Anne Nivat

A Turkoman Family

Excerpt from “The Wake of War” by Anne Nivat*

The Turkomans represent the third largest ethnic group in Iraq, after the Arabs and the Kurds.  They speak Turkoman, which is a Turkic language.  They have a close relationship with Turkey and traditionally live in the central and northern regions of Iraq.  Originally from central Asia, they settled in Iraq thousands of years ago during a long migration.  They grew in number under the Abbasid caliphate, and then took root in the region of Kirkuk and Mosul, as well as in the northwest.  Their exact number is unknown.  According to the last census, conducted by the British in 1957, the Turkomans numbered 590,000 out of the total population of 6 million, which would be equivalent of 2 millions today.

The family of Arshad Al-Hirmizi[1] is very observant.  Everyone stops his or her daily activities for a few minutes during the five prescribed prayers, and the women pull on long white head scarves to pray.  When they open the door to a stranger, they cover themselves with a hood-and-scarf combination that is very common in the countries of the Persian Gulf (Arshad’s wife, Sefa, brought a few of them back from Saudi for her sister-in-law) and conceals their hair, neck, and bustline.  The electricity is often out.  A fuel oil heater has been installed in the living room and another in the dining room in an attempt to warm the vast rooms.  For years the family lived without windowpanes, but new glass was recently installed, a gift from the local government after the fall of Saddam.

Nidret, a forty-year-old English professor, is Arshad’s sister-in-law.  She is passionate and has a great deal to tell me about her teaching experience during a period when everything has been turned upside down: “For the time being, there hasn’t really been much change in the curriculum since the end of that abominable regime.  Of course, the slogans glorifying Saddam have been eliminated, and we just received new English manuals without Saddam’s official photos on the flyleaf.  For the other manuals, we had the children remove the photos, and they grimly tore them up, but without really realizing the meaning of their gestures.  As in the other primary and secondary schools in Iraq, we used to spend several hours every Thursday morning assembled in the schoolyard singing to the glory of ‘our beloved leader.’  Now the children are witness to our sudden hatred for Saddam, taboo feelings we had always concealed.  They have trouble understanding why the songs are banned.  They’d been accustomed to them since they were in day care.  I still catch my three-year-old daughter often humming those propagandistic refrains.  The melody has gotten stuck in her head, which was the whole point.  From their earliest years, children had to be brainwashed.  At day-care centers, they’re now made to chant verses from the Koran; I don’t know if that’s any better…Only the watanya [nationality class] was eliminated from the curriculum[2].  It was replaced by history and geography.  An let me add, at a more down-to-earth level, that the teacher’s chair I sit on, composed of four concrete blocks piled one on top of the other, has not been replaced, and the students still shiver from the cold.”

Nevertheless, more than seventy million new textbooks were printed in Jordan and Iraq under the aegis of UNESCO’s and UNICEF’s education programs, just in time for the beginning of the first post-Saddam school year.  The Baathist ideology was eliminated, but the complete recasting of the curriculum for various ideological subjects, especially history and geography, will take time.  The primary school manuals will include lessons on human rights (the history and operation of various international institutions and documents such as the International Court of Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Geneva Convention, little known by Iraqis).  They will also deal with the danger of land mines.  Schoolchildren will be taught to identify the different types of mines and how to react if one of the deadly devices explodes.

Nearly 12,000 of the 365,000 teachers in the country were dismissed because they were members of the Baath Party, which they were once strongly advised to join.  Nidret, who did not belong to the party, still teaches, despite difficulties.  The salaries of those who were not suspended increased a great deal (hers went from $5 a month to $250, only slightly less than what university professors earn), and UNICEF is training 2,000 teachers a month in a new pedagogical theories and methods.

