The end of 2013 brought a grim harvest of bad news from the Arab countries: a car bomb in the centre of Beirut which killed the former finance minister, Mohammad Chatah; unbearable tales of suffering among the refugees from the Syrian conflict; an annual toll of more than 8,800 deaths in violent attacks in Iraq, approaching the levels of the civil war in 2008.
Amid these headlines it was easy to miss a more modest milestone: the Kurdish region of northern Iraq started exporting heavy crude oil through Turkey. In stark contrast to the eternally troubled history of the Kurds, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is now an established part of the region’s make-up.
The KRG is still formally part of Iraq, enjoying only limited autonomy, and its right to sell the oil reserves within its territory is not recognised by the Baghdad government. But in practice it now has more friends in high places – from the boards of international oil companies to the cabinets of western states – than many fully fledged members of the United Nations.
It is often said that the Kurds – who number some 30 million scattered over Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – have no friends but the mountains. They have been betrayed over the past century by the dominant powers, and been used as pawns in regional struggles.
While the KRG flourishes in northern Iraq, the Turkish government – which for decades denied the existence of the Kurds as a separate people – is pursuing a historic compromise after the defeat of the leftist-nationalist PKK insurgent group. In the north eastern corner of Syria, government forces have retreated, leaving Kurdish militias in control.
So while the Arab revolutions of 2011 are mired in various degrees of conflict and national paralysis, it is worth asking if they can learn some lessons from the nationalist revolution of the Kurds.
Despite their common aspiration for self-determination, the Kurds in the past have been as faction-ridden as any tribally based people. The two historic parties in Iraq – the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – have fought bitter internecine wars in the past. Yet now Iraqi Kurdistan is a more or less functioning democracy, with a strong army, and is on the way to turning Erbil into a regional commercial hub.
The first point to make is that autonomy or independence is not a sure recipe for success. South Sudan, which became independent from Sudan in 2011 on a wave of international support, is a case in point. A power tussle between two leaders of the independence struggle, President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar, turned into a mutiny within the National Guard, with members of the two dominant tribes fighting each other. More than 1,000 have died so far. The support of international donors is likely to be less generous if the struggle is not resolved quickly. Eritrea, when it broke away from Ethiopia in 1991, was thought to be a good bet for an African success story. Its guerrilla fighters impressed foreign observers with their spirit and organisation. Its history as an independent state has been one of wars, dictatorship and economic failure, with two-thirds of the population dependent on food aid.
The Kurds of northern Iraq could have gone the same way. The main difference is maturity of leadership which has given them the ability to take advantage of geopolitical changes. Since the Iraqi Kurds launched their first rebellion against the Iraqi state in 1961, they have been in almost constant conflict with Baghdad. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead and deported, they have learnt not to trust any foreign allies. The seminal experience came in 1975 when the Shah of Iran, who had allied himself with the Kurds as a means of pressure on Baghdad, abruptly withdrew support after he secured a boundary change from Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman. This allowed the Iraqi army to launch a successful offensive against the surprised Kurdish fighters.
As the Kurds like to say, at that time they were “pawns of pawns” – foot soldiers in a regional struggle within the context of the Cold War superpower confrontation. Since then, they have been determined to be actors in their own drama, building up relations with all regional intelligence services in order to play one off against the other. By the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the journalist and Iraq expert Patrick Cockburn writes, the Kurdish leaders were able to “position themselves carefully between the US and Iran without becoming dependent on either.”
The contrast with the Syrian opposition could not be clearer. There is no leader or banner to unite the fighters. They are either local self-defence groups in search of guns and money, or bigger players following the agenda of regional actors, both states and the Al Qaeda franchises.
The Kurdish leadership has had many years to learn the lessons of failure and the benefits of a pragmatic approach. By any reckoning, the era of Kurdish nationalism is dawning. But the leaders of the KRG are careful to avoid scaring the regional states. There is no plan to declare independence from Iraq. A union of southern Kurdistan, bringing together the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, is not on the cards. The goal of Massoud Barzani, the KRG’s president, is to use his influence to calm the hotheads in Syria.
In Syria, under a ruthless Baathist dictatorship for decades, there has been no chance for any opposition to learn the political arts. The same failure afflicted Iraq after the Anglo-American invasion: Saddam Hussein had liquidated or exiled all possible leaders, and those that returned were tainted by association with the countries they had sought refuge in.
The crude lesson from northern Iraq is that 50 years of failure is a good tutor. Does that mean the Arab revolutions are fated to struggle for two generations before achieving some kind of stability? That would be too pessimistic. Information moves faster these days. But the learning process on how to organise a state on different lines will be long.
aphilps@thenational.ae
On Twitter: @aphilps
