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Iraq's "Bosnians" : The Turkomans as
Ethnic Scapegoats The recent theater of amity among Iraq's opposition factions at a London conference should not beguile anyone. Iraq's interethnic rivalry smolders daily hotter, especially in the northern areas around the strategic oil towns of Kirkuk and Mosul. That area is facing a potential Balkan-style upheaval of pent-up forces, with the most moderate secular Muslim group, the Iraqi Turkomans, cast in the role of the local Bosnians. The Iraqi Turkomans complain that their share of the population is being deliberately underrepresented. They and their neighbors the Christian Assyrians are angry that their urban districts -- still under Saddam Hussein's control -- are being pre-emptively gerrymandered by the Kurdish factions to carve out a greater Iraqi Kurdistan in a future grab for oil terrain. It bodes ill for the region's stability that virtually no one outside of Turkey is conscious of the plight of the Turkomans. They, like the Bosnians, are kith and kin to the Turks. They claim to number some 12% of Iraq's total population and the current Iraqi opposition alliance concedes them only 6% of representation. The Turkomans might be driven to take up arms to protect their rights once the enforced Saddam umbrella disappears. The internal strife could draw in the Turkish military. The last time the Turks waited for international intervention to protect their cousins -- the Bosnians -- what they witnessed instead was unrelieved slaughter. The last time they themselves intervened, which was in Cyprus, the world never forgave them. This time the Turkish military is gearing up warily and reluctantly. Naturally, they would rather that their Western allies, for once, heeded their interests ahead of time. But the West, thus far, does not seem to have even heard of the Turkomans. The Turkomans are the only non-Arab ethnic group in Iraq with a single separate language. The residue of several ruling Turkish dynasties, including the Seljuk and the Ottoman, the Turkomans have been part of the urban literate classes in the region for over a thousand years. Even before Turkish rule, the early Arab Abbasid and Ummayad caliphates used them as a military caste before the first millennium. But ever since the British replaced the Ottomans after World War I, successive modern regimes in Iraq have undercounted, slaughtered, displaced and violently assimilated their population. Indeed, they are called Turkomans (or Turkmen) only because the British, in inventing 1920s Iraq, wished to divide them from the Turks in nearby Turkey as an early census-rigging ploy. This was all the rage at the time, as the fledgling Soviet regime under Lenin also went about subdividing their own Turks into Turkmen, Uzbeks, Azeris and the like. Subsequent Iraqi regimes followed the pattern with forcible re-education programs to persuade the Iraqi Turkomans that they were a mere subtribe of Soviet Turkmenistan. In 1958, when the British-sponsored Faisal monarchy was overthrown by socialist Arab nationalists who ultimately became Saddam's Baath Party, the oil town of Kirkuk was partially ethnically cleansed of Turkomans (they still make up two-thirds of the population). In their place, Kurds were allowed to settle in the area as a welcoming gesture for the return to Iraq of the Soviet-educated Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani. (His son Masood Barzani, who has inherited leadership, was a Saddam ally as recently as 1996.) The pattern of Stalinist pogroms followed by ethnic cleansing of Turkomans became routine both pre- and post-Saddam. Over the years, financial incentives were thrown in for anyone marrying a Turkoman bride, forcibly or otherwise, or for any Turkoman taking up Arab ethnicity. For decades, Iraq has forbidden the Turkoman minority to teach its language and history. And nobody, not even the Turks, has yet interceded on their behalf. As the Turkomans argue, the last halfway fair Iraqi census occurred in 1957, when their ethnic group officially comprised 9% of Iraq's total. And this did not include the estimated one-third of Shiites who were Turkic. In recent years, neither Turkomans nor Assyrians have been allowed to declare themselves anything other than Arab or Kurdish, so the current population figures are dubious in the extreme. Yet in convoking the post-Desert Storm 1992 conference, and again last week, the self-appointed anti-Saddam coalition seems bent on misallocating power according to their peremptory needs based on phony figures. They break down Iraqi minority populations as 40% Shiite (which pleases the Iranians), 25% Kurdish (which encompasses the oil cities), 6% Turkomans and 3% Christian (which angers both latter groups). The Kurdish factions in particular, with moral support from Europeans nostalgic for the leftist allegiances of yesteryear, are egregiously culpable in the back-stairs power grabbing. They have disguised their machinations cleverly, at one point announcing a regional Iraqi Kurdish parliament and inviting their brother Turkomans and Assyrians to participate. That slippery version of democracy will not work; the Iraqi Kurds have attacked each other and their ethnic neighbors too often to stake that fraternal position credibly. If it comes to a federated system in Iraq -- perhaps the only way to keep minorities safe from each other -- the Turkomans must be allowed their own full-fledged autonomous zone, undivided by the oil-lust of others. The inescapable bottom line, which we ignore at our peril, is this: The Turkomans and other Iraqi groups cannot, in full view of Western eyes, be doled out meager and jerry-rigged portions of democratic rights by rivals. This will only lead to further ethnic strife a la Bosnia, and infinitely complicate the postwar allied administration of the region. Mr. Kaylan, a New York writer, is completing a history of Istanbul. |