Kurdistan on the Global Stage Diane E. King Rutgers University
“A rare account by an anthropologist of uncommon courage, this unique analysis of the rapid transformation of Iraqi Kurdistan is a must-read for students and scholars of the Middle East.” —Marcia C. Inhorn, Yale University
Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Husseins Bathist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to and from other parts of the world. Focusing on household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages, King explores how residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and vice versa. Old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone. Households may have a startling combination of nonliterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage. King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography.
Diane E. King is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky. She is the editor of the volume Middle Eastern Belongings (2010; paperback edition, 2013) as well as scholarly articles and journalism on collective identity, kinship and descent, gender, and the state. Since 1995, she has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Her Ph. D. (2000) is from Washington State University. She previously taught at Washington State University and the American University of Beirut. Her research has been supported by her employers and by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Foundation (of Brown University), and the British Council.
Contents
List of Illustrations / ix Acknowledgments / xi Note on Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Proper Nouns / xiii
1 Kurdistan Glocal / 1 2 Fieldwork in a Danger Zone / 41 3 A Man on the Land: Lineages, Identity, and Place / 66 4 Gendered Challenges: Women Navigating Patriliny / 102 5 Politicking / 138 6 Refuge Seeking, Patriliny, and the Global / 172 7 Kurdistan in the World / 204
Notes / 229
Glossary and Acronyms / 237 References / 239 Index / 255
Illustrations
Figures (Charts and Maps)
Figure i.i “Kurdistan," the area recognized by Kurds as their historic homeland / 4 Figure 2.1 United Nations northern Iraq map / 42 Figure 3.1 Chart of the hypothetical known forebears of a Kurdish individual / 68 Figure 3.2 Bushra and Loqman kin chart / 71 Figure 3.3 Barwari Bala tribal area government map / 92 Figure 3.4 Map produced by U.S. intelligence in the 1940s / 94
Photographs
Photo 1.1 An advertisement for Nokia mobile phones / 10 Photo 1.2 Shanidar Cave / 16 Photo 1.3 Dohuk juice bar / 23 Photo 1.4 A new park and buildings in Hewler’s city center / 26 Photo 2.1 Passport stamp issued to the author in 1996 granting authorization to travel to Iraq / 44 Photo 2.2 Rubble from the Iraqi government’s attacks against the Kurds / 54 Photo 2.3 Signs of industry, a plane landing, and a billboard trumpeting a new lifestyle / 55 Photo 3.1 Boys herding sheep and goats / 89 Photo 3.2 Knitting in the village / 90 Photo 3.3 Village farmer posing with plow / 91 Photo 4.1 Girls studying to become teachers of English / 103 Photo 4.2 Shopkeepers and shoppers in the fabric section of the main bazaar / 123 Photo 5.1 Men visit overlooking the town of Aqre / 158 Photo 6.1 A bomb casing lies in a field near a village / 178 Photo 6.2 A girl removing freshly baked bread from an earth oven / 179 Photo 6.3 Shush, a village near Hewler / 198 Photo 7.1 A black goat-hair tent, used for transhumant herding / 217 Photo 7.2 A man walks a trail on the mountain behind his village / 219 Photo 7.3 “American Village,” a new planned community / 222
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My research would have failed without a warm welcome from people in both diasporic and homeland Kurdish communities starting in the mid-1990s, who endured, in almost all cases cheerfully, my endless questions. When research participants may come into harm as a result of their participation in the research, university Institutional Review Boards (in the United States) require that they be protected through the use of pseudonyms and other means. Successive IRBs have expressed what I believe are appropriate concerns for my interlocutors. Because of these concerns, and even more so due to my own concern that no one be endangered or embarrassed by my research, there are many people to whom I owe a debt of tremendous gratitude, but cannot name. 1 thank you, even though my thanks cannot be public. My special thanks goes to my host families, especially the one that long ago "adopted" me and has still not changed its mind. You are delightful, all of you.
I value very highly, and am grateful for, the freedom I have in Kurdistan to talk to seemingly anyone, a freedom I exercise every time I am in the field. Especially when I think of Iraq’s totalitarian past, and the present in much of the territory surrounding Iraqi Kurdistan, I do not take it for granted. I thank the Kurdistan Regional Government for its openness, trust, and support. Asmat M. Khalid, current KRG minister of higher education and founder and former president of Dohuk University, and Nesreen Barwari, former KRG minister of reconstruction and development and Iraq minister of municipalities and public works, deserve special mention. I also thank Stafford Clarry, KRG humanitarian affairs adviser. Over the years I have hired a number of research assistants. Four became integral to my work: Nazira Mehsin Shamdeen, Zhiyan Rozh, Elie W. Mouchrik, and Erin Richter. I also thank Janet Johnston for her logistical help.
I stole away and wrote parts of this book in two homes, those of Kippy Gambill and the late Del Gambill, and Art Miley and Babs Miley. Thank you for your generosity. I am profoundly indebted to Linda Stone for her mentorship, encouragement, and friendship over nearly two decades. For their input on the manuscript I thank M. Cristina Alcalde, Nicholas Bailey, Francie Chassen-Lopez, Kristin Monroe, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Karen Petrone, Ana Rueda, Linda Stone, and Mark Schuller and his students at York College CUNY. I also thank participants in the Second International Conference on Kurdish Studies at Exeter University. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Rutgers University Press for their very helpful feedback. Marlie Wasserman, the press’s director, and her associates were wonderful to work with.
