Bullets on the ground in Mosul, Iraq, 01 June 2017. Picture by Noe Falk Nielsen/NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All right reserved. I
arrived in Baghdad in November 2013. It was part of my doctoral
research on the afterlives of the Iraqi Baʿth state’s al-Anfāl
genocide (1987-1991). I wanted to record how the Iraqi federal
government shows its responsibility for the past, present, and future
of Iraq. I saw the future of Iraq to be entirely wrapped in women
survivors’ persistent demands for legal and ethical justice, for
tracing, exhuming, identifying and returning the remains of their
loved ones scattered in unknown mass graves in the country. In Iraq
women survivors remain the voice that translates into the ethical
urgency for building a more responsible and virtuous Iraq.
With
modern bureaucracy the Iraqi Baʿth regime pulled religion and the
constitution together to justify and to make legitimate genocidal
violence. The state’s decree no. 4008, dated June 20, 1987,
declares the Kurdish rural areas and village as outlawed, and that
they “shall be regarded as operational zones strictly out of bound
to all persons and animals […] in which the troops can open
fire at will
[…] The Corps shall carry out random bombardment, using artillery,
helicopter and aircraft […] in order to kill the largest number of
persons in the outlawed areas.” Jointly with thousands of other
al-Anfāl documents, the decree became a key legal evidence during
the al-Anfāl trials (2006-2007) and was used against Ali Hassan
al-Majid, the Secretary General of the Northern Bureau from
1987-1989. Al-Majid was the one who had signed the decree. Following
the trials, the verdict judged al-Anfāl as genocide.
“This is life in Baghdad. It is a biological duration”
In
the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, it is now remembered to have resulted
in the killing and disappearance of ‘182.000’ people,
displacement of ‘1.5 million’ people, and complete destruction of
‘4.500’ villages.
At
the time of my arrival, ten years after the United States turned
“de-Baʿthification” of Iraq into law, Baghdad was still dotted
with checkpoints. It was a city under siege as mobile military units
and armored vehicles roamed the streets. Occupying the dangerous
sidewalk of the road between the liberation monument in Tahrir Square
and the “green zone,” where the Iraqi parliament, the Council of
Representatives of Iraq, and the respective American and British
embassies are located, vendors were forming a line and displayed
their goods. As the driver saw me watching the vendors, he told me,
“This is life in Baghdad. It is a biological duration.” He was
telling me whose life is at stake.
I
soon observed that al-Anfāl was not of concern to the Iraqi
government in the green zone. What happened had disappeared into a
past without trace. The dominant question in the pressroom of the
Iraqi parliament was whether to maintain or decrease the monthly food
rations (e.g. flour, rice, cooking oil etc.) to the Iraqi population.
This public distribution food program became a policy when sanctions
were imposed on Iraq. It was the punishment for Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait in the beginning of August 1990. The United Nations’ “oil
for food” program in 1996, and the Iraqi food program increasingly
turned the Iraqi peoples into biological duration.
A
specially trained Kurdish Peshmerga (lit. ‘before death’) force
and a British Security company with employees from the Republic of
Fiji were responsible for the security of the parliament. “I am
surprised to see Peshmerga here,” I voiced my inquisitiveness to a
Peshmerga who scanned my body at the entrance. “Shīʿītes
and Sunnīs
do not trust each other, but they both trust us. There were
bloodbaths here before we came,” he responded. Yet, the
then President Jalal Talabani had left the Presidential Palace to the
city of Sulaimani in the Kurdistan Region. I was told that he is in
conflict with Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister at the time. “He
will come back. This is how politics is done in Iraq. People get
angry at each other and they threaten to kill each other, and then
suddenly they are back together as if nothing ever happened between
them. It is the Iraqi civilians who suffer,” an Iraqi
parliamentarian told me over dinner at a small restaurant outside of
the green zone. Two boys, 17 years old and 18 years old respectively
were running the restaurant. The restaurant was 16 square meters, and
it was also where the two boys slept at night. “We are from the
south of Iraq, and have nowhere else to go to at night,” said the
17 year old boy.
Politics as irresponsibility and unaccountability is at the heart of the modern political history of Iraq.
The
2005 Iraqi state’s constitution that hosts rights and freedoms
neither
had a place at the restaurant nor in the everyday life of the two
boys and their families. “Our families can put bread on the table
because we send them money every month,” said the 18 year old boy.
