Iraqi Kurdistan in Middle Eastern Politics

Alex Danilovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315468396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

The changes brought by the Arab Spring and ensuing developments in the Middle East have made the Kurds an important force in the region. Tel-Aviv and Washington place high hopes on Erbil to facilitate their dealings with Baghdad, Damascus, Teheran and Ankara. Kurds living in Turkey, Syria and Iran have been inspired by the successes of their brethren in Iraq who managed to gain significant independence and make remarkable achievements in state building. The idea of a greater Kurdistan is in the air.

This book focuses on how the Kurds have become a new and significant force in Middle Eastern politics. International expert contributors conceptualize current developments putting them into theoretical perspective, helping us to better understand the potential role the Kurds could play in the Middle East.

Part I

Soul searching

1Learning from history

Kurdish nationalism and state-building efforts

Anwar Anaid

The first aim of this chapter is to provide a brief historical background to Kurdish nationalist movements that mainly emerged during the First World War and after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. The second is to provide a broad-based analysis of the causes behind the failure of post-Ottoman Kurdish nationalists to establish a nation state. The third aim is exploring the dynamic changes that occurred in the Iraqi Kurdistan region since the 1991 popular uprising and the potential for the establishment of an independent state in the region.

Informed by a modernist approach to nationalism and the emergence of modern nation states, I argue that the Kurds failed to adapt to the socio-political changes required for a successful implementation of a nationalist project in a timely manner. The belated, slow and ineffective nationalist movements, combined with several other factors, led to the failure of Kurdish statehood efforts early in the twentieth century and the ancient Kurdish ethnie was not transformed into a unified Kurdish nation.

The factors that are likely to influence the developmental trajectory of Kurdish nationalism in the early twenty-first century are assessed in this chapter. It is argued that the political changes which have happened since the 1991 uprising by the Kurds in Iraq are relatively integrated. This, combined with the post-Arab Spring structural changes in the Middle East, have created more favorable conditions for the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in the Kurdistan region.

The historical background of Kurdish nationalism

A relatively large volume of literature is now available on the Kurdish national movements. Scholars such as Wadie (1960), Edmonds (1971), McDowell (1997), and Van Bruinissen (1991) have focused on different aspects of Kurdish history and Kurdish nationalism. More recently, Gunter (2004 and 2005) and O’Leary (2002) have written extensively about the latest developments in Kurdistan. There is also a large volume of literature written by the Kurds in Kurdish and other languages on the subject.

From time immemorial, the Kurdish people have inhabited the land of Kurdistan¹ situated in the mainly mountainous regions that – as a unified entity – includes parts of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and the former Soviet Republic of Armenia. A record of the Kurds’ ‘… interaction with Europeans appears in Xenophon’s Anabasis when the Greek army retreating from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea had to cope with the depredations of people called the karduchoi’² (Ghasimlow 2007: 38–39). Toward the end of the tenth century:

Shaddadids … and the other two major Kurdish dynasties – the Marwanids and Rawwadids – collectively dominat[ed] much of the huge region between the Caucasus range and northern Mesopotamia and Persia

(Blaum 2006: 3–4).

Kurdistan was the battlefield of numerous wars between successive Persian Empires on one side and Greeks, Romans and Byzantines on the other. Consequently, parts of Kurdistan changed hands many times. In more recent history, the Battle of Chaldiran between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires in 1514 is often mentioned as an historical event that divided Kurdistan, a division that was formalized in a treaty between the two empires in 1639 (Hassanpur 1992: 53).

