Khomeini, Kurdistan: An excerpt from "The Foreigner's Gift"
The following is an extended excerpt from "The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq by Fouad Ajami
Page 105-106
... an important outsider had turned up in Iraq: a religious scholar in his midforties, Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, a grandson of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In an episode of supreme irony, this man of impeccable pegigree arrived in Najaf from Iran --- to preach the virtues of secular rule. Iran, he told the Iraqis, was suffocating under the rule of clerical obscurantism. He described a reign of mediocrity and repression in his native land --- the intelligence services loose in the holy city of Qom and its seminaries, the lack of channels of free expression. Despite his very special pedigree, he had not been allowed access to the media. There was nothing odd, he said, about his opposition to his grandfather's notion of clerical rule. The old man himself, "Imam Khomeini," had taken up the notion of wilayat al-faqih only late in life, when he was in his fifties. The world changes, and men change with it: the notion of Islamic rule had played out in Iran and had failed.
Hussain Khomeini told of a letter he had sent to the "Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, putting before that man the internal and external problems of the regime. He had described unsparingly the disaffection at home and Iran's isolation abroad. He called for a plebiscite that would ask the people of Iran to let it be known, in an open manner, whether they still wanted theocratic rule. Let the ballot decide, he had written to the clerical leader. If the theocracy failed at the ballot box, the men of religion "would go back to their homes, and change would come without bloodshed." The revolution, he had told its clerical leader, had been "hijacked," "stolen," and it was time to press for the separation of religion and politics.
A witness had thus come to Iraq from the very apex of the Iranian system. He congratulated the Iraqis on their new liberty. In an astonishing break with his grandfather's legacy, young Khomeini even spoke well of the Americans. The new liberty, he reminded Iraqis, was a gift of the Americans. There was nothing in Iran, he lamented, save sterility and misery. There was nothing to emulate in Iran: it was up to the Iraqis to build a better polity of their own. Hussain Khomeini was an unusual man: he would not take the bait before him when asked the obligatory question about Israel. The matter of Israel, he said, needn't concern Iranian and Iraqis. Reform, modernity, economic progress: these were the themes that mattered. It was important, he reiterated, that the principle of theocratic rule be turned back, that the harm it had done to Shiism be faced and acknowledged.
Pages 28-33
Knowledge of a different kind of Iraq and about Iraqis came to me when I went north to Kurdistan. I flew with then Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih to his hometown and political base in Suleimaniyah. This political leader and technocrat, born in 1960, the son of a judge, had made his mark in that part of the country in the Kurdish regional government. He had known brief imprisonment under the Baath, then had made his way to Britain, where he completed a doctorate in statistics and computer modeling. Having represented the Kurds in London and Washington, he knew the world beyond the hill country of Kurdistan. He spoke Arabic, Kurdish, and English with equal ease. A can-do man and an optimist of enormous will and talent, he had left his base in Suleimaniyah to be part of this interim government. He was going to visit his family and be with his mother and to call on his political leader, Jalal Talabani.
After the checkpoints and the gunfire and the mortors of Baghdad, the tranquility of Suleimaniyah came as a surprise. There was peace in the streets and normalacy, a boom of sorts in the building trade, houses going up everywhere, a public park with gardens and a lake where Iraqi military barracks and facilities had once stood, a sunlit library of exquisite design with books tumbling out of the shelves, computer terminals, a children’s reading room. A kind of modernity was being grafted onto the place, the peace of a people who know that fate can turn cruel at any time.
The independence of this world was made clear to me on an evening drive into the hills to visit Jalal Talabani. A narrow road snaked into the mountains. The hills below and around looked majestic, stark, and endless. These hills would be wild with vegetation come spring, I was told. Fog was blowing in, and it was getting cooler. At the roadside, families had congregated for picnics and dinner.
There were fires being readied for the preparation of the meals. There was no privacy here, and no great need for it. Talabani’s heavily guarded residence was elegant but within the bounds of taste. This was no place in the Saudi mold and size. A gregarious, overpowering man in his mid-seventies, Talabani was surrounded by a dozen or so of his colleagues. He filled the gathering with his presence. No host could have been more attentive: he urged more food on me. We sat in his garden under a starlit sky, enveloped by the mountains. The heat --- and the insurgency --- of Baghdad seemed worlds away. There was no trace here of the anti-Americanism that dominates many an evening in Arab lands. Talabani spoke of America and Americans with genuine fondness; he wanted more Americans in Kurdistan. This man had known combat; in his youth, he had been a Marxist. But in his mountain lair, he harked back to an older role, a chief of his people. He took pride in the peace of Kurdistan: a Chinese restaurant had opened in Suleimaniyah, and he took pleasure in that. Indeed, he had some of that restaurant’s dishes added to an already huge dinner. Talabani exuded optimism. In the scramble for this new Iraq, he had a seat at the table. He had his younger colleagues represented in the interim government. But he had these hills, and the town below, and the armed militiamen defending this turf as well; they were what he relied upon.