Nidret admits her uncertainty and fear in this unprecedented political situation: “I’m afraid we’ll go on suffering, in a different way no doubt, not necessarily because of the Arabs but because of the other ethnic communities [without saying so, Nidret is targeting the Kurdish community]. I dread the dissolution of Iraq as an entity.  That’s because we Turkomans want to be part of Iraq, and in no case part of a part [that is, of Kurdistan].  We’re in favor of a single government for our country, with a president at its head…and if he’s a Shiite, we’ll accept him!  As a matter of fact, we have Shiite Turkoman friends with whom we’re on excellent terms.  Personally, I’m in favor of a return of the king, Sherif Ali Ben Al-Hussein[3].  A monarch always stands above divisions.  We’d be a constitutional monarchy, like Great Britain.  I’m nostalgic for the time of peace and tranquility under the Hashemite monarchy, which my Turkoman grandparents told me a lot about.  But if the state were to become federal, we’d constitute one of the federated parties.  Iraq is like one big family, and the Turkomans want to be part of it.  But I’m very afraid that in the end the federation will only divide us…

“I’m also afraid of the increasing security problems.  The double suicide attack perpetrated in Erbil is undoubtedly part of the settling of accounts between the fundamentalist Ansar Part and the two Kurdish parties.  Those terrorists are hurting the image of Islam, which is a religion of peace.  Vicious rumors have it that American themselves organize those acts of terror to justify their presence.  At least under Saddam, we weren’t afraid to go to the market.  Today we feel completely unsafe.”

At school as well, the climate is poisonous:  “When I made the mistake of telling my students that we were not yet accustomed to democracy, they immediately reported it to the new principle, who summoned me to her office.  I was not supposed to talk that way to the children.  We have to pretend we know what democracy is, to show how happy we are about what’s happening to our country!  Another time, I explained to the students that it was wrong and immoral that the looters in the city have not been arrested; I never mentioned that most of them were Kurds.  But once again, Kurdish students complained to the principle, claiming they had been singled out.  The truth is, we’re all still paralyzed by fear.”

Because she is a Turkoman (part of an ethnic minority) and was not a member of the Baath Party (that is, she did not embrace the majority opinion), Nidret’s position at her neighborhood school was always vulnerable, not to mention the fact that she refused to change her nationality.  She and her husband, for example, were never able to buy property in Kirkuk, since that privilege was reserved for the Arabs[4].  “The administrative pressure compelling us to become Arabs got stronger in the last years,” Nidret remembers.  “Yet we were perfectly aware that even if we’d given in, we’d never have been considered anything but ‘Arabs on paper.’”

The U.S. occupation throws her into complete confusion.  In the first place, there’s her exasperation with all the electrical outages caused by power stations damaged by the U.S. military during the two wars.  The military is doing nothing to repair them.  But she also accuses the United States of being overly aggressive: “People say that during raids, [the soldiers] make everyone in the household go out into the street so they can work more easily.  Most of the time, they steal jewelry and savings and no one can raise the slightest objection.  If they behaved differently, there wouldn’t be so much resistance.  People thought they’d be able to perform miracles, and it’s finally dawning on us that that’s not he case.”

Nidret’s husband, Adb, an engineer at Northern Oil Company for more than thirty years[5], points out that of the twenty thousand or so employees in the company that was taken over by an American civilian, only three hundred were dismissed.  Even though Adb is a Turkoman, has never been a member of the Baath Party, and refused to Arabize his name, he managed to remain with the company over the years, a real feat.

The goal of Arabization, pursued by the Baath Party over the last three decades, was tot establish the dominance of Arabs over the other communities—especially Turkomans and Kurds.  Under Saddam, pressure continued to be exerted on Turkoman, Kurdish, and Assyrian families to leave the city and settle elsewhere, including in the inhospitable regions of southern Iraq.  As for the cultural rights the Turkomans enjoyed—limited, to be sure—such as being taught in Turkish in primary school and having newspapers and local radio stations in Turkish, these were eliminated in 1972.

