Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (57 page)

“We should have at least five more years in government, to create more confidence at home and to convince American and French decision makers that we are not dangerous and can discuss mutual interests between us,” he added. “So I think we need to be one of the main parties, but not the main party.”

The party’s compromises, however, have made it vulnerable to charges of being co-opted by the monarchy—and failure. It has not only stood by the king; several PJD officials work in government ministries.

“The monarchy has the support of the Moroccan public. We feel it doesn’t contradict democracy,” Othmani told me. “There are many monarchies in Western democracies.”

The compromises, so far, have been largely one-sided. The monarchy has given the Party of Justice and Development a bit of public space but retained all power. Even if it won a parliamentary election, the PJD might not be able to either lead a government or pass legislation, since the king appoints the prime minister and can dissolve parliament at his whim.

The failure to share power or enact political reform puts the monarchy in a precarious position, for the Party of Justice and Development is neither the largest Islamic movement in Morocco nor the biggest threat to the royal palace.

Despite its traditionally moderate brand of Islam, Morocco has several other more hard-line movements. The most militant is the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, an ally of al Qaeda sired by Moroccan dissidents trained in Afghanistan. In the 1990s, many of its members returned home and cultivated new cells, particularly in the cinder-block slums of Casablanca that teem with more than 300,000 people.

The group also has cells in Europe. Besides the 2003 Casablanca attacks, the group’s militants are linked to the 2004 bombings in Madrid, when ten bombs went off simultanteously on four commuter trains at rush hour. Almost 200 were killed, almost 2,000 injured. It was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history.

The Moroccan militants want an Islamist regime to replace the monarchy. They also support al Qaeda’s confrontation with the West.
³³

The largest and most popular Moroccan Islamist group is Justice and Charity. The movement is nonviolent but refuses to participate in politics.
³⁴
It was founded by Sheikh Abdesalam Yassine, a charismatic cleric, who is widely compared to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Both led campaigns against powerful monarchies in the 1960s and 1970s. Both called for a monarchy to be replaced by a republic. Both men also went to jail, fueling their popularity.

Yassine launched his party with a 120-page open letter to King Hassan in 1974. It accused the monarchy of tolerating corruption. It condemned the regime for allowing Western-style moral decay. And it warned that an Islamic deluge would sweep the monarchy from power.

For much of the next quarter century, Yassine was intermittently locked up in a state psychiatric hospital, imprisoned, or under house arrest. His message of good works for the poor nevertheless tapped into deep discontent among the poor and triggered a groundswell of support, as his daughter carried on the campaign in his absence.

In 2000, shortly after his father died, King Mohammed released Yassine and other political prisoners. But the sheikh did not repent. He penned another long open letter charging that the late king had looted billions from the national treasury and calling on the King Mohammed to save his father from eternal damnation by returning the people’s “legitimate belongings” to alleviate Morocco’s enormous poverty.
³⁵

Yassine’s powerful challenge has given Justice and Charity credibility among Islamists—and posed the biggest challenge to both the monarchy and the PJD.

When he inherited power, King Mohammed VI pledged to become the “king of the poor.” “We are firmly determined to lead our people to a democracy which involves all participants and incites everybody to take part in the economic and social Jihad,” he told parliament in 2000.

But little changed. One third of Moroccans still live below the poverty line. One in five is still unemployed. Infant mortality rates are very high. And prospects for rapid improvement are limited, because roughly one half of Moroccans are still illiterate, putting significant progress a generation away, at least.

The young king also tightened the cordon around political Islam after the Casablanca bombings. In 2003, the government introduced an antiterrorism law that allows it to monitor mosques, religious leaders, and the religious content of textbooks. “Apologizing for terrorism,” widely interpreted as explaining it in terms of local conditions, became a crime.
³⁶

In 2005, the regime proposed another law that barred all religious and ethnic references in party platforms. It effectively blocked any group more ambitious than Othmani’s movement—and even put it on notice.

