THE Kurds in Iraq have been in a state of revolt intermittently ever since the British created the state by joining together the Ottoman provinces (velayats) of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra following the First World War. They constitute a larger proportion of the population and could play a larger role in Iraq than they did elsewhere.

Moreover, unlike Iran and Turkey which have existed as recognised political entities for many centuries, Iraq started out as a new and artificial state put on the map by an external power.

It should be noted also that at the time of Iraq’s creation it was understood that the future of its Kurdish population would be open to negotiation. One of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (# 12), which the peacemakers at Versailles had adopted, provided that minorities in the Ottoman empire would have the right to “autonomous development”. The Treaty of Sevres (1920) provided for “local autonomy” for the predominantly Kurdish areas (Article 62), and contemplated the possibility that the Kurds might even be granted independence (Article 64).

The British and the new Iraqi government issued declarations intended to appease the Kurds. On December 24, 1922, an Anglo-Iraqi statement to the League of Nations recognised their right to have a government of their own, and expressed the hope that the various Kurdish groups would come together and negotiate the matter with the British and the Iraqi governments. But these assurances did not materialise. The government in Iraq has all along been scared of the possibility of Kurdish secession, which would reduce the new state’s population and territory; including that where large oil deposits and fertile lands are located.

As the Kurdish nationalist feeling gained vitality, a man of the name of Mulla Mustafa Barzani (1904-1979) emerged as its chief spokesman. He belonged to Barzan, a village in a mountainous region of northeastern Iraq. His father, and later his older brother, played a leading role among the Naqshbandi Sufis in their area. In the spring of 1932 the Barzanis refused to pay taxes to the new Iraqi government. Mustafa and his brother, Shaikh Ahmad, were arrested and then exiled to Sulaymaniyah; a mistake on the government’s part, for this town happened to be a centre of the emerging Kurdish nationalism.

During his exile in Sulaymaniyah, Barzani learned theology to the point where he could quote and interpret Quranic verses and sayings of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). But despite his religious learning, he chose to be a politician and a warrior. An American diplomat, William Eagleton, who knew him wrote that Barzani was astute enough to grasp quickly the essence of a situation, that he was capable of diplomatic and military “cunning,” and that he never turned down an opportunity that came his way. Dana Adams Schmidt of the New York Times observed that he did not care for fancy food, that he was austere and expected his associates to be likewise. He maintained dignity and calm in all circumstances. He was a democrat but maintained an aristocratic reserve. At times he preferred indirect modes of expression, conveying his intent by telling stories.

In the fall of 1943 Mulla Mustafa fled Sulaymaniyah and returned to Barzan. In rising to a leading role in the Kurdish nationalist movement he was helped by Heva, a liberal, nationalist party of urban intellectuals established in 1941. Thus, he rose above his tribal frame of mind and acquired a broader outlook and a larger perspective.

The Kurdish demands at this time may be summed up as follows: first, that the districts of Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Arbil, Dohuk, and Khanaqin be made into a province and given economic (including agricultural) and cultural autonomy; second, that all other internal matters, except the army and the gendarmerie, be placed in the charge of a special minister for Kurdish affairs in the Iraqi cabinet; third, that a Kurdish assistant minister be appointed in each ministry; and fourth that, as promised in 1932 but not actually done, Kurdish be made an official language and taught in schools.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Said was sympathetic and initially it seemed that some of these demands would be accepted. But a little later the majority in his government turned against them, fearing that their acceptance would incline Kurdish militants towards separatism and secession. Nuri al-Said was forced to resign in June 1944, and soon new fighting started. By this time Barzani had built up considerable military force that resisted government operations, but bombing raids and the support the rival tribes gave to the government, forced him to go into Iran with several thousand of his men.

While in Iran, Barzani became a general in the short-lived Mahabad Republic, which an Iranian Kurdish intellectual and politician, Qazi Muhammad, had set up in January 1946 with Soviet backing. This republic was suppressed a few months later, and Barzani and his men made their way, walking through rugged mountains, to the Soviet Union in June 1947, and remained there for almost 12 years. During this time Barzani maintained contact with his followers in Iraq and broadcast radio messages to them from time to time. Even though his detractors referred to him as the “Red Mulla,” he did not convert to communism. He insisted that he and his associates were good Muslims and could not possibly become communists.