The money had to be given to their respective mothers who in turn
would use it to take care of other children. If one doesn’t
immediately acknowledge that love, ethics, responsibility,
accountability, care and justice are always at work at this level of
the current Iraqi society then one denies the history and the future
of Iraq.
The
green zone is at work creating another Iraq, taking a different
stance in relation to the past, present, and future. Politics as
irresponsibility and unaccountability is at the heart of the modern
political history of Iraq. Because of his titanic depravity, Nouri
al-Maliki was replaced with Haider al-Abadi. Yet, he remains a
powerful figure in the Iraqi government. An electric engineer,
al-Abadi is now doing apoplectic politics in continuity with a
particular reading of religion. While claiming to be a strict
constitutional leader and reader, he continues to militarize Iraq to
be prepared to carry out constitutional and religious wars against
the Iraqi
Kurdish
citizens
at
any time. Al-Abadi’s matter of concern is not the living
conditions, national infrastructure, and promotion of national
education in all fields, health care, and cultural life, but the
politics of violence that has brought him closer to Iran and Turkey.
Violence
is entrenched in the evolvement of what is now Iraq. Apart from the
violence of the Ottomans, the British and the Americans that are yet
to be accounted for, certain interpretations of religion are a
constitutive part of six separate genocidal violence in Iraq in the
twentieth and twenty-first century. The
Summayl massacre
against the Assyrians, an Iraqi Christian minority, on August 11,
1933; Al-Farḥūd
became the name for public hangings, massacre, and violent
dispossession of the Iraqi Jews in early 1941; The
Dujail massacre
targeting the Iraqi Shīʿītes between 1982-1985; Al-Anfāl
operations
targeting mainly the Kurds but also absorbing Êzîdîs
and Christians between 1987-1991; Shīʿīte religious cleansing of
the Sunnīs in 2006-2007; the Sinjar
operations
of the “Islamic state” against Êzîdîs,
and its exterminatory violence against Christians, Kāka’ees, and
Shabak between 2014-2017.
Political violence has ascended into a mode of governance in Iraq today
Political
violence has ascended into a mode of governance in Iraq today,
wherein religious identity reigns supreme.
The arrival and settlement of the “popular
mobilization forces” (Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī)
in
the city of Kirkuk on October 16, 2017, attests to how freedoms and
rights break down and the control over the oil reserves takes
precedence. In its visible form, it is a Shīʿīte army
acting
rather in the name of God, and making public the growing solidarity
between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Haider al-Abadi. A shared
religious identity, Shīʿīsm is subjected to a political
translation that shapes a new but asymmetric relationship between
Baghdad and Tehran. The Iranian state is only at work foisting its
own reading of Shīʿīte identity on the entire region. This
particular mode of existence is the Islamic Republic’s only
contribution to the modern history of the Middle East, and it remains
its only option of survival. Its survival and its acts of violence
both within Iran and in the region are inseparable. An identity that
makes invisible all other identities, as Amartya
Sen writes,
“can kill – and kill with abandon.”
Dichotomized
religious identities have advanced into an Iraqi ordinance. Together
with other friends, I had the privilege of visiting a renowned Iraqi
artist while in Bagdad. Lamenting the loss of cultural life in
Baghdad, the artist reflected on how the politicization of Islam is
gradually cleaning all traces of art and aesthetics in the memory of
the city. Later on, one of the hosts invited me to an art exhibition
and while walking he whispered to me how the Iraqi Sunnīs were
transformed into a measurable enemy and identified on the basis of
their names or their location inscribed on their national
identification cards. “Many Sunnīs were exterminated and their
bodies were thrown into the Tigris River,” he told me. He continued
saying how this policy precipitously turned neighbors and communities
into historical religious enemies and brought the everyday living
together to an ultimate end.
The
very exclusive religious mission of Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī
brings it closer to the Islamic states’ phantasmagoria, informing
the Iraqis that they are exclusively Shīʿīte. This comes to life
during the holy Day of Ashura, when some organized groups
occupy the streets with swords and chains, cutting and whipping their
own bodies. Physical pain and bleeding become evidence of religious
duty and identity, remembering the killing of ḥussein
Ibn ʿAli at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. The politics of
viscerality is an act that sanctifies the self and the land where
ʿAli, Prophet Mohammed’s first cousin
and son-in-law, and ḥussein,
ʿAli’s
son, and other martyrs of the Battle of Karbala are buried.
