One Nation
Political Scientist Advises Kurdistan’s Negotiators in Iraq

by Peter Nichols

When Brendan O’Leary flew into Ankara in 1997 to speak at an interna-tional conference entitled Toward a Peaceful and Democratic Resolution of the Kurdish Question in Turkey, he was startled to find that the meeting was banned. The Turks, it seemed, were unwilling to even consider moving toward any resolution except the brutal and repressive one they had put into place after World War I when the state made it a crime to speak non-Turkish languages. So sensitive was the subject that even an academic conference was threaten-ing, and those who had come to just talk about the Kurds found themselves being shadowed by
state security agents.

Undaunted, the resourceful academics knew that banquets were legal, so long as only two people addressed the gathering, so it was decided there should be a “banquet.” Two of the conference speakers, both Turkish Kurds, collected the notes and papers the invited foreigners had prepared and read them at the session. Shortly after, one of the speakers was arrested.

“ This gave me an exposure to the Kurdish question of a very direct and palpable kind,” O’Leary remarks with a precise and unflappable understatement that is typical. In person, he tends to speak so softly that you need to lean in. “I had two loud, articulate, competitive brothers who could shout me down,” he confides with affection. “They had to listen to me by shutting up.”

O’Leary is the Lauder Professor of Political Science and director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. When
I came to his office at the Asch Center in June, two bags sat against the wall, packed for a flight to Guatemala later that afternoon. Over the summer, the global gadfly would visit Bosnia, Jordan, Turkey, Ireland, and Italy, and that doesn’t count the e-mails he sent from Heathrow Airport in London. The week before, he had returned from northern Iraq, where he’d spent the last seven months as a constitutional advisor helping the Kurdistan Regional Government negotiate its place in the new Iraqi state.

The Kurdish region of northern Iraq—formerly part of the no-fly zone enforced by U.S. warplanes—has bare, craggy precipices and full, tumultuous rivers. It is rich in resources, including oil, and has well developed cities. The protection granted by the U.S. military since the end of the first Gulf War allowed the Kurds of Iraq to hold elections and develop some of the independ-ence they’d been working toward, at great cost, for generations. “The success of 12 years of autonomous government is pretty plain,” O’Leary reports. “The roads are better, the housing is better, the welfare of the people is better, and they show signs of being freer as well as being more prosperous.”

Because the Kurds have their own army and a functioning government, the northern part of the country remained relatively safe and orderly when chaos swept over Iraq after the Ba’athist regime collapsed. American soldiers went without weapons or body armor, he says, and many came to the region “on holiday.” One of them, a Southerner, remarked to him doubtfully: “You look like an American, you talk like a Brit, and you’ve got an Irish name.” The characterization, notes O’Leary, was “spot on.”

O’Leary came to Penn two summers ago. As a professor at the London School of Economics, he had long been interested in national and ethnic conflict regulation. He’d been a consultant with the European Union and United Nations on the constitutional reconstruction of Somalia, and he advised the British government when it was helping South Africans in Kwa-Zulu Natal build parlia-mentary coalitions after apartheid. He was also a political advisor to the shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland and made “radical proposals” for power sharing within the country and sovereignty sharing between Britain and Northern Ireland. Principles like these found their way into the final Belfast Agreement, which most observers judge brought the long, bloody, and seemingly intractable conflict to an end.

O’Leary’s advisory experi-ence in constitution making and his growing expertise on the Kurdish plight caught the attention of Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil.
The mostly Moslem Kurds are the world’s largest ethnic group, about 25 million, without a state of their own. Abdul-Rahman would be a principal negotiator for the KRG, and he liked O’Leary’s views, which ran counter to American preferences for a strong central government, on how the Kurds could secure a measure of autonomy in the new Iraq.

Greater Kurdistan, a contiguous region long inhabited by the Kurdish people, is spread across the well guarded borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. When the Ottoman Empire was being carved up after World War I, the Kurds’ dream of their own state, provided for by the Treaty of Sèvres, fell victim to the power plays of British and French realpolitik, which largely ignored the natural boundaries between existing nationalities. The Kurdish rebellions that followed were brutally crushed by the host states. It was the first of many betrayals suffered by the Kurds in the twentieth century.

In northern Iraq, the flame of independence has never been stamped out. Decades later, the Kurdish peshmerga, “those who face death,” fought for and won an autonomy settlement with the Baghdad government. The promises reached were later rescinded by Saddam Hussein, and the United States, which was backing the Kurds, suddenly withdrew its support, opening the door for the next wave of slaughter by government forces. After the decimation of Iraq’s army in the first Gulf War, the Kurds rose up in northern Iraq, again with encouragement from the U.S. Saddam Hussein turned his still-intact army on them, driving the rebels into the mountains on the Turkish border. No U.S. troops—or anyone else—came to their aid. Being winter, many starved and froze. In 1991, the U.S. finally established a safe haven and a no fly zone in the north, which allowed the Kurdish refugees to return and build their own government, a free press, and a budding economy.

Now that Iraqis are rebuilding their country after Saddam Hussein’s downfall, the Kurds want to protect what they’ve achieved under U.S. air cover. After decades of deporta-tions, village razing, torture, mass execution, and massacres with chemical weapons by what O’Leary calls “a regime of mass destruction,” the Kurds were looking for guaran-tees that such things wouldn’t happen again.