Early experience of self-rule

Looking at the history of Kurdistan through a viewpoint corrupted by modern prejudices and informed by the characteristics of modern nation-states has led to the popular but misleading argument that the Kurds have never had a state of their own. The Kurdish principalities that existed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were largely ‘autonomous’ in running their affairs and only pledged loyalty to Ottoman or Safavid rulers based on the requirements of time and circumstance (see Dunn 1995: 75 and Fawcett 2001: 111). These Kurdish quasi-states were not ruled under the banner of a unified Kurdish entity that included all parts of Kurdistan, but they enjoyed relative freedom and independence. When these autonomous emirates’ liberties were endangered, or when they saw an opportunity for expansion of their domain of influence, these Kurdish principalities would rise against Ottoman rule. In 1820, for example, the famous Emirate of Soran, under the rule of Mohammad Pasha (1763–1846) or Pashai Kora (the Blind King as he is known in Kurdish), challenged Sultan Mahmud and established a Kurdish quasi-state based in Rawanduz.³ Mohammad Pasha gradually expanded his domain to include Mosul, Bahdinan and most of the Ottoman Kurdistan. According to Eppel (2008: 250):

… the Soran Emirate under Muhammad ‘Kor’ [⁴] became the strongest force in southern Kurdistan … within the confines of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of the Bohtan emirate under the Emir Badr Khan, who had his own ambitions toward bolstering his status and expanding the territory under his rule.

The Ottoman centralization campaign

From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the situation changed as the Ottomans pursued centralization policies, in response to the weakening status of the empire relative to its European counterparts (Gunter and Yavuz 2005: 2). As part of a broader defensive modernization strategy, the Ottoman Empire gradually reduced the regional self-rule of the Kurdish emirates and ‘the autonomous life of Kurdistan came to an end’ (1995: 5).

The Ottoman centralization policies gradually weakened the empire’s power base. On the one hand, the concentration of power antagonized the Kurds who ‘jealously’ protected their independence and liberties (Pasha 2001: 130).⁵ On the other hand, the modernization process weakened the religious foundation of the empire which was fundamental to the legitimacy of the Ottoman rulers. The Ottoman reforms planted the seeds of a gradual internal disintegration of the empire and its ultimate collapse.

The declining Qajar dynasty in Iran also suffered from structural weaknesses. Simko Agha Shikak used the opportunity provided by both Qajar’s feebleness and the chaos of the Great War. Simko managed to successfully reign in a large part of Kurdistan that crossed the boundaries of Iran and the Ottoman Empire.

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, as enshrined in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), the allies agreed to establish an independent Kurdish homeland. However, due to the changing geopolitics of the region, the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne (1923) ignored these promises, and Kurdish self-rule did not materialize. The situation worsened when the Kurdish territories of the Ottoman Empire were divided among the three emerging states of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. For the following decades, the last two countries remained under the influence of Britain and France, respectively.

The Kurds reacted to the imposition of artificial boundaries that divided Kurdistan along colonial lines of interest. Kurdish discontent with the new territorial arrangements manifested in numerous revolts. Sheikh Sa’id rose against the newly emerged Turkish state in 1925 and shook its foundation (see Olson 2006). Ghasimlow quotes Frooghi, the Iranian ambassador to Turkey at the time: ‘the uprising was so important that it threatened the existence of Turkey as a state’ (2007: 59).

The post-Ottoman socio-political changes were profound. The religious nature of Ottoman citizenship largely incorporated the Kurds into the empire. The Kurds and the Turks had a shared religion and faced the common threat of the Russian-Armenian cooperation. Such a religiously inspired alliance significantly delayed and lowered the intensity of a unified Kurdish demand for a nation state in the declining days of the Empire.

The Kurdish allegiance to the Ottoman rulers was a pragmatic strategy in an age of faith-based empires. The misfortune started when the Kurdish masses failed to grasp that the nature of global politics had radically shifted toward secular ethnonationalism. Centuries of shared historical experience was not enough to keep the otherwise diverse Ottoman ethnic groups together in a context when the formation of nation states with clear ethnic boundaries became a globally prevalent political ideology.

In the post-Ottoman period, the secular, ethnocentric and exclusive nationalist ideologies of the emerging states that incorporated Kurdistan (Turkey, Iraq and Syria) alienated the Kurds. Iran experienced similar changes after the collapse of the Qajar Dynasty, and the emergence of a nationalist state under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The often discriminative policies of the newly established states meant that the emergence of further Kurdish nationalist movements in the later years was inevitable.

