Cruelty and Silence
Kanan Makiya
Jonathan Cape
On August 2, 1990, when I heard that Saddam Husain had just invaded Kuwait, I felt sick. The instinctive thought was that he was going to get away with it. The Arab world was in a moribund, fragmented state and Saddam Husain knew his world, however little he may have understood anyone else’s. Had he been allowed to get away with the annexation of the whole or part of Kuwait, everything that he stood for in politics would have been projected outward, shaping the Arab world for generations to come. For each one of us, the most important moments in politics begin with the kind of raw feeling that overcame me as I sat in my living room listening to the news. All the complex analyses and fancy formulations—which are a writer’s trade—fall into line behind such feelings. Writing and thinking turn into mere elaboration of elemental instinct.
“Saddam Husain has to be stopped,” I wrote that same August. “The major flaw in the American-led effort against him is that the shock troops in the front lines are not Arabs. The old nationalist, anti-imperialist formulas are therefore already being ...
Contents
Acknowledgments / 9
A Note on Transliteration / 13
Introduction / 15
Cruelty / 29
1. Khalil / 31
2. Abu Haydar / 57
3. Omar / 105
4. Mustafa / 135
5. Taimour / 151
6. Remembering Cruelty / 200
Whither Iraq? / 215
Silence / 231
7. Who Am I? / 233
8. New Nationalist Myths / 253
9. Landscapes of Cruelty and Silence / 284
10. Defining Silence / 312
Notes 329 Index / 359
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A handful of dear friends have always read everything that I wrote. They are Afsaneh Najmabadi, Mai Ghoussoub, and Emmanuel Farjoun. What they have contributed to all my books goes beyond comments and suggestions for improvement; I take nourishment from their spirit. To Mai, who never wanted me to dwell so much on the violence of our world even as her example taught me how to grasp only what was most essential about it, I dedicated Republic of Fear in 1986. Tilings being what they were under the Iraqi Ba‘th, that dedication remained a secret between us. No longer.
Cruelty and Silence could never have been written in that 1980s atmosphere of mistrust and personal isolation. This is a book of Arab and Kurdish voices. In the nature of things I have a large number of people to thank. Homes were opened up to me, personal letters were passed on, newspapers were clipped and complicated interviews arranged. I was entrusted with sensitive government documents, with names that were not to be revealed, with family secrets, with the stories of terrible things that people were compelled to do. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, where much of the writing was done, and in London and Iraqi Kurdistan where most of the information was obtained, Iraqis took care of my children, collected information, introduced me to people, and told me what to look for and where. They commented on chapter drafts, took me to places, and provided me with protection inside Iraq. This is their book. Being able to say this gives me great pleasure. Nonetheless, I alone am responsible for errors or for controversial ideas. Nor, it must be stressed, does appearance in the book involve any kind of responsibility for it.
Aside from the “characters” in this book, I am grateful to Haydar Hamoodi, Ghanim Jewad, Nabaz Kamal, Dhia Kashi, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, Zuhair Hamadi, Rend Rahim, Shoresh Rasoul, Tamara Daghistani, Muhammad al-Hakim, Faleh ‘Abdel-Jabbar, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, Bushra Rahim, Amin al-‘Issa, Ahmad Chalabi, Latif Rashid, Barham Saleh, Hoshyar Zibari, Jawhar Namiq Salem, Burhan al-Jaf, and the members of the Iraqi-American Forum for Peace and Democracy. There remain many other Iraqis spread across the world whose personal circumstances preclude my naming them. I hope that one day, in an edition of this book issued from Baghdad, their contribution can be properly acknowledged.
My friends Andre Gaspard, Paula Hajar, Lawrence Weschler. Greg Singer, Cliff Wright, Kenneth Roth, Stephen Howe, and Hazim Saghiyeh kindly read through various early drafts of part or the whole of this manuscript. It has been gready improved by their comments. I would also like to express my appreciation for the confidence placed in me by John Blake, the producer of Everyman at the BBC, Marty Smith and David Fanning of “Frondine” at WGBH, and Gwynne Roberts in whose company I travelled to northern Iraq in the winter of 1991. Gwynne also kindly provided me with translated transcripts of interviews conducted in Kurdistan in November 1991. Neil Conan of National Public Radio and Tony Horowitz of the Wall Street Journal very graciously gave me transcripts of interviews they had conducted inside Iraq, both of which have found their way into the text. Sarah Zaidi and Aliza Faijoun drew my attention to the important fieldwork done by Pakistani and Palestinian women on political rape. Jacqueline Williams put together an invaluable chronology of the Iraqi intifada. I feel greatly indebted to all of them. I am also grateful to Nabaz Kamal for helping with translations from Kurdish. As for the translations from French, I am indebted to Donald Stone, Eric Evans, and a very dear Iraqi friend who prefers not to be named. Translations from the Arabic are my own unless otherwise noted.
The Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard University provided an environment most conducive to writing. In particular, I would like to thank Roy Mottahedeh and William Graham for their support and for inviting me to be a part of that community while working on this book.
My publishers, Mary Cunnane at W.W. Norton and Neil Belton at Jonathan Cape, have provided support at every step of the way.
They followed the twists and turns of this book from its inception in June 1991 to its completion in December 1992. I have lost count of the number of different drafts I forwarded on to them for comment. No author could ask for more.
I published an article in the May 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine which was based on the material in Chapter 5, Taimour. I am very grateful to Jerry Mazaratti for his editorial insights during the writing of that article; they remained invaluable in shaping the enormous mass of material that ended up as Chapter 5. A less-developed version of the argument in Chapter 7, Who Am I?, was published in Arabic by Saqi Books in a pamphlet entitled Al-Harb Alati Lam Tuktamal. Throughout, many of the ideas put forth were explored in the form of lectures given at Oxford University, the University of Utah, Harvard University, the School for Advanced International Studies at Princeton University, the University of Washington in Seatde, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Finally, there are three special people who did something much more than just work on or help out with this book: they left a piece of their hearts inside its pages. Naghmeh Sohrabi, from Iran, combed libraries and edited transcripts. Rena Fonseca, from India, read and reread chapters when I could no longer see the forest for the trees. Ayad Rahim, from Iraq, did a little bit of everything. No task was too big or too small for him, and he was always there. I met Ayad accidentally in October 1990 in the Old City of Jerusalem shortly after the killings on the Haram al-Sharif. He was working on the human rights abuses endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation; from there we began a return journey into the cruel world of Ba'thi Iraq. Together, we worked and laughed and cried for the year and a half that it took to finish this book.
A Note on Transliteration
I have kept in mind the general reader, not the specialist, in transcribing Arabic into English. Arabic names which have entered into English, such as Cairo, Mosul, Omar, and intifada, have been kept in their widely accepted form. Where Arab writers or publications have a common rendition of their name, I have opted for these (for example, Hisham Djai'et, Edward Said, an-Naqid). The definite article “the” has been rendered al - with the exception of the construction “’Abd al-,” which has been rendered “‘Abdel-” because that is what most people with that construction in their name seem to prefer (for example, ‘Abdel-Rahman Munif). Otherwise I have used a simplified version of the English transliteration system employed in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), leaving out all diacritical marks with the exception of (‘) for the Arabic guttural consonant ‘ain and (’) for the Itaniza, an unvoiced glottal stop. I have also used “dh” for the three Arabic letters dhal, dhad, and dha\ the sounds of which range from the English “th” (as in “the”) to an emphatic muffled “d.” The long vowel sound produced by a dhamma and a waw is transliterated as “ou” (as in Mahmoud). The long e sound is transliterated as “ee” (as in Khalcej and Sa‘eed). The intent is to provide a better sense of the pronunciation to the general reader. A particular problem for which there is no ready solution is the rendition of Iraqi colloquial and Kurdish words. Where, in such cases, the above rules broke down, I improvised.
Introduction
On August 2, 1990, when I heard that Saddam Husain had just invaded Kuwait, I felt sick. The instinctive thought was that he was going to get away with it. The Arab world was in a moribund, fragmented state and Saddam Husain knew his world, however little he may have understood anyone else’s. Had he been allowed to get away with the annexation of the whole or part of Kuwait, everything that he stood for in politics would have been projected outward, shaping the Arab world for generations to come. For each one of us, the most important moments in politics begin with the kind of raw feeling that overcame me as I sat in my living room listening to the news. All the complex analyses and fancy formulations—which are a writer’s trade—fall into line behind such feelings. Writing and thinking turn into mere elaboration of elemental instinct.
“Saddam Husain has to be stopped,” I wrote that same August. “The major flaw in the American-led effort against him is that the shock troops in the front lines are not Arabs. The old nationalist, anti-imperialist formulas are therefore already being trotted out, to terrible effect. For the sake of the future of the Arab world itself, Arab must be seen to be fighting Arab in the sands of Arabia for the sake of the restoration of the sovereignty of Kuwait and against the principle of violence in human affairs which is what Ba‘thi politics is all about.”1
On January 17, 1991, the day the Allied forces began bombing Iraq, I was in Cairo to attend the twenty-second annual Arabic language …
Kanan Makiya
Cruelty and Silence
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape
Cruelty and Silence
War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World
Kanan Makiya
(Samir al-Khalil)
Jonathan Cape
London
First published 1993
© Kanan Makiya 1993
Kanan Makiya has asserted his right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
to be identified as the author of this work
First published in the United Kingdom in 1993 by
Jonathan Cape
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