The Kurds, O’Leary notes, are “positively disposed” toward Americans, but they know that the welfare of the Kurdish people is not a top priority of U.S. policy. The disposition of Pan Arab opinion is of far greater weight, he observes. “In an ideal world, the best thing would be for Kurdistan to have allies among the Arabs of Iraq so they don’t have to rely upon the support of the United States, which historically has not been—How shall I put it gently?—they’re not consistent.” Sami Abdul-Rahman, a pragmatist and former rebel fighter, was less delicate when he told a Frontline interviewer in 2001, “We have learned through our history that governments take their interests first and foremost and not really the principles that are talked about.”

Abdul-Rahman asked O’Leary to join an international team of experts the Kurds had recruited to help them negotiate with Iraq’s Shi’a and Sunni Arabs to forge a power-sharing arrangement in the new government. O’Leary worked closely with the KRG’s deputy prime minister—preparing principles of federation, drafting clauses, reviewing papers from the Coalition Provisional Authority. Together they clarified and defined the Kurds’ position for negotiations over the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), the legal framework for holding elections and writing a permanent constitution. They also became friends. On a Sunday morning in February, Abdul-Rahman was killed, along with about 60 others, including his son, when he shook hands with a suicide bomber at the party headquarters in Erbil. O’Leary was in London for the weekend.

Iraq is not a single nation, O’Leary notes, but an entity made up of several groups, each with its own language and culture. Even the Shi’a, by far the electoral majority, are not homogeneous but riven with religious factions and political differences. The people of Iraq are not “just Iraqis” as Ambassador Paul Bremer has tried to insist; they have prior allegiances to the communities in which their lives are rooted. “Kurds are organized as a separate nation,” O’Leary explains. “They have a separate language. They have experienced genocide and ethnic expulsion at the hands of the majority. A community like that does not willingly dissolve its identity to say it’s part of another nation. They’re not ‘just Iraqis’: They’re Kurds first of all.”

Any future conflict, he counsels, would likely break out of these more basic identities and national allegiances. Given the history, a democratic structure must hand everyone a share in power, rather than piling it all into the hands of the majority group. “The Kurds have a vision of an Iraq that might work,” he says, “based on multinational principles,” that is, a federal political system in which each group shares power in the central government but also maintains authority over its own affairs. Canada and Belgium are the models he cites.

In laying out his views, O’Leary is fond of enumerating factors: three imperatives driving Americans to favor a strong central government, four problems with the TAL, three ways that federations differ, five elements that lead to their breakup, and five conditions for success. In the negotiations, he says, the Kurds have sought five objectives: Kurdistan should (1) be recognized by the Arabs and other groups, (2) keep its existing policy-making autonomy, (3) maintain its security, (4) own its natural resources, and most importantly (5) have the right to ratify the permanent constitution.

In June, number five led to a crisis, and the Kurds threatened to walk away from the Iraqi state. In a compromise provision, the parties agreed that a future constitution would pass with a majority vote unless voters in three of the country’s 18 provinces opposed it by two-thirds. The Kurds, who make up a fifth of Iraq’s population, are a majority in three provinces and thus hold a veto in their hand. The Shi’a argue that the provision is undemocratic, but the Kurds contend it is the only guarantee they have that history won’t be repeated. It was a tenuous victory, and it remains to be seen with what force the Shi’a will play their majority hand after the election
in January 2005.

In March, O’Leary gave a public talk in Erbil explaining the pros and cons of the Transnational Administrative Law, what compro-mises Kurdistan will need to make, and what tack it should take in negotiations for the permanent constitution. “Many of those who questioned me were advocates
of immediate independence for Kurdistan, which I counseled would be imprudent”—O’Leary’s gentle word for catastrophic. The text of his speech was published in the newspaper Khetat with a headline that commented darkly on what he told the Kurds: “At the beginning of the constitutional struggle in Iraq you have not lost, but you have not yet won.” He may be called back when negotiations resume.

O’Leary’s refrain in talking about rebuilding Iraq is, “There are no easy answers,” especially for Kurdistan. The sociological causes, the historical factors, and the political machinations that he enumerates do not add up to a promising outcome. But O’Leary knows that humans have a way of defying the odds, of turning aside the onrushing, unyielding trajectory of the past.
He has seen bitter and longstanding blood feuds simmer down when carefully crafted settlements were agreed upon. “I’m not a political-science determinist,” he says. “I believe in the capacity of politicians to prove history wrong.” n

Brendan O’Leary’s book, The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (with John McGarry and Khaled Salih, editors) is scheduled for spring 2005 publication by University of Pennsylvania Press.

Understanding Terror

“A new type of terrorism threatens the world,” writes Marc Sageman, an adjunct psychology professor with the Solomon Asch Center. “Only a thorough understanding of these new terror networks and their social movement will enable the world to mount an effective defense.” In his new book, Understanding Terror Networks, Sageman offers that analysis.

Sageman is a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer who worked out of Islamabad from 1987 to 1989. He testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2003. His new book profiles 172 followers of the “global Salafi jihad,” a spontaneous religious uprising that seeks to revive past glory by establishing “a great Islamist state stretching from Morocco to the Philippines.” Al Qaeda is the vanguard of this violent worldwide jihad. “We did kill two-thirds of the 2001 Al Qaeda leadership,” he noted in an interview, “but now they’re back again….It’s a network with no organization. You have to arrest terrorists but you [also] have to turn off the faucet of new people volunteering
to be part of the network.”