'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Fears of Balkanization in Iraq

Riverbend, the talented Iraqi author of the "Baghdad Burning" blog, has a very important new post up today in which she outlines her fears--and those of all the folks around her--regarding a possible breakup of her country.

Her bottom line:

We all lived together before- we can live together in the future. Iraqis are proud of their different ethnicities, but in the end, we all identify ourselves as "Iraqi". Every Iraqi's nightmare is to wake up one morning and find Iraq split into several parts based on ethnicity and religion.

Riverbend was writing in reaction to something that Salam of "Dear Raed" had written, that expressed much the same attitude toward the idea. (Click here , then scroll down to the bit that starts, "Have you been noticing...") His bottom line:

Yes I know identity is important but you see my father is Sunni, my mother Shia and our neighbors for years Kurds. There are no lines and none should exist, the situation in Kirkuk does create lines and make people choose sides.

Tragedy, tragedy, tragedy.

I remember back at the end of April when Martin Indyk, who was at the apex of Washington's Middle East decision-making for all of the Clinton administration, suddenly saw that the post-war situation in Iraq was not going as smoothly as he and many of his friends had hoped. Suddenly running scared by that, he told an audience at Washington's elitist Brookings Institution April 23 that, "We're going to have to play the old imperial game of divide and rule and the stakes could not be higher."

Well, Martin should know about playing that game. Having grown up in that old corner of the British Empire, Australia, he has also been a lifelong supporter of Israel, which has tried to perfect the "divide-and-rule" policy against its Palestinian neighbors as it proceeded with great deliberation to build colonial-era, Jews-only settlements on expropriated Palestinian land.

Thing is, though, Martin, "imperialism" as an organizing idea is so-- well-- so terribly nineteenth century don't you think, old boy?

The use of "imperial" tactics in Iraq is bound to fail, and most likely sooner rather than later. But still, the attempt to pursue them will quite predictably lead--has already evidently led--to the infliction of terrible harm on the already multiply traumatized people of Iraq, as well as to quite a lot of (totally avoidable) harm on the people staffing the US and allied occupation forces.

I read that chilling report of Martin's words back in April with a horror born in good part of my experience living in Lebanon while that beleaguered country was falling radically apart into religiously "cleansed" cantons in the 1970s. (Of course, the attempt at that cleansing was carried out in anything but the spirit of true religion. It was, however, generally carried out in the name of one religion or another--mainly, the Maronite 'Christian' version.)

And then, just a few weeks ago, there was supposedly "wise" Les Gelb, urging an extreme form of federalism onto the Iraqis-- as I commented on, here .

At this point I would urge everyone who has not lived in a society undergoing "radical Balkanization" as I have to head straight for a library or bookstore and get hold of two books.

The first is Slavenka Drakulic's The Balkan Express: Fragments from the other side of war. That's an incredibly well-written account of what it was like to live in Croatia (and to try to work in other becoming-'former'-Yugoslav cities) just as poor old Yugoslavia was being torn apart by (frequently manufactured) ethnic hatreds in the early 1990s.

I see that Balkan Express is out of print. But you can get a used copy from from Amazon--today, at least-- for as little as $2.00.

The other book has an eerily similar title: Beirut fragments: A war memoir , by Jean Said Makdisi. It too is out of print. You can get a used copy from Amazon for $7-- plus, if you go to the Amazon page for the book you can read the first few pages of her prologue.

Both Drakulic and Makdisi have given us truly invaluable testimonies about what war feels like for the members of "warred-upon" society. They both write superbly in English. They are definitely "insiders" to the conflicted societies they write about, and they write with passion and insight from their role not just as professionals but also as mothers, i.e. people with extremely important responsibilities to society.

Definitely not "your father's war story"!

Back ten years ago, I wrote a review article about those two books in Antioch Review. And you know-- amazingly!--I was just able to find it on an old diskette (remember diskettes?). And I was able to convert it from WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS to something a little easier to use. So now I'm going to try to get it up on the web someplace where y'all can read it.... [time passes, as she works at this... ]

Okay, friends, here it is.

By the way, after all the excitement of finding that old diskette, converting the text, etc., it is ways past my bed-time.

And tomorrow, I get to spend most of the day writing about one of my favorite countries of all: Mozambique. Yay!