Located at the heart of Iraq, Karbala and the city of Najaf fall
within the area where Sunnīs and Shīʿītes sacrificed lives and
spilled blood in their battles over who would become the ultimate
face of Islam on earth, following the death of the Prophet Mohammed
in 632 CE.
Dichotomized religious identities have advanced into an Iraqi ordinance.
Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī cannot,
therefore, be confined to what the name proposes.
Al-shaʿbī
is a euphemism for al-Shīʿīte,
just
as al-Anfāl
was a euphemism
for genocide. Born from a religious declaration (fatwā)
of Al-Sayyed Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shīʿa
authority
in Iraq, on 15 June 2014 Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī
is the manifestation of divine punishment. Its mission was to descend
into war with the “Islamic state.” It has now advanced into a
force that can suspend law and ethics and make and unmake the
humanity of its target group with impunity. Its reputation as a
merciless armed force renders it foreign to the principle that each
and every person has civil and political rights that she/he should be
able to express and realize freely and without any fear of death. It
makes infinitely public al-Abadi’s religious reading of the Iraqi
constitution, in the name of which he claims to order and command
military operations. The
operations target Iraqi citizens (Kurds) whose rights and freedoms
are also guaranteed by the same constitution.
The constitution was written under the US-UK rule. In his book,
Constitution Making Under Occupation,
Andrew Arato writes that a “short time period was provided for the
making of the permanent constitution (seven months), some of this was
eaten up by the problems of government formation and the formation of
the Constitutional Committee itself (three and a half months in all),
and it took another two months to include Sunni representatives.”
The
paradox embedded in the relation of religion
to
the constitution continues to be integral to the justification of
violence or the right of the state to kill. While Article 2 insists,
“Islam is the official religion of the State and is a foundation
source of legislation,” Section
Two: Rights and Freedoms
of the constitution encapsulates the rights and freedoms of all
persons, that are taken to be independent of “gender, race,
ethnicity, nationality, origin, color, religion, sect, belief or
opinion, or economic or social status” (Article 14). These rights
are enshrined in the Universal Declarations of Human Rights of which
Iraq is a signatory state. In this respect, as it is also inscribed
in Article 8, the Iraqi state is made nationally and internationally
accountable for any violations of fundamental rights and freedoms.
It is characteristic of neoliberal democracy that one sings democracy at “home” and participates in annihilatory violence elsewhere – that one is at once a democrat and a monster.
The
terrorizing invasion of Tuz Khurmatu, Kirkuk, Khanaqin, and Sinjar
and the forced displacement of the Kurdish civilians from what
Article 140 of the constitution gathers together under the name
“disputed territories” are rather trends toward violation of all
rights and freedoms. The name also turns
the inhabitants into “disputed populations.” Sinjar is yet to get
free of the genocidal violence of the “Islamic state,” and its
inhabitants, Êzîdîs, continue to live in the shadow of that
violence in camps for “internally displaced persons” in the
Kurdistan Region. The Shīʿīte dominated Iraqi government’s
unwillingness to break free of terror and violence and the active
deferral of the constitution, has securely turned the no
longer valid
Article 140 into annihilatory violence. Paragraph
2 of Article 140, insists that the “Iraqi Transitional Government
stipulated in Article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law,”
shall through “a referendum in Kirkuk and other disputed
territories … determine the will of their citizens … by a date
not to exceed the 31st of
December 2007.” Noticing the date (31st
of
December 2007),
Article 140 must be a
thing of the past.
What
Article 140 archives is now
actualized violence. The
arrival and presence of Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī with
sophisticated weapons, turning the disputed territories into a war
zone,
cannot display protection of “The will of [Iraqi]
citizens.”
Fundamental to the annihilatory force of Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī is
the modernity’s technics of extermination. This is what connects it
to the global arms trade for which no one is held accountable. This
dimension reveals how weapons produced in democracies, e.g. the
United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, and traded
with Iraq, inevitably makes them complicit. According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Yearbook
2017,
these democracies are among the main exporters of weapons and Iraq is
among the main importers of these weapons. It
is characteristic of neoliberal democracy that one sings democracy at
“home” and participates in annihilatory violence elsewhere –
that one is at once a democrat and a monster. “In
politics,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “obedience and support are the
same.”