My research and writing have been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Foundation (of Brown University), and the British Council. Three universities have also supported my work: Washington State University, American University of Beirut, and University of Kentucky. I believe in intervention by the divine in human events. Several times during my research, I have been the beneficiary of small miracles, and I imagine there were more of which I was not aware. I am grateful.
Note on Transliteration, Pronunciation, and Proper Nouns
The Kurdish language is written in a number of different scripts. The Arabic script is most common in Iraq, followed by the Latin script. Because of its similarity to English, I use the romanized script in this book. I render many Kurdish words, and words from neighboring languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Persian that are used in spoken and written Kurdish, in their most common English spelling, even if such a spelling is not standard in the romanized Kurdish script. Examples include "Zakho,” the name of a town that in Kurdish is spelled “Zaxo,” and “peshmerga,” the word for resistance fighters that in Kurdish is spelled “pe§merge.” In other cases, I retain the spelling in English that is closest to the Kurdish spelling, but without Kurdish diacritics. An example is "Silemani.” the name of a city that in Kurdish is spelled “Silemam" (and this city is often referred to by other authors writing in English by a transliteration of its Arabic pronunciation, such as "Sulaymaniyah"). When quoting another author, I leave spellings as they are in the original.
Kurdish encompasses several significant dialects and many subdialects. Most of the colloquial Kurdish featured in this book is from the Behdini Kurmanji dialect. Some places have multiple names that are derived from different languages or different historical periods. For example, the capital of the Kurdistan Region is the city that is known as “Hewler” (Hewler) in Kurdish but “Erbil” in Arabic. The latter tends to be more common in English-language sources. 1 favor the former in this book, but also use the latter.
Pronunciation Guide for the Kurdish Roman Alphabet
A, a / a in father C, c / j in June, jar Q, q / ch in church E, e / e in bet fi, e / a in bake G, g / g in go H, h / “heavy” h I, I / i in kit f, i / ee in seen J, j / s in vision O, o / o in oat (but shorter) Q, q / phryngeal q R, r / flapped r RR, rr / trilled r §, § / sh in shop U, u u as in put, a short vowel 0, u oo in soon, a long vowel X, x / as ch in Scottish “loch” (sometimes rendered “kh”) X, x / as in “X, x,” but voiced ’ / glottal stop ‘ / ayin, a guttural sound
Kurdish has fourteen additional letters. These particular letters are listed either because they differ from English, or because if used in English they could signify more than one sound.
Kurdistan on the Global Stage
Kurdistan Glocal
Kurdistan Parliament passed Domestic Violence Law; making Female Genital Mutilation criminal offense, prohibiting forced marriages, child labor.
-Barham Salih via Twitter, 2011
In 1991, hundreds of thousands of people fled up the soggy, freezing mountainsides of Kurdistan, the Kurdish homeland that spans Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, to escape attacks by the Iraqi military. The attacks were ordered by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, one of the world’s most brutal dictators, in response to an uprising by three main categories of Kurdish fighters: the chete (<;ete) tribal mercenaries who had been on the government’s payroll, and long-standing government adversaries the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party. Parti Demokrati Kurdistan) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Yeketi Ni^timani Kurdistan), whose fighters are called peshmerga (pe§merge) "those who face death." Enraged that the three Kurdish groups had united to challenge him, and hoping to use the fog of the waning Gulf War with the United States as a cover, the Iraqi leader sent his well-equipped army charging toward the Kurdish-populated area of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan. Desperate people streamed into the mountains toward Turkey and Iran. With little food and spending nights outside without adequate shelter, young, old, and vulnerable people began to die. At the Turkish border, many tried to cross and a few succeeded, but Turkish soldiers beat most people back. Although those particular attacks by Iraq were contextualized as a by-product of the Gulf War between the United States and Iraq, they followed many years of conflict in which Kurds had fought for autonomy and the central Iraqi government had done its best to crush them, using chemical weapons, mass deportations and executions, and all manner of terror.¹
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Diane E. King
Kurdistan on the Global Stage
Rutgers University
Rutgers University Press Anthropology - Human Rights - Middle Eastern Studies Kurdistan on the Global Stage Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq Diane E. King
Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
King, Diane E., 1966- Kurdistan on the global stage: kinship, land, and community in Iraq / Diane E. King. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-6353-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6352-7 pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-6354-1 (e-book) 1. Kurdistan (Iraq)—Politics and government. 2. Kurdistan (Iraq)—Social conditions. 3. Kurds—Iraq—Politics and government. 4. Kurds—Ethnic identity. I. Title. DS7o.8.K8I<55 2014 956.7'2—dc23 2013010360
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
For the atrocity and war survivors of Kurdistan and Iraq. May they find not only safety, but a just abundance.
Cover photograph: Near Savra, looking east at the Barzan Valley and the Great Zab River, Erbil Governorate, Kurdistan Region, Iraq, October 18, 1998. Photo by the author. Cover design by Eve Siegel