Othmani acknowledged the tensions—and the growing limitations. “As an opposition party, we have no ability to get our bills enacted,” he told me. “Our approach is to have gradual progress and avoid haste and shortcuts, which is a major mistake committed by many leftists, nationalists, and Islamist movements over the decades.”

“The strategy for us is to be patient,” he said. “The question now is whether the population has enough patience to stick with us.”

In Morocco’s 2007 parliamentary elections, in a field of thirty-three parties, the PJD did not do as well as it had expected. Yet the Islamists won more votes than ever. And the PJD improved its position in parliament. It officially became Morocco’s second most popular party.

The Furies

F
or the foreseeable future, the Middle East will be engulfed in a contest between the familiar and the feared, between the comfort of long-standing local traditions and the lure of global political trends. In a region where ways of life date back millennia, it will be a tug-of-war, bloody at times.

Along the way, change will often require sorting out the past or at least trying to move beyond it. Progress will otherwise be overpowered.

Iraq is the starkest case.

In November 2002, during the buildup to the Iraq war, I went to see Barham Salih, the prime minister of Kurdistan. The northern region of Iraq, about the size of Switzerland or twice the size of New Jersey, was then isolated from the outside world, so it took a while to get there. I flew first to Iran, spent several days in Tehran getting assorted permissions, then flew west to Iran’s Kermanshah province, and finally took a three-hour cab ride to the border with Iraq. In a cold, drizzling rain, I checked in at a hut used mainly by truckers and smugglers who ferried goods into Iraq in defiance of United Nations sanctions. I was asked to sign my name in an old-fashioned ledger to note that I was leaving the country. Then I walked across a no-man’s-land—illegally, since I did not have a visa—into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

I was not the only American in Kurdistan. U.S. intelligence and Special Forces officers were already secretly in the northern Iraqi province, almost six months before the invasion and as diplomacy was only midstream at the United Nations. The Americans were conducting reconnaissance, negotiating access with Kurdish leaders, checking out four unused airfields, setting up listening posts, probing the strength of Kurdish troops, and becoming familiar with the starkly beautiful region of craggy mountains and tranquil lakes.

The American experiment in creating a democracy in the Middle East was already in the works.

I stopped first in Sulaimaniyah, a bustling city with tree-lined streets and its own Ferris wheel, about four hundred miles north of Baghdad. Sulaiman is the Islamic version of Solomon. The suffix-
iyah
citifies a name. Sulaimaniyah was named after an eighteenth-century Kurdish prince. It is one of two Kurdish capitals. Irbil is the other.

Born in 1960, Barham Salih is an erudite man with a smoothly bald pate; the sides and back of his hair are neatly barbered, as is his mustache. He speaks the Queen’s English, is a dapper dresser, and has a penchant for fine red wines and cigars. Arrested twice by Saddam’s regime, he graduated from the University of Cardiff in Wales and did graduate work at the University of Liverpool. He was a Kurdish representative in Washington before returning to join the government. I had known him for more than a decade, and we had been debating the future of Iraq through most of it.

Salih invited me to his family house in Sulaimaniyah so we could watch the American election results. He was closely monitoring the 2002 vote, in part to see if it would have any impact on U.S. plans in Iraq. He was both nervous and excited by the prospects of American intervention.

“We still have a precarious relationship with the West in this part of the world. Our admiration is shaded by suspicion from past experience,” he told me. “But we’re hoping the United States will be a partner in bringing about a better Iraq. And I’d be surprised if the United States allows this opportunity to go down the tubes.”

I asked him if he had any reservations. He hesitated for a moment.

“Living in the West was a very useful opportunity for me to see debate in the British Parliament and America’s Congress. It was wonderful!” he said, with a laugh. “But as I am reminded daily since I returned to Iraq, your Western societies took hundreds of years to get that far. Modernity is the rejection of so many traditions and sources of identity. We are not anywhere near this point.