Fifty-five-year-old Arshad was born in Kirkuk to a Turkoman father and mother.  He left Iraq in 1980 at the start of the war with Iran and settled in the Persian Gulf.  He is currently the head of a hospital-equipment business in Saudi Arabia.  He finally came back for the Feast of Sacrifice this year, after being away for twenty-three years.

What he discovers both excites and scandalizes him, particularly the enormous scope of infrastructural damage and above all the low level of Iraqi consciousness, a clear consequence of the way his compatriots have been kept in isolation.  Arshad accounts that one of his friends, a lawyer, also from Kirkuk, has lived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for twenty-seven years.  When he returned to Iraq, the country he rediscovered seemed so poor and foreign that he felt as though he’d landed on another planet.  His city looked like a huge wasteland.  At the cemetery where he went to meditate on his mother’s grave, he was moved to pity by the face of a ragged child and offered him a little money, but the boy refused it.  “There people have nothing left but their pride,” Arshad’s friend said sadly.

A key city in the former Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, Kirkuk[6], the fourth largest city in Iraq, is the envy of all.  At the start of the U.S. invasion, in a gesture of brotherhood towards its Turkoman neighbors in the region[7], Turkey warned that it would not tolerate the Kurdish peshmerga besieging it in too visible a manner[8].  But the Kurds did everything they could to stay there.  In the view of the Kurdish political parties, Kirkuk historically belongs to Iraqi Kurdistan, despite the fact that the Kurdish population there has been reduced by Arabization policy.  For these refugees, the Kurdish parties demand the imprescriptible right to return and settle there.  After nearly eighty years of struggle against the different regimes in power in Baghdad, they believe they have earned Kirkuk.  Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, even compared that aspiration to the Palestinians’ plans for Jerusalem.  But the Turkomans categorically refuse to become part of any “Kurdistan,” even if it is Iraqi.  They claim a “historical” right to the city, alleging they were the first to settle the area.  The coalition authorities, extremely cautious on this matter, confine themselves to pointing out that the municipal council of Kirkuk is composed of Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, and Assyrians, with two members per community.

Arshad is particularly preoccupied with the fate oh the Turkoman community in Iraq since the fall of Saddam’s regime.  He passionately defends it in his publications abroad, though the international colloquiums he organized and his cultural foundation based in Istanbul, and he closely followed the fight over Kirkuk.  “Kirkuk is a mix of different ethnic groups, but the largest ethnic component has always been Turkoman.  We constituted nearly 90 percent of the population until the 1950s and 1960s.  But when the oil companies started hiring unskilled foreign labor, it was Kurds who settled in the outlying areas,” he explains.

He gives his version of what happened when the city was liberated on April 10, 2003, after the American arrived in Baghdad: “Despite the promises by the U.S. soldiers, Jalal Talabani’s Kurdish militias and a few of Massoud Barzani’s troops—the former from Sulaimaniya, the latter from Erbil—came along and invaded the city.  They seized the main government buildings and lost no time burning down the administrative archives, especially the cadastre and the records office.  Their goal was to conceal the city’s real ethnic composition.  Everything that could be looted was, right in front of the U.S. soldiers, who observed that plunder with complete indifference.  Only the governments of Turkey, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia denounced that they called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ ‘Kurdization’ had already replaced Arabization.  The Americans were embarrassed and finally promised that the peshmerga would leave Kirkuk within twenty-four hours.  The Kurdish militias pretended to obey, then returned in civilian clothes bent on the same tasks.  They put up sign posts in Kurdish everywhere and even replaced the street names with Kurdish designations!”

“We’re outraged at the lack of fair play among the Americans,” he continues.  “They’d barely arrived when they imposed a Kurdish governor on Kirkuk.  That may be a kind of revenge for Turkey’s refusal to get involved in the war![9]  They certainly wanted to punish the Turkomans because we didn’t collaborate the way they wanted.  As for the Governing Council with its twenty-five members, it claims to be representative, but it’s not.  We have only a single member, a woman with no political weight, whereas the Kurds have five.  It’s a disgrace!  Not only do the Americans decide in our place, but they don’t give a damn about the internal political situation of our country.  Before they go, they’ll set up bases and establish a government that will be loyal to them.  We’re grateful that they rid us of Saddam Hussein’s regime, even though everyone knows he hadn’t had weapons of mass destruction in ages, but noe we don’t want anything more from them!”