In
fear of terrorization and death, more than a hundred thousand Kurdish
civilians in Sinjar, Tuz Khurmatu, and Kirkuk left their homes
already
on October 16-17, 2017. Homelessness and statelessness are again
turning families, many of whom are survivors of al-Anfāl, into
depoliticized bodies. The homes that have been set on fire and
worldly possessions looted in Tuz Khurmatu and Kirkuk must testify to
how the state materialized in Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī displays
its will to erase human plurality while miniaturizing
Iraq, as Amartya Sen would say. This is already an appalling marker
of how the state forgets
the constitution. Apart from “public morality,” and the “right
to individual privacy,” Article 17 of the Iraqi constitution
states: “The sanctity of the homes shall be protected. Homes may
not be entered, searched, or violated, except by a judicial decision
in accordance with the law.”
The unprecedented rapprochement between Iran, Turkey and Haider al-Abadi is a political reversal – friends becoming enemies and enemies becoming friends.
The
referendum [The will of Iraqi citizens]
for
independence in the Kurdistan Region is made responsible for
terrorization and threat of annihilation, forced displacement and the
burning of homes. Al-Abadi describes the referendum as “a thing of
the past” that is both “unconstitutional” and a threat to state
“sovereignty.” The constitution and sovereignty are thus taken as
sufficient source for the forgetfulness
of the past
and the legitimization of Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī as
a fearful armed force. State sovereignty is not seen to be applicable
to the dominant military presence and participation of the Islamic
Republic of Iran,
operating through Qasem Suleimani,
commander of Iran’s “Quds Force” with a commitment to
extraterritorial wars. It is also
the Islamic
Republic of Iran
that
has divided and controls the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan as a
Kafkaian gatekeeper and shapes its politics of withdrawal at any
moment. Like the Kurdistan Democratic Party, it, too, remains to be
held accountable for its history of political violence. What link
together these Kurdish political parties with the the Islamic Dawa
party in Baghdad, are their political translation of “Kurdish and
Shīʿīte
victimhood”
and their unaccountable abuse of national wealth.
The
unprecedented rapprochement between Iran, Turkey and Haider al-Abadi
is a political reversal – friends becoming enemies and enemies
becoming friends.
They are now suddenly each other’s only hope. Iran and Turkey were
“friends” of the two most powerful Kurdish political parties
before the referendum. Together with al-Abadi they are now at work
drawing a cartographic control of the Iraqi Kurdish citizens.
Politics and religious identity are made indivisible. The
conquest
of the disputed territories is a viscerally arresting testimony. This
shows how humiliation and symbolic violence – taking off, throwing
away,
trampling on, and burning the
Kurdish flag and homes – embody a politics of religious identity
that feed on hatred between different human collectives in Iraq.
As acts of genocide throughout the world can plainly demonstrate,
hatred is intrinsically genocidal. If the future of Al-Hashd
al-shaʿbī
in the disputed territories
cannot
be fully calculated, their right to render rightless continues to
create Iraq as the legitimate domain of the Shīʿīte.
It produces radical identitarianism that points at a monstrous
future.
Al-Anfāl
operations, too, produced the Kurdish rural civilians and political
demand an internal threat to the Iraqi state sovereignty and national
security. Saddam Hussein, then the president of Iraq, also claimed to
be an adherent to the Interim Constitution of July 1970, which it had
at its disposal. While during the reign of the Baʿth party the
constitution was due mainly to political violence, today for the
Islamic Dawa party it is due to violence founded on religious
identity beyond the national borders of Iraq. The carryover of
centralization of political power and monopolization of violence
clearly marks how the overthrow of the genocidal Baʿth party has not
guaranteed fundamental rights and freedoms of all Iraqis.
Contrary
to the politics that has given birth to hatred and mass murder again
and again in Iraq, what I physically encountered and heard in Baghdad
and in villages and cities in the Kurdistan Region is an urgent call
for what W. E. B. Du Bois called cardinal
virtues:
“individual prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, and the
more modern faith, hope and love.” These virtues as a complete
opening up of the Iraqi political configuration places the future in
Iraq, if not in the rest of the world, on the side of the urgent
political and ethical demands of all Iraqis outside of the green
zone.
