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

6. Refuge Seeking, Patriliny, and the Global

172 6 Refuge Seeking, Patriliny, and the Global Emrevîn. (We fled.) —Phrase repeated in countless conversations and interviews Iam a guest for lunch at the home of a family living in the Barushki neighborhood of Dohuk. The conversation turns to the Anfal campaign, in which the Iraqi government led by Saddam Hussein attacked people in Kurdish villages from the air, dropping chemical weapons on them. Suzan, a relative of the family who is also a lunch guest, tells her personal story of fleeing the government’s helicopters in 1988. She managed to get away with her life, but did not escape injury; in various places on her body, some of which she shows us, are large areas of scarred skin. She and her family fled to Diyarbakir, Turkey, staying there for four years, but both her husband and son died there. Suzan begins to cry as she recounts her story, going on to tell how her village in the mountains behind Dohuk had been destroyed by the government four times since the 1960s. Her story is like countless others I have heard from people in Iraq and from Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdistan’s recorded history is consistently bloody. It lies at the meeting point of three old imperial territories, Persian, Turkish, and Russian. It came under British attack in World War I and became a British Mandate after the war. The violence produced by these encounters can be called “large scale” and seen as a precursor to the globalized violence that was to follow it, because these were big powers. Kurdistan has also had, and still has, many sources of “small scale” localized collective violence as well. Most Kurdish people belong to a tribe, and tribes sometimes get into conflicts with one another. Like tribes, patrilineages sometimes also get into REFUGE SEEKING, PATRILINY, AND THE GLOBAL 173 conflict and split over land, women, access to a resource, or other causes. Between the large and the small scale, increasingly the source of violence is the modern or modernizing state, such as the Ba‘thist Iraqi state that waged such horrible attacks on its own citizens in the decades leading to 2003. Collective violence can be said to come in waves, and inconsistently. Evidence suggests that it never stops. Each wave of violence in Kurdistan, whether small, medium, or large scale, has prompted people to flee in search of safety. A century ago, most Kurds who migrated did so only “internally,” within Kurdistan. The vast majority of refuge seeking events were highly local, within a small area of a few to tens of kilometers, such as from the realm of one local leader to another. For example, a refuge seeker might flee to the neighboring tribal chief’s territory, where he or she would be granted asylum and allowed to remain indefinitely. The reason for flight might stem from perpetration, victimhood, or both (depending on the point of view of the person or entity assigning such a label). Or, the refuge seeker might have killed someone accidentally, and the victim’s lineage mates might be out for blood. A person who has or is an enemy and does not have enough allies around himself or herself to remain in place needs safety granted elsewhere , and quickly. Refuge seeking and refuge granting are still possible, and indeed are frequently implemented in Kurdistan. Now, however, such flight and refuge episodes may come to the attention of authorities representing far larger spheres of power than a tribal chief, such as the regional government, state government, and international agencies. While refuge seeking used to involve mainly local social connections, it now invokes and involves connections at the state and global levels. Kurdistan is a very rich site for exploring refuge at the crossroads of the local and the global, traditional structures such as patrilineages and tribes and the modernizing state. Anywhere in the world, people who flee “internally,” within the boundaries of the state, are likely to come to the attention of state authorities. Those who cross a border usually come to the attention of authorities belonging to a different government, and often of the global refugee and asylum regime consisting of interstate agreements and international agencies like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Refuge seeking is now embedded in the modern (or purportedly modern) state, which is itself embedded in a global milieu of public awareness and accountability structures such as...