“As prime minister,” he added, as the U.S. election results on CNN streamed across the bottom of his television, “I spend a
lot
of time with traditional people who want to build a mosque when my instinct is to build a school. I fully believe that the Middle East can’t continue in the way of the past. There’s simply too much change taking place everywhere, and globalization makes us part of it, whether leaders like it or not. But there’s no place the saying that ‘old habits die hard’ is truer than in the Middle East.

“My concern,” he said, “is that removing a dictatorship does not mean democracy will work—right away or perhaps at all. I have been warning the Americans about this. But I don’t know whether they understand.”

Kurdistan was a model for both the potential and the dangers of change in Iraq.

The world’s largest ethnic group without a state, the Kurds were particularly keen on ousting Saddam Hussein. They had never wanted to be part of Iraq in the first place.

An Indo-European people, the Kurds are closer ethnically to Persians than Arabs. Kurdish tribes have inhabited the inhospitable mountains for millennia. An early mention of the Kurds—people in “the land of Karda”—was found in cuneiform writings of the Sumerians some 3,000 years before Christ. Saladin, arguably the greatest warrior in Middle East history, was a Kurd. Born in the twelfth century, he came from Tikrit, which, ironically, was also Saddam Hussein’s home town. Saladin went on to become the vizier of Egypt. He recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Ever since, leaders in the region have coveted the idea of being the next Saladin.

After the Ottoman empire’s collapse, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised the Kurds their own country. But the agreement fell apart. Today, the estimated thirty million Kurds—although estimates vary widely—are divided up among four countries: More than one half are in Turkey. Iraq and Iran each have about twenty percent. More than five percent are in Syria. Smaller numbers are in Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Kurdish diaspora includes significant numbers in Europe as well as Israel, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.
³

For the Kurds, life in modern Iraq was never easy. They always felt like outsiders, as non-Arabs, and continuously agitated for real autonomy. Relations with Baghdad were often tense. But Saddam Hussein’s rule was the most brutal.

In the 1980s, Saddam’s army razed hundreds of Kurdish villages. More than 180,000 Kurds were detained. Thousands were executed, their bodies dumped in mass graves, their families never notified. In 1987 and 1988, the Iraqi military fired chemical weapons on two dozen Kurdish towns and villages.
⁴
The grisliest attack was in Halabja, where some 5,000 Kurds died from mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun and sarin. The bodies of mainly women, children, and the elderly littered the streets where they had dropped. Guy Dinmore of
The Financial Times
recorded the gruesome scene when he arrived shortly afterward.

Halabja ranked as the most devastating chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in modern times. The city was under Salih’s jurisdiction, just down the road from Sulaimaniyah. It served as a constant reminder of the Kurds’ vulnerability.

In 1991, the Kurds rose up one last time against Saddam in response to an appeal by President George H. W. Bush to topple the Iraqi leader after a U.S.-led campaign had forced him to retreat from Kuwait. But Baghdad quickly crushed the Kurdish revolt, again killing thousands and forcing one million to flee to the borders of Turkey and Iran. Baghdad then punished the five million Iraqi Kurds by cutting off funds, food, fuel, electrical power, and any human traffic in or out of their landlocked enclave. Saddam wanted the Kurds starved into submission.

The threat of military action hung over every action the Kurds took. “If the current government in Baghdad remains in power, the prospect of another genocide is very real,” Salih told me. “Iraqi tanks are literally an hour or so away. Most Kurds have contingency plans for what they’ll do if something should happen again.”

The Kurds lived under double sanctions. As part of Iraq, they also came under the toughest punitive measures ever imposed by the United Nations.

The Kurds, as a famous proverb laments, had no friends left but the mountains.

Yet the rugged people of northern Kurdistan, some of whom still wear the baggy pants and colorful turbans of tribal tradition, are a scrappy lot. In the 1990s, they slowly began transforming the north, reconfiguring what they had and smuggling in the rest to survive.