The next day I was to go to the town of Halabja, little more than an hour’s drive away. This was where the Baath despotism had committed mass murder with chemical weapons in 1988; the Kurds had turned the place into a monument of Kurdish sorrow and memory. The landscape alternated --- patches of green, fields of sunflower seeds and pomegranates and corn broken by fields of wheat and barley and by the threshing floors of peasants. (I knew and loved these threshing floors from my childhood in Lebanon; politics yielded in my thoughts to the timeless ways of the land.) The villages by the road were forlorn and poor places that the Baath utopia of power and progress had never reached. I had not been prepared for this neglect. I had seen rural poverty in other Middle Eastern lands, but these villages dug into the hillsides with houses of rough stone and flat mud roofs were poor even by those standards. The satellite dishes atop the shacks and the mud houses were an ironic reminder that the “timeless” rhythm of the countryside had been broken.
There was something else that broke the rhythm and stood out against the landscape: mosques of a bluish color, large and elaborate, by the shacks. I did not count the mosques, but practically every village had one. They were the gift of the “charities” of Saudi Arabia: the plaques at the entrance to these mosques acknowledged the names of the charities and the donors. Deildar Kittani, a secular Kurdish woman --- with years of education in England behind her --- heaped scorn on these charities. These villages were bereft of roads and clinics and schools, she said, but no one had come to their rescue. This organized religious drive had blown here, bringing disputes and bigotry in its wake.
On a clearing at the foot of the hills, a monument to the victims of Halabja had been erected. It was elegant and subdued. Inside --- inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial --- on a black wall were inscribed the names of the five thousand people who perished when the Iraqi Army struck in March 1998. There was installation art and black-and-white photography that honored the dead. The director, a dignified, quiet man, led me through the monument.
I then went through the town itself --- a small, bustling place. The commerce in the shops offering the usual fare of out-of-the-way places was an odd consolation that life renews itself. I paid a visit to the cemetery on the town’s outskirts. Rows of neatly arranged headstones suggested method and care. One plot was reserved for a family of twenty-four people who had been cut down that day in 1988. This was the burden of Kurdistan’s --- and Iraq’s --- history.
Page 105-106
... an important outsider had turned up in Iraq: a religious scholar in his midforties, Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, a grandson of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In an episode of supreme irony, this man of impeccable pegigree arrived in Najaf from Iran --- to preach the virtues of secular rule. Iran, he told the Iraqis, was suffocating under the rule of clerical obscurantism. He described a reign of mediocrity and repression in his native land --- the intelligence services loose in the holy city of Qom and its seminaries, the lack of channels of free expression. Despite his very special pedigree, he had not been allowed access to the media. There was nothing odd, he said, about his opposition to his grandfather's notion of clerical rule. The old man himself, "Imam Khomeini," had taken up the notion of wilayat al-faqih only late in life, when he was in his fifties. The world changes, and men change with it: the notion of Islamic rule had played out in Iran and had failed.
Hussain Khomeini told of a letter he had sent to the "Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, putting before that man the internal and external problems of the regime. He had described unsparingly the disaffection at home and Iran's isolation abroad. He called for a plebiscite that would ask the people of Iran to let it be known, in an open manner, whether they still wanted theocratic rule. Let the ballot decide, he had written to the clerical leader. If the theocracy failed at the ballot box, the men of religion "would go back to their homes, and change would come without bloodshed." The revolution, he had told its clerical leader, had been "hijacked," "stolen," and it was time to press for the separation of religion and politics.
A witness had thus come to Iraq from the very apex of the Iranian system. He congratulated the Iraqis on their new liberty. In an astonishing break with his grandfather's legacy, young Khomeini even spoke well of the Americans. The new liberty, he reminded Iraqis, was a gift of the Americans. There was nothing in Iran, he lamented, save sterility and misery. There was nothing to emulate in Iran: it was up to the Iraqis to build a better polity of their own. Hussain Khomeini was an unusual man: he would not take the bait before him when asked the obligatory question about Israel. The matter of Israel, he said, needn't concern Iranian and Iraqis. Reform, modernity, economic progress: these were the themes that mattered. It was important, he reiterated, that the principle of theocratic rule be turned back, that the harm it had done to Shiism be faced and acknowledged.