General Abdul Karim Kassem seized the government in Iraq in a bloody coup on July 14, 1958. Barzani sent him a telegram, asking permission to return to Iraq, which Kassem readily gave. He arrived in Baghdad on October 6, 1958, and was well received. Kassem housed him in a mansion which the late Prime Minister Nuri aal-Said had once occupied, gave him a limousine, legalised the Kurdish Democratic Party, and permitted the publication of more than a dozen Kurdish journals. Article 23 of the new provisional Iraqi constitution declared that the Kurds and Arabs were partners in the Iraqi republic and guaranteed Kurdish rights within that framework. Gradually, however, Kassem and Barzini drifted apart as both realised that their ultimate objectives were incompatible.

In July 1961 Barzani submitted a “petition” to Kassem in which, in addition to the demands mentioned above, he asked that the police and army units posted in the Kurdish areas must be entirely Kurdish, and that Kurdish army units must not be deployed in other places without the Kurdish autonomous government’s consent. This government would control education, health services, communications, and municipal affairs. A large share of the oil revenues produced by the Kurdish region must be spent there. Foreign affairs, defence, and fiscal policy would remain with the central government in Baghdad, but the deputy prime minister, vice chief of the army staff, and assistant ministers in the various central departments must be Kurdish. Fearing that these demands, if conceded, would lead to the country’s dismemberment, Kassem refused them.

Barzani assembled a fighting force of 7,000 and began to chase out government police and army garrisons from strategic places. The government responded with indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages in September 1961, killing for the most part old persons, women, and children, which only served to enhance Barzani’s popular support. He waged guerilla war and chose not to defend fixed positions, including Barzan itself. Knowing their own territory well, his troops always managed to slip away before government forces could surround them.

The Baath party came to power in Iraq in February 1963, lost it after a few months, but regained it in July 1968. President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and his deputy, Saddam Hussein, sent a representative to negotiate with Barzani. This move had the support of Michael Aflak, one of the two founders of Baath. Saddam Hussein himself journeyed north to meet Barzani in March 1970. These contacts produced a “manifesto,” which has since been regarded as the proper guide to resolving the Kurdish “problem.”

It consolidated and streamlined the demands the Kurdish leadership had made from time to time. Some of its provisions were partially implemented while others were simply ignored. It is possible that neither the government nor the Kurdish leaders expected that it would be fully implemented. They may have seen it as a way of providing an interlude of ceasefire before the next round of fighting began.

There was no meeting of the minds on the extent of autonomy that the Kurdish region would have. As one Kurdish leader noted, it would depend upon “our strength and that of the enemy.” The parties differed also on the dimensions of the Kurdish autonomous region and on whether it would include the oil rich area of Kirkuk.

Not only did the Baathist government continue to settle Arabs in Kurdish areas, in violation of a pledge it had given the Kurds in that regard, it expelled some 40,000 Kurds from Baghdad, where they had lived for generations, and from south of Khanaqin, saying that, being Shia, they were really Iranian nationals.

The government in Baghdad accused Barzani of treason inasmuch as he worked in close military collaboration with Iran, which provided his organisation with weapons, training, broadcasting facilities, and counterfeit Iraqi currency. Baathist agents were believed to have made assassination attempts against Barzani and his son, Idris.

In March 1974 the Baathist government announced an autonomy plan for the Kurds that fell considerably short of the assurances it had earlier given to Barzani. As a result, fighting broke out again and lasted for a year — until Iraq and Iran signed an accord in Algiers in March 1975. Following this agreement, Iran halted its aid to Barzani, who was then no longer able to continue his struggle. His role gone, his prestige declined within a few months. He went into exile in Karaj (a suburb of Tehran), and then moved to the United States. He lived in Alexandria, Virginia (a suburb of Washington, DC) until he died of lung cancer on March 1, 1979.

Mulla Mustafa Barzani may well be regarded as the greatest Kurdish leader in the 20th century who gave his people a pride in their identity, and the will to assert it, that they might otherwise not have had to the same degree.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US.

Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

THE ‘charter of democracy’ for Pakistan, though signed only by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, and that too, sadly, in London, is born of the frustrations and hopes of all those politicians who have been forced out of power by Gen Musharraf.

The two signatories of the charter are the luckiest of the ousted lot. To be able to own flats and live in Park Lane or South Kensington is the good fortune of only the rich and idle of the world. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif are among them. Most of their loyal supporters at home or abroad are leading a much less enviable existence.

Not that the two top leaders did not have their share of personal pain, besides the deprivation of power and forced exile. Benazir Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari, reputed to be a playboy, bore the rigours of seven years of jail life stoically, without striking a deal which many among his peers with greater pretensions to piety and patriotism did just to get a toehold in power.