Arshad is convinced that the way the 2005 general elections are organized will work in favor of the Turkoman population, whose true weight in Kirkuk will finally be recognized.  The fragile ethnic balance of the city is to be preserved, according to strict humanitarian rules and thanks to ad hoc commissions.  “We Turkomans accept the Arabs, who arrived twenty-five years ago whose children were born here,” he says.  “We don’t proclaim Kirkuk a Turkoman country, but we don’t tolerate it being called a Kurdish country either.  We want Kirkuk to remain Iraqi.  By the way, that shows we have nothing against the Arabs!”

To confirm his assertions, Arshad arranges a meeting with Dr. Sadetin Ergec, head of the Turkoman Council, which has represented the Turkomans in Iraq since the “liberation.”  Thanks to that council, a local television channel and a radio station broadcasting in Turkish, as well as a few trade unions, appeared shortly after the Saddam regime was overthrown.  The council defends the rights of the community but rules out any use of force.  Needless to say, there is great exasperation in the face of Kurdish “provocations.”

Atop the house surrounded by fruit trees, two banners are flying: the Iraqi flag and the Turkoman flag, a white start and a crescent moon against a sky-blue background.  “We had to act faster after the fall of Saddam’s regime.  Otherwise the power vacuum would have been filled by the Kurds who’s occupied our city.  But we fight democratically and peacefully,” explains Ergec.  He is referring to a demonstration on December 31, 2003, by several thousand Turkomans and Arabs on the central square of Kirkuk.  Demonstrators were heading for the office of the new provincial governor, a Kurd.  The peshmerga responsible for protecting him reportedly fired on them, and three people are said to have died.[10]

“We have been extremely confused by what has happened since the ‘liberation.’  We thought no once could be worse than Saddam Hussein, and we were wrong.  The Kurds behave just like the dictator who oppressed them.  Let’s be clear: this city is at the center of our historical territory; no one will drive us out, and no one will prevent the Turkomans from expressing their discontent.  If the Kurds intend to deprive us of the petroleum from the rich subsoil to increase their importance on the world scene and to force recognition from the international community, well, they won’t succeed!  We thought that the shared suffering in our past connected us to the Kurdish people, but the Kurds have turned out to be unjust and aggressive.  We have nothing against the one who’ve lived in Kirkuk for more than ten years, but we’re upset by the intruders who’ve been knocking on our doors since the ‘liberation,’ supposedly to reclaim their possessions.  They’re being manipulated by Kurdish leaders, who are pursuing their terrible political schemes.”

Like all Iraqi metropolises, there is nothing aesthetically pleasing about Kirkuk, “the city of black gold.”  Concrete cubes stand next to one-story cob houses whose outer walls are a slightly warmer color of ocher.  Arshad explains that the absence of architectural harmony in Iraq can be attributed to a complete lack of education in taste going back decades.  In the 1920s, he assures me, Kirkuk was a stone and alabaster city painted white.  I observe that the scaffolding on work sites is made entirely of wood, as in Kabul.  Pressed tightly together, these pieces of wood look like large matchsticks, giving the construction they shore up a strange look of fragility.

On an imposing hill, with the Khasa River meandering lazily below us, I make out the citadel were a former Turkish general once refused to raise the Iraqi flag, even after the treaty handing the city over to Iraq had been signed.[11]  Although destroyed by Saddam in 1994 and looted from top to bottom, it is still impressive.  We are strolling among the few housed hidden behind immaculate white walls, whose small courts open onto a maze of recently built rooms that have escaped destruction.  Arshad’s state-of-the-art movie camera attracts kids playing among the stones.  The residence in the Christian quarter, like the one that once belonged to Toma Hindi, patriarch of one of the 150 Chaldean families who lived in the citadel in the 1920s, are the best preserved.  Hindi’s home is an elegant building dating from the eighteenth century, with colonnades and reception rooms overlooking the bazaar.

