Najaf and Karbala 2004, Srebrenica 1995: two bloody conflicts, miles apart, both the result of events more than 80 years ago. Few places demonstrate as vividly as the former Yugoslavia and Iraq that today’s rulers tend to forget the lessons of the past: both countries were artificial states created by the victorious allies from the ruins of the conquered Ottoman empire in 1918-21.
We know the results in the Balkans — royalist dictatorship followed by large-scale civil war and massacres during the second world war, then communist dictatorship under Tito followed in turn by collapse and even more brutal civil war in the years after his death.
Yugoslavia no longer exists and it seems to me that the only way to bring peace in Iraq is to achieve a similar federal tripartite solution for the Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds. Given the violence of the last week alone — 60 killed and 120 wounded by a car bomb, three election officials killed in an ambush, 18 Americans slaughtered inside an American base — it must be foolhardy to think that the forthcoming elections will presage peaceful democracy.
Peter Galbraith, the former American ambassador to Croatia, with his vantage point in Zagreb during the bloodbath in Bosnia, was able to see how a country cobbled together by the allies was failing to work. When he visited Iraq after the American conquest last year he was struck by how similar the equally artificial British-created country was to what he had witnessed in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia fell apart violently when the powerful Serbian minority began to flex its nationalist muscles and met the resistance of the majority to Serbian rule. The Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, then used Serbian ethnic nationalist fears to stir up inter- ethnic strife, with devastating results.
We are seeing the same pattern in Iraq and with identical potentially lethal consequences. The Sunnis — Iraq’s former ruling class — know they will be the minority in a democratic unified state and want to sabotage the new Iraq America is trying to create. Bungled American handling of the transition is making matters far worse by allowing non-Iraqi Sunni Arab Islamic fanatics to enter the country and add a whole extra terrorist dimension.
So, in the so-called Sunni triangle of central Iraq, we have two ideologically disparate groups coming together in hatred for the new Iraq. Joining the politically dispossessed Sunni Ba’athists are Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic fanatics for whom Iraq is part of the holy war to restore Sunni rule to the lands of the ancient Islamic caliphate, whose capital in its Abbasid glory days was at Baghdad. Despite their secular/Islamist differences, both hate the prospect of democracy, one that will see the Shi’ite majority in power for the first time.
Under Saddam such fanatics were kept out since, for all his occasional nods towards Islam, he was essentially a secularist. (Michel Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath party, was a Syrian Christian, and Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy, is from Iraq’s small Christian minority.) But thanks to Donald Rumsfeld’s “army lite”, such groups have been able to enter Iraq through the porous Syrian border. Jihad, holy war, has come to Iraq.
Islam is far from monolithic. There are divergences of doctrinal belief, such as between mainstream Sunnis and minority Ismailis (who follow the Aga Khan). Most Muslims also reject the extremist views of the Wahhabi sect of (Sunni) Hanbali Islam, an austere 18th-century interpretation of the Koran that predominates in Saudi Arabia, and from which radicals such as Osama Bin Laden gain their theological inspiration.
According to the Koran, Muslims are not supposed to attack each other, but the violence against Shi’ite Muslims in the two holy Shi’ite shrines of Karbala and Najaf last weekend show that some Sunni extremists have no qualms about Muslim-Muslim terror. They take their cue from writers such as Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the Egyptian whose book Signposts (or Milestones) is to present-day Islamic extremism what Lenin’s books were to Bolshevism. Qutb’s main enemies were leaders such as Nasser whom he felt had betrayed Islam. Qutb’s modern disciples, such as Bin Laden, take a similar view of rulers who are insufficiently Islamic, such as the al-Saud dynasty in Saudi Arabia.
American officials are now worried that Iraq might take the “Iranian option” and, given the close ties between Iran and many of the leading Shi’ite theologians in Iraq, this is not surprising. This is where the other Iraqi minority, the Kurds, enter the picture.
The Kurds have felt betrayed ever since Winston Churchill and other western leaders denied them a state of their own after 1918. While Kurds are predominantly Sunni Muslim, they do not identify with their fellow Sunnis in Iraq, since for them their Kurdish nationality matters more than their Sunni beliefs.
Most Kurds today are essentially secular, and so the idea of being in an Arab Shi’ite theocracy would be a double nightmare, both ethnically and theologically. But an independent Kurdistan would be a security nightmare for Turkey and Iran, which have large Kurdish minorities. Straight independence would thus be a risky solution.
This is why Galbraith is surely right to say that only a tripartite solution will work. (So too might a cantonal model, which would deal with the problem of the Shi’ites in the Sadr City section of Baghdad, a Shi’ite enclave within a predominantly Sunni region.)
Devolution on thorny issues such as education would enable Sunni Arabs and (secular) non-Arab Sunni Kurds to be free from domination from a potentially theocratic Shi’ite Arab national majority. The federal government would deal with matters such as defence and foreign policy where religious and ethnic sensitivities might not be so acute. If oil revenues were shared on a federal basis that would make up for the fact that there is little oil in Sunni Arab areas.
One major Shi’ite cleric, Mohammed Bahr al-Ulum, has said the Sunni Ba’athist/Islamist terrorists are “trying to ignite a sectarian civil war”. Galbraith fears the same and reflects that “there are no good options for the United States”.
One can only hope that the pessimists are wrong, and that against all precedent Iraq will not break into civil war once the Shi’ites finally take over the reins of power next year. But history, alas, is with them.
Christopher Catherwood is the author of Winston’s Folly: Imperialism and the Creation of Modern Iraq and the forthcoming A Brief History of the Middle East