The onset of Kurdish nationalism

Modernist theoreticians of nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm, suggest that nationalism is a recent and modern development in human political history. In explaining the factors behind the emergence of nationalism and modern nation states, they often referred to modernization and the rise of capitalism as the underlying dynamics. The development and expansion of capitalist markets on a national scale needed nationalism as a supportive and complementary political ideology for the state to be able to mobilize the masses. In this phase of capitalist evolution, nationalism encouraged the standardization of all factors that helped in strengthening countrywide markets, including a wide-ranging legal system, a uniform state bureaucracy, and a national language. Nationalist ideologies also filled in the ideological vacuum created by the rise of secularism and weakening religious identities (see Anaid 2014).

Smith (2002: 7–16) agrees that ‘nationalism’ is a modern occurrence but he argues that ‘nation’ has an ancient core called ethnie, which includes:

… a self-designated collective proper name, myths of origin, migration, and election, an ethno-history including memories of sages, heroes, and golden ages, one or more elements of shared culture, including perhaps a link with a particular ancestral terrain, and a measure of social solidarity among, at least, the elites.

(2002: 25)

If we adapt a Smithian perspective on what constitutes an ethnie, a Kurdish ethnie had existed since time immemorial. The historical evidence suggests that the emergence of Kurdish national consciousness, at an elite level, dates backs several centuries. The classical Kurdish poet, Ahmad-e-Khani of Botan (1650–1706), undoubtedly demonstrates nationalistic aspirations (Edmonds 1971, Hassanpour 1992). For centuries, outsiders have referred to the Kurds as a nation. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes from T. Roe (1899: 310) that ‘in 1616 the [Mogul] King … tooke occasion to take in by force a reuolted Nation to the East of Babilon. The People are Called Coords’ (OED 2008). While in modern times, as Yavuz and Gunter argue ‘… the major difference between Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi … and Kurdish nationalism is the presence of the state [in the case of non-Kurdish ethnic groups]’ (2001: 33).

Most of the modern states emerged after the First World War and transformed Smith’s ethnies into modern nations animated by the ideology of nationalism. These states worked on internal homogenization, including the standardization of language, bureaucracy, economy and other factors that are the foundation of a modern nation state. If we take language as an example, the presence of many regional dialects was/is common among other languages and is not unique to Kurdish. However, these linguistic differences are less visible in established national languages because of deliberate state policies that – among other things – had promoted a standard print language or what Anderson (2006) refers to as ‘print capitalism.’ According to Erikson:

At the identity level, nationhood is a matter of belief. The nation … is a product of nationalist ideology; it is not the other way around. A nation exists from the moment a handful of influential people decide that it should be so, and it starts, in most cases, as an urban elite phenomenon. In order to be an efficient political tool, it must nevertheless eventually achieve mass appeal.

(1993)

While Kurdish nationalism flourished among the Kurdish elites at the beginning of the last century (for example, see Bedr Khan 2004), the nationalizing elite failed to establish a modern Kurdish state which could have supported the task of nation building, the main reason being the failure of Kurdish nationalism to achieve the necessary mass appeal that Erikson refers to above.

The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent partition of Kurdistan denied the Kurds an historic opportunity to strengthen the binding principles of their nation through the systematic efforts of a Kurdish state. While the established nation states after the First World War such as Turkey and Iran, underwent a process of nation building and the modernization of their respective languages, these processes were often reversed in Kurdistan due to the deliberate anti-Kurdish policies of these states.

Different historical experiences and subjection to different socio-economic organizations imposed by the boundaries of the new states further increased the diversion from a unified nationalistic project.⁶ It is surprising that despite systematic policies for the subversion and assimilation of their ethnic identity, the Kurdish people have been able to keep the core aspects of their national uniqueness intact.

The Kurds in Iraq

Following the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British imperial mandate, Arab forces that had supported British war efforts against the Ottomans were placed in charge of ruling the newly emerged Iraq. ‘Emir Faysal … – Sharif of Mecca – was made [the] King of Iraq by the British High Commissioner’ in 1921 (Fatah 2006: 6). A major factor behind promoting Arab nationalism and the subsequent establishment of Arab states was the British and French imperial interests in using Arab patriotism again...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Soul searching
• Part II Iraqi Kurdistan in Middle Eastern politics
• Conclusion
• Index