Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

7. Kurdistan in the World

204 7 Kurdistan in the World Şam şekir e bes welat şîrintir e. (Damascus is sweet but the homeland is sweeter.) —Common Kurdish proverb The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is now a participant in the world’s system of states, even though it is, technically, only a “region” within a federated state. It conducts its own foreign policy business without going through Baghdad. Iraqi Kurdistan has long been called “autonomous” within Iraq, but it in many ways now exercises autonomy in the world, too. Isolated, desperate, and fighting a decades-old insurgency prior to 1991, the population of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region lived with very little awareness of what people there call “the outside”—the area beyond Iraq. They endured attacks by the Iraqi government that some, such as David McDowall (1997), have labeled “genocide” and attempted to break away from Iraq in 1991 in the wake of the Gulf War. Kurdistan’s inhabitants had been busy for decades fighting an insurgency against a(n) (Sunni) Arab other. They were walled off by forbidding mountains and official borders outside their control, hemmed in by media that was only local as well as totalitarian, and denied regular travel abroad. Despite their status as belonging to a significantly large ethnic group of twenty million or more, no elites represented them in the world’s power circles. No academic departments or chairs in Western universities took “Kurdish” as their defining category. No airport runways in their region received planes from abroad. Little global literature made its way to their location or was translated into their languages. When the Kurds assumed control over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, the authoritarian and abusive government of Iraq suddenly had much less influence over them. Only then were the people of Iraqi Kurdistan able to KURDISTAN IN THE WORLD 205 connect with the rest of the world and to participate vigorously in globalization . Seemingly overnight, after they succeeded setting up their own administrative zone following the Iraqi government’s withdrawal from the area, Kurdistanis started connecting with the outside world. They started to become a part of what Hannerz (1989) calls “the global ecumene.” Their emergent state became a “connected” place, a zone with a significant international presence in which a populace was increasingly aware of, and influenced by, knowledge, trends, and possibilities from the world beyond its borders. As I have recounted in this book, starting in the 1990s Iraqi Kurdistan became an outpost for many of the world’s major international relief and development agencies while a significant diaspora took shape simultaneously. Following the overthrow of the Ba‘thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, it became a recognized region in a federal Iraqi system, connecting still further with the world. It now has many of the features of a place that is globally plugged in, and Kurdish nationalism is coming into its own in a highly globalized context. Lord Acton wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, “Exile is the nursery of nationality , as oppression is the school of liberalism” (Dalberg-Acton 1907:286). A nationality born of exile is strongly evident. Liberal politics are in formation as well, even though, as I emphasized in chapter 5, they take their place alongside other forms of politicking. While much of the rest of Iraq remains dangerous and relatively cut off from the world, the Kurdistan region is becoming a kind of Kurdish hub. “Kurdistan,” the imagined, longed-for state that is home to the Kurdish nation, the whole Kurdish nation, has at least partially arrived in the form of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It now has a significant number of Kurdish residents who have relocated there from Iran, Syria, and Turkey in addition to returnees from the Western diaspora communities. Diasporic Kurdish nationalism now blends with homeland nationalism (Houston 2008; Wahlbeck 1999). Satellite television, significant flows of people and goods, mobile phones and the Internet are all features of daily life. New options for gender and kin relations, new institutional forms, and new citizenship possibilities present themselves. Significant wealth from oil revenues is having an impact on the overall economy, and much more significant economic growth is ahead if conflict can continue to be averted. Iraqi Kurdistan displays a kind of globalized modern, a modern that is fashioned locally, like all moderns, and encompasses its own vernacular particulars (e.g., Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Özyürek...