The oldest building in Kirkuk, built by Seljuk Turks in the twelfth century and topped with a high turquoise minaret, is the tomb of the prophet Daniel, ruler of Babylon when the region was controlled by Nebuchadnezzar.[12]  It’s a vast, austere room that receives many visitors.  Two veiled women are meditating there as I go by.  They have removed their shoed at the entrance and walked barefoot on the cold ground.  Next to the tomb are the remains of an Ottoman cemetery where the families of the local elite chose to bury their loved ones, not far from the holy man.

As we come around a ruin, we catch looters at work.  They are Kurds and don’t even try to hide, addressing one another in their own language in front of us.  The five confederates, dressed in the traditional trousers and their community, are in search of pieces of scrap iron or shards of pottery decorated with verses from the Koran, which are easy sell.  The three Turkoman children who have decided to escort us are lively and cheerful.  When Arshad wants to give them candy, the first refuses, and then the second as well; finally, when the third one pockets it, the other two make fun of him, calling him “Kurd!”  They have no Kurdish pals, they tell us, because they live in an exclusively Turkoman neighborhood.  At school they are also among themselves.  Are contacts between communities carefully avoided perhaps?

Finally, we visit Ata Tarzibashi, the senior lawyer of Kirkuk.  He is a Turkoman and a famous author, having writing nine books on Iraqi Turkoman literature and poetry.  Arshad has come to express his good wished for the Feast of Sacrifice.  He too is not at a loss to criticize the current situation:  “We have gained more freedom of expression, but we’ve lost the assurance of a more or less predictable future.  We’ll have to get used to that lack of security.  I don’t see any future for a country occupied by foreign powers that purposely turn communities against one another.  The British occupation had nothing like the severity we see in the Americans.  The British paid more heed to the people.  The proof is that they brought Faisal’s grandson back to the country! Whether the Americans stay or go, I see nothing but problems.  We’re at an impasse.”

We listen to him as we sip our coffee when two of his former students, a Kurd and an Assyrian, come in and sit down beside us.  They are members of the local government council set in place by the Americans.  They too came to give their best wishes for Id.  Right away, a lively discussion ensues, with each party remaining polite but firm in his position.  The Assyrian, a very dramatic shopkeeper in suit and tie, is particularly struck by the lack of real authority on the local council.  It has no budget; the population presents its problems, but no one is able to solve them.  The Kurd, conversely, points out the injustices endured by his community, which has lost its attitude of tolerance.  During the discussion, he mentions the first Iraqi was composed primarily of Arabs and Kurds.  Arshad is indignant and replies that no, on the contrary, the constitution was known for not discriminating on the basis of ethnic origin, religion, or language.  All Iraqis were equal before the law.  It was the constitutions of 1958, then of 1970, that identified the two peoples, “Kurdish” and “Arab,” and gave them a prominent place.  “For us,” notes Arshad, “the constitution of 1925 was better than all that followed it, even if it did defend a monarchical system!”

While we share our last breakfast, nicely set out on the table in the dining room, which is separated from the living room by a charming Japanese sliding door, Nidret draws me into on last passionate discussion of Iraq.  The young teacher is categorical.  “The new enemies are the Americans,” she declares, opening her chestnut brown eyes wide and energetically shaking her head of short-cropped black hair.  “They indecently supported Saddam until the invasion of Kuwait.  Before that, they intentionally incited him to start the war against Iran to weaken us.  Saddam was an abomination, but now we’re under the occupation by individuals who obviously don’t understand us.  Is that any better?”

* Anne Nivat, The Wake Of War, Translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd, Beacon Press, Boston.USA, 2005