The New York Review Abroad (67 page)

As I write, on November 19, US military forces in Iraq are conducting Operation Iron Hammer, striking with warplanes and artillery bases thought to be occupied by Iraqi insurgents. American television broadcasts are filled with dramatic footage of huge explosions illuminating the night sky. In Tikrit, Saddam’s political base
and a stronghold of the opposition, the Americans staged a military show of force, sending tanks and other armored vehicles rumbling through the main street. “They need to understand,” Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell told ABC News, “it’s more than just Humvees we’ll be using in these attacks.”

The armed opposition in Iraq seems unlikely to be impressed. However many insurgents the Americans manage to kill in bombing runs and artillery barrages, the toll on civilians, in death and disruption, is also likely to be high, as will damage to the fragile sense of normalcy that Americans are struggling to achieve and the opposition forces are determined to destroy. Large-scale armored warfare looks and sounds impressive, inspiring overwhelming fear; but it is not discriminate, which makes it a blunt and ultimately self-defeating instrument to deploy against determined guerrillas. In general, the American military, the finest and most powerful in the world, is not organized and equipped to fight this war, and the part of it that is—the Special Forces—are almost entirely occupied in what seems a never-ending hunt for Saddam. For American leaders, and particularly President Bush, this has become the quest for the Holy Grail: finding Saddam will be an enormous political boon. For the American military, this quest has the feel of a traditional kind of war not wholly suited to what they find in Iraq. “We are a hierarchy and we like to fight hierarchies,” says military strategist John Arquilla. “We think if we cut off the head we can end this.”

Whatever the political rewards of finding Saddam, they will not likely include putting a definitive end to the insurgency in Iraq.
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“The
Americans need to get out of their tanks, get out from behind their sunglasses,” a British military officer, a veteran of Northern Ireland told me. “They need to get on the ground where they can get to know people and encourage them to tell them where the bad guys are.” As I write, operations on the ground seem to be moving in the opposite direction. In any event it is difficult to impress an opponent with a military advance plainly meant to cover a political retreat.

President Bush’s audacious project in Iraq was always going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but without political steadfastness and resilience, it had no chance to succeed. This autumn in Baghdad, a ruthless insurgency, growing but still in its infancy, has managed to make the President retreat from his project, and has worked, with growing success, to divide Iraqis from the Americans who claim to govern them. These insurgents cannot win, but by seizing on Washington’s mistakes and working relentlessly to widen the fault lines in occupied Iraq, they threaten to prevent what President Bush sent the US military to achieve: a stable, democratic, and peaceful Iraq, at the heart of a stable and democratic Middle East.

—December 18, 2003

Christopher de Bellaigue

1.

“
IN TURKEY WE
have no minorities,” the leading official in a poor district in one of the poorest provinces of eastern Turkey told me in April. The official was in his late twenties; he had studied public administration at a Turkish university, then received training in Ankara and spent a few months at a language institute in England’s West Country. He enthusiastically practiced his English on me. There was not much use for it in his district, where most people speak one of two Kurdish tongues, Kirmanji or Zaza, and many of the old people do not know Turkish.

The Kirmanji speakers in the district are Sunni Kurds, of which there are at least 10 million in Turkey. The Zaza speakers are members of Turkey’s roughly 12-million-strong Alevi community, heterodox Shiites of Turkmen and Kurdish lineage. Neither of these groups, the official went on, should be called a minority; that would imply that there is discrimination against them, which is not the case. He told me this with the assurance of someone who knows that he, and his view of the world, enjoy the sanction of a large and powerful state. You can find young men like him throughout Turkey sitting in government offices, where a cast of the death mask of Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, is hanging on the wall behind them.

The Turkish Republic’s attitude toward minorities only makes sense if you have an idea of the contribution that the nationalism of those minorities made to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in the eighteenth century, Europe’s Christian powers assumed the role of protectors of their coreligionists in the empire. By the nineteenth century, they were promoting nationalist movements among them and protecting the newly independent states that had been created from former Ottoman territories, such as Greece, Serbia, and Romania. The process of making new nations was lethal for the empire and very often for those Muslims who were caught up in it; millions
of Muslims were forced out of those newly independent states (besides the new autonomous territory of Bulgaria) and fled to Anatolia, the empire’s heartland. By the eve of World War I, Anatolia had become a refuge for dispossessed Muslims from the Balkans and from the Caucasian territories that Russia had won during the Russian–Ottoman War of 1877–1878.

But Anatolia also had large non-Muslim minorities, including the Orthodox Greeks and mostly Gregorian Christian Armenians. These minorities looked to outside Christian powers for protection, especially to Greece (in the case of the Greek Orthodox) and Russia (in the case of the Armenians). Many of them were uneasy about the Ottoman decision during World War I to side with Germany against their own protectors, while the Ottomans viewed them as potential fifth columnists.

