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“Common Sense, or A Step Pregnant with Enormous Consequences: Some Thoughts on the Possible Secession of Iraqi Kurdistan”
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PETER SLUGLETT Common Sense, or A Step Pregnant with Enormous Consequences Some Thoughts on the Possible Secession of Iraqi Kurdistan At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq had enjoyed autonomy from Baghdad for some eleven years. In consequence, the possible secession of the Kurdish provinces (Dohuk, Arbil, Sulaymaniyya, and perhaps Ta’mim, which includes Kirkuk) to form an independent “Iraqi Kurdistan” was and still is very much on the political agenda, encouraged by the Kurdish provinces’ de facto separation from the rest of the country, the fact that the younger generation of Iraqi Kurds knows English better than Arabic, and of course the seemingly endless chaos in the rest of the country. The state of Iraq was created in 1920; as I show, the incorporation of the Kurdish areas into Iraq on the same footing as other parts of the state (that is, without providing for special treatment of the Kurdish population) generally passed off without major incident between the early 1930s and the 1960s and early 1970s. Noises made regarding a “Grand Kurdistan”—which would include the Kurdish parts of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—have generally been rhetorical gestures rather than calls to arms, not least because of the very different aims of the various Kurdish political parties and groupings within the three states. Let me try to set the topic into some sort of comparative framework. First, although the map of much of the Middle East was redrawn after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and although many of the states that were created at that time are not exactly “natural” political enti- [320] Peter Sluglett ties, their boundaries have generally remained fairly stable since then. Apart from the various trajectories of Israeli expansion, the creation of Saudi Arabia, the boundary changes made after the British withdrawal from South Yemen in 1967, and the unification of “the two Yemens” in 1990, the only significant border change in the area was the transfer (by the French mandatory authorities) of the sanjak of Alexandretta (now the Turkish province of Hatay) from Syria to Turkey in 1938. Besides the Iraqi Kurds, the only other significant separatist/autonomist groups in the region (involving military operations that have incurred considerable loss of life) are the Kurds of Turkey, whose separatist sentiments have been largely inspired by the Turkish government’s blanket insistence that, to simplify a more complex reality, all Muslims within the borders of the Turkish Republic must be Turks, thus denying the Kurds’ identity as an ethnolinguistic minority. However, current thinking on Turkish politics considers that the process of “traveling towards” European Union (eu) membership (which would entail “addressing civil-military relations, expanding human rights, promoting economic stability, and realizing the rule of law”) will inevitably have positive results for the Kurds: the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, which looks set to remain a major player in Turkish politics, has explicitly adopted the Copenhagen criteria for eu membership. Incidentally, there is no evidence of collusion or coordination of policy between Ankara and Baghdad vis-à-vis the two countries’ Kurdish populations, and even under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi regimes did not exhibit systematic political or other discrimination against Kurds living outside northern Iraq (for example, the sizable Kurdish population of Baghdad). For these and other reasons I allude to below, it is a little difficult to relate the Kurds to many of the apparently more straightforward secessionist movements with which this book is concerned. However, using the kinds of criteria justifying secession put forward by Christopher Wellman (in particular), it is not difficult to argue that the ill treatment meted out to the Kurds by the governments of both Turkey and Iraq could serve as the moral basis for secession in each case. As already noted, the idea of a Kurdish state is complicated by the fact that the various Kurdish movements have developed separate trajectories within Iraq and Turkey (and to a lesser extent within Iran) and that movements within each host state are often hostile to each other—for example, the Patriotic Union of (Iraqi) Kurdistan, founded in 1976, was essentially a breakaway state created by those fed up with the tactics of the (Iraqi) Kurdistan Democratic Party. In addition, not all Iraqi Kurds speak the same Kurdish dialect; some [18.206.160.129] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:09 GMT) Common Sense [321] Iraqi Kurds speak the same dialect as...