Blood and Belonging (28 page)

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.

A
S 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.

PESHMERGA

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.

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.