In 1915, following severe military defeat at the hands of the Russians and an Armenian uprising in the eastern city of Van, the Ottomans ordered the deportation of Armenians from Anatolia. Well over one million are thought to have died in what many historians consider to have been a premeditated act of genocide. In the Treaty of Lausanne, which was signed in 1923, Turkey pledged to protect its non-Muslim minorities, but the Turkish delegates at Lausanne succeeded in preventing Muslim minorities such as the Kurds and Alevis from being mentioned; and they emerged from Lausanne protected only by general commitments to linguistic and religious freedom, commitments that, in many cases, the Turks went on to disregard. In 1925, around one million Anatolian Greeks were sent to Greece under a population exchange that was managed relatively humanely and cleansed Anatolia further of non-Turkish minorities.

Atatürk presented his new state as an increasingly monolithic entity. Regardless of their ethnic identity, Muslim citizens of the republic
were henceforth to be considered Turks. The glorious national history taught in schools was supposedly pure in its Turkishness—it starts with an epic migration from the Central Asian steppe, follows the Turks as they assume leadership of the Islamic community, and ends as they triumphantly embrace modern European civilization. “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk” became Atatürk’s most famous saying, and everyone was encouraged to agree.

It is well known that millions of Kurds, whose ancestors inhabited parts of Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia well before the Turks turned up, resented being designated as Turks, and that on several occasions they took up arms to demand autonomy or independence. (The most recent separatist rebellion, by the Kurdish Workers Party, whose Kurdish acronym is PKK, lasted from 1984 to 1999 and cost at least 30,000 lives.) But the most striking thing about the Turkish identity promoted by Atatürk is just how many citizens of the new state enthusiastically accepted it. Few of today’s Turks are descended from the original Central Asian migrants. Atatürk himself was not the “Father of the Turk” that his self-conferred surname suggests, but was probably descended from Slavic converts to Islam. Many of the people I spoke to in Turkey this spring told me that their ancestors had fled from the Balkans, the Caucasus, or Ottoman Mesopotamia during the empire’s collapse. I met others who were assimilated Kurds; they had, they said, no sympathy for Kurdish nationalism.

What has induced these people to embrace Atatürk’s national identity? As Muslims under the Ottoman Empire traumatized by the loss of their former lands whether in the Balkans or elsewhere, their forebears found refuge in Anatolia. In the face of new threats to their security, not least Allied attempts at the end of World War I to carve up Anatolia and create new Armenian and Kurdish countries, the only thing for them to do was to assimilate. Most forgot their Balkan
or Caucasian languages and traditions; their children became model Turkish citizens, diligently learning at school about allegedly Turkish skull types and memorizing the poems of Ziya Gokalp, an exponent of Turkish nationalism who wrote much of his poetry in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. And so modern Turkishness, while theoretically springing from a common racial heritage, actually means something more and less than that. It was born in response to irredentist Balkan nationalisms of the nineteenth century and it became a means of uniting people against hostile states trying to divide up Anatolia at the end of World War I.

Atatürk chose Turkishness, and not Islam, to bind the citizens together because he had decided that Turkey should be a secular state, and hoped that Islam, which he felt retarded modern development, would lose its influence over people’s daily lives. In the words of the Turkish historian Taner Akcam, who has written extensively about Turkey’s self-image, particularly in connection with the atrocities committed against the Armenians, the national identity “developed together with the fear of extermination, of extinction” by predatory enemies.
¹
For the Armenians, of course, the fear of extermination turned out to be real; but many modern Turks concur with the words of Talat Pasha, the chief vizier who ordered the deportations: “If I had not done it to them, they would have done it to us.” Any attempt to dismantle Turkishness, even now, is bound to revive old fears.

2.

In April, I visited the eastern city of Erzurum, 150 miles from the Turkish border with Georgia and a thousand miles to the east of
Ankara. Commanding both the headwaters of the Euphrates and a vital corridor for a foreign army seeking to invade Anatolia from the northeast, Erzurum has a tumultuous history of acquisition and loss, of resistance and vulnerability. You feel the weight of this history when you visit the city’s medieval mosques, which more closely resemble fortresses than places of worship. From the hills overlooking the city, you can see the plains from which the Russians approached when they conquered Erzerum three times in less than a century. And you learn quickly about ethnic conflict. When H.F.B. Lynch, a British writer and statesman, visited Erzurum in the final years of the nineteenth century, the city’s Turkish and Armenian inhabitants were complaining of attacks by Kurdish militias that the Ottoman government had unwisely armed—militias that embarrassed local officials described as “brigands, disguised as soldiers.”