Pages 28-33
Knowledge of a different kind of Iraq and about Iraqis came to me when I went north to Kurdistan. I flew with then Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih to his hometown and political base in Suleimaniyah. This political leader and technocrat, born in 1960, the son of a judge, had made his mark in that part of the country in the Kurdish regional government. He had known brief imprisonment under the Baath, then had made his way to Britain, where he completed a doctorate in statistics and computer modeling. Having represented the Kurds in London and Washington, he knew the world beyond the hill country of Kurdistan. He spoke Arabic, Kurdish, and English with equal ease. A can-do man and an optimist of enormous will and talent, he had left his base in Suleimaniyah to be part of this interim government. He was going to visit his family and be with his mother and to call on his political leader, Jalal Talabani.
After the checkpoints and the gunfire and the mortors of Baghdad, the tranquility of Suleimaniyah came as a surprise. There was peace in the streets and normalacy, a boom of sorts in the building trade, houses going up everywhere, a public park with gardens and a lake where Iraqi military barracks and facilities had once stood, a sunlit library of exquisite design with books tumbling out of the shelves, computer terminals, a children’s reading room. A kind of modernity was being grafted onto the place, the peace of a people who know that fate can turn cruel at any time.
The independence of this world was made clear to me on an evening drive into the hills to visit Jalal Talabani. A narrow road snaked into the mountains. The hills below and around looked majestic, stark, and endless. These hills would be wild with vegetation come spring, I was told. Fog was blowing in, and it was getting cooler. At the roadside, families had congregated for picnics and dinner.
There were fires being readied for the preparation of the meals. There was no privacy here, and no great need for it. Talabani’s heavily guarded residence was elegant but within the bounds of taste. This was no place in the Saudi mold and size. A gregarious, overpowering man in his mid-seventies, Talabani was surrounded by a dozen or so of his colleagues. He filled the gathering with his presence. No host could have been more attentive: he urged more food on me. We sat in his garden under a starlit sky, enveloped by the mountains. The heat --- and the insurgency --- of Baghdad seemed worlds away. There was no trace here of the anti-Americanism that dominates many an evening in Arab lands. Talabani spoke of America and Americans with genuine fondness; he wanted more Americans in Kurdistan. This man had known combat; in his youth, he had been a Marxist. But in his mountain lair, he harked back to an older role, a chief of his people. He took pride in the peace of Kurdistan: a Chinese restaurant had opened in Suleimaniyah, and he took pleasure in that. Indeed, he had some of that restaurant’s dishes added to an already huge dinner. Talabani exuded optimism. In the scramble for this new Iraq, he had a seat at the table. He had his younger colleagues represented in the interim government. But he had these hills, and the town below, and the armed militiamen defending this turf as well; they were what he relied upon.
The next day I was to go to the town of Halabja, little more than an hour’s drive away. This was where the Baath despotism had committed mass murder with chemical weapons in 1988; the Kurds had turned the place into a monument of Kurdish sorrow and memory. The landscape alternated --- patches of green, fields of sunflower seeds and pomegranates and corn broken by fields of wheat and barley and by the threshing floors of peasants. (I knew and loved these threshing floors from my childhood in Lebanon; politics yielded in my thoughts to the timeless ways of the land.) The villages by the road were forlorn and poor places that the Baath utopia of power and progress had never reached. I had not been prepared for this neglect. I had seen rural poverty in other Middle Eastern lands, but these villages dug into the hillsides with houses of rough stone and flat mud roofs were poor even by those standards. The satellite dishes atop the shacks and the mud houses were an ironic reminder that the “timeless” rhythm of the countryside had been broken.
There was something else that broke the rhythm and stood out against the landscape: mosques of a bluish color, large and elaborate, by the shacks. I did not count the mosques, but practically every village had one. They were the gift of the “charities” of Saudi Arabia: the plaques at the entrance to these mosques acknowledged the names of the charities and the donors. Deildar Kittani, a secular Kurdish woman --- with years of education in England behind her --- heaped scorn on these charities. These villages were bereft of roads and clinics and schools, she said, but no one had come to their rescue. This organized religious drive had blown here, bringing disputes and bigotry in its wake.
On a clearing at the foot of the hills, a monument to the victims of Halabja had been erected. It was elegant and subdued. Inside --- inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial --- on a black wall were inscribed the names of the five thousand people who perished when the Iraqi Army struck in March 1998. There was installation art and black-and-white photography that honored the dead. The director, a dignified, quiet man, led me through the monument.
I then went through the town itself --- a small, bustling place. The commerce in the shops offering the usual fare of out-of-the-way places was an odd consolation that life renews itself. I paid a visit to the cemetery on the town’s outskirts. Rows of neatly arranged headstones suggested method and care. One plot was reserved for a family of twenty-four people who had been cut down that day in 1988. This was the burden of Kurdistan’s --- and Iraq’s --- history.
posted by Steel Monkey at 9/12/2006 08:50:00 PM
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