced a rebirth of sorts. They built a new outhouse and extended the kitchen, and they filled it with new appliances. “It wasn't that I didn't have the money,” Mohamed said. “But I wasn't sure I would keep this house. I didn't know if I'd need the money in the future for food.” His wife had dropped out of school because there was no chance for a Kurdish woman who didn't correct her nationality to find a job. After the liberation, she reenrolled and obtained her degree. “Before, we didn't know when we'd be arrested or expelled,” Mohamed said. “Now we have hopes for the future.”

As for the Arabs who enjoyed all the rights and privileges that were denied his family, Mohamed was of two minds. It would be easier for everyone if they left. “But their kids, when they're born here, there's a kind of relationship to the land, and it's not those kids' fault that they're in love with the place where they were born,” he said. “It's unfair for them to have to leave.” The only reason for Kirkuk to join Kurdistan, he said, was that Arabs didn't treat Kurds fairly. The important thing was for Iraqis' minds to change. If the imported Arabs would just admit that they came to Kirkuk through Arabization and displaced the Kurds, “They can stay and even bring more Arabs,” Mohamed said. If a government in Baghdad ensured that all Iraqi citizens would be treated equally, he would gladly live under its flag instead of in Kurdistan.