Outside Sulaimaniyah, a little oil refinery assembled from the cannibalized parts of cement, sugar, and soft-drink factories noisily pumped out 3,000 barrels of oil a day. Its slogan: “Where there’s a well, there’s a way.” Unable to get passports, Kurdish officials converted time abroad as students or workers into second nationalities. Salih had a British passport, his minister of education was a Swede, the ministers of reconstruction and of human rights were Germans. Other officials were Belgian, French, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, and Swiss.

“I don’t think there are any Portuguese among us,” reflected Defense Minister Sherdl Hawezey, seriously.

The Kurds also adapted their skills. Salih was a civil engineer and statistician. His intelligence chief, Khasro Mohammed, was a former veterinarian specializing in poultry diseases.

“Both jobs require research and investigation,” Mohammed told me, somewhat bemused.

To compensate for having no postal system, dozens of Internet cafés had opened in the previous three years. The Internet elsewhere in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was heavily censored and required a police permit to get full access, but Kurds had cheap, unrestricted connections. Satellite dishes, perched atop mud-brick homes in the countryside and dangling with laundry off apartment balconies in the cities, brought in the outside world. As we watched the U.S. election results, Salih flicked between CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the BBC with his remote. The Kurds had also launched their own television stations, some with satellite links on Kurdsat that beamed into the United States and Europe. One station aired an equivalent of
Saturday Night Live
with irreverent pokes at Kurdish politicians.

Kurdistan, which was divided into eastern and western regional governments, had the early trappings of democracy. One of the first signs was a decision by the two regional governments to form a united front and hold elections in 1992 for a single new Kurdish legislature. Although two parties dominated politics, others contributed to feisty public and parliamentary debates.

Freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly were also taking root. Several regional newspapers began questioning policies and politicians.

“Every week, someone comes through my office asking me to do something about the papers,” Salih told me, with a sigh.

Hawlati,
or The Citizen, was the particular bane of Kurdish politicians after its launch in 2000—on a 1967 printing press. It exposed a military commander’s illegal kickbacks on government contracts. It published secret government communications. Its investigation of a Kurdish official led to his arrest for kidnapping and murder. And its editorials blasted government inefficiency, corruption, and heavy-handedness.

“Politicians understand that allowing criticism is more important than stopping criticism—no small thing in Iraq,”
Hawlati
’s editor Aso Hardi told me. Some papers were independent; others were tied to political parties. “But at least we have a lot of parties,” Hardi said. The rest of Iraq was then ruled by the all-powerful Baath Party, which controlled every media outlet, print or broadcast.

Free enterprise had also produced a taste of globalization in Kurdistan. A new fast-food outlet, complete with golden arches, had introduced Big Macs and Happy Meals—but as MaDonal’s.

“I have to wait until sanctions end to make it the real thing,” explained owner Suleiman Kasab, a former hamburger flipper at a McDonald’s in Austria.

Kurdistan was hardly self-sufficient. The Kurds relied heavily on the United Nations, which under the sanctions arrangement channeled thirteen percent of Iraq’s oil revenues back into the north and provided a daily food ration for every Kurd (and every Iraqi). The income helped rebuild the villages that Saddam had destroyed. It paid for new schools, clinics, a justice ministry, and a Central Bank independent of Baghdad. It helped develop agriculture, pave roads, and plant three million trees.

The Kurds, however, did figure a way to generate revenue by turning the tables on Saddam, who also relied on illicit trade to circumvent international sanctions. The Kurds taxed smugglers bringing sanctions-busting goods across from Turkey and Iran, through Kurdistan, into the rest of Iraq—to the tune of one million dollars a day.

“Our dinar—the old one, without Saddam’s picture on it—is now stronger than the currency in the rest of Iraq,” Salih told me.

Kurdistan had evolved into a state within a state. It had done so well that many Kurds, who made up about twenty percent of Iraq’s twenty-six million people, liked to boast that the north could be a prototype for the rest of Iraq.