Then, Shahbaz Sharif has by now spent six years in exile only because he is the errant Nawaz Sharif’s brother. In his case, it is the tribal law of collective punishment in operation in Pakistan’s democratic politics.

The charter itself brims with rhetoric and grand aims but doesn’t say how the two leaders propose to drive Musharraf out of power: by force or (less likely) through the ballot? And, secondly, what is there for the people to feel assured that their partymen who surround them now would show greater commitment to democracy than those who deserted them to join Musharraf — the likes of Chaudhry Shujaat, Rao Sikandar, Aftab Sherpao?

But the most troublesome question the two leaders have to answer is why the people should trust their conduct in the future when they have remained so utterly unrepentant for their misrule in the past? The decade they took turns to dominate is remembered for its intrigue and strife, not for democracy or development.

Before going on to some substantive parts of the charter the people deserve to savour the sentiment of their leaders in London. Here is an extract from the charter: “Our responsibility (is) to set an alternative direction for the country saving it from its present predicaments, on an economically sustainable, socially progressive, politically democratic and pluralist federally cooperative, ideologically tolerant, internationally respectable and regionally peaceful basis, in the larger interest of the peoples of Pakistan to decide once for all that only the people and no one else has the sovereign right to govern through their elected representatives as conceived by the democrat par excellence, Father of the Nation Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah.”

Continuing the rhetoric the leaders reaffirm their commitment to “undiluted democracy and universally recognised fundamental rights, the rights of a vibrant opposition, internal party democracy, ideological/political tolerance, bipartisan working of the parliament through a powerful committee system, a cooperative federation with no discrimination against federating units, the decentralisation and devolution of power, maximum provincial autonomy, the empowerment of the people at the grassroots level, the emancipation of our people from poverty, ignorance, want and disease, the uplift of women and minorities, the elimination of Klashnikov culture, a free and independent media, an independent judiciary, a neutral civil service, rule of law and merit.”

Leaving the other contents of the above statement aside, it is well known that authority was never more centralised at the centre than in their times, elections to local councils were never held and the independence of the judiciary and neutrality of the civil service was put to greater jeopardy during their tenure than ever before.

In its substantive part, the thrust of the charter is on the total executive authority vesting in the prime minister and curbing the independence of the army to bring its command under his direct control. The charter also seeks to curb the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court by creating a federal court with equal representation from each province to adjudicate on constitutional issues.

Strangely enough, while the charter lays down an elaborate procedure for the appointment of the superior court judges and chief election commissioner by associating the parliamentary committees, the bar and the opposition with the selection process, it leaves the appointment of the chiefs of the armed forces to the sole discretion of the prime minister.

No lesson is learnt from history. Nawaz Sharif is where he is because he dismissed one chief of army staff (Jehangir Karamat), appointed another (Pervez Musharraf) ignoring his unsurpassable senior (Ali Kuli Khan) and then nominated yet another from down the list (Ziauddin) to replace a rightly irked Musharraf while he was on a foreign visit.

What followed is too well known to be recounted here. A check on the power of the prime minister to appoint and remove the service chiefs, especially the army chief, is needed more than on any other appointment.

The implementation of the charter would require wholesale amendments to the Constitution but its authors do not spell out how it would happen. The Constitution as it stands can be amended only by two-thirds majority in each house of parliament. Further, the amendments have to be made before the elections are held because the charter stipulates elections under a neutral caretaker government. Under the proviso to Article 244 of the Constitution the appointment of the caretaker government is at the discretion of the president. This cannot be called neutral.

It would be, thus, possible to implement the charter only if the parties sponsoring it take part in the elections and win two-thirds majority in the National Assembly and then in the Senate. There is no other way to amend the Constitution. General discontent or breakdown of law and order may bring about a military coup (backed by the judicial doctrine of necessity yet again) but not undiluted democracy that the charter envisages. The signatories to the charter must reconcile to their parties taking part in the next elections while Musharraf remains president. They have no other real alternative or course to power.

The numerous and disparate elements that Musharraf put together to form governments one after the other have been targets of ridicule redeemed only by some individual efforts. Now they have outlived their lifespan and are too worn out to be sustained even by rigged elections. There is, thus, a power vacuum to fill. If the mainstream parties stay out, the religious parties will move in.

Whether the charter is viewed as a historic document, as Benazir perceives it, or is dismissed as a gimmick as Musharraf did, it would be a folly to ignore it.

The charter would have served a great purpose if it were to bring the two sides on to a talking plane for neither can vanquish the other. Their tussle is only prolonging the agony of the people.