03-23-06,8:47am
(part 2 of 2 parts), [p.a. ed. article length required two sections]
Limited industrialization in Iraq -- outside the oil sector -- rendered urban unemployment a perennial problem by the late 1930s. Oil fields in Mosul and Kirkuk, as well as the port and refineries in Basra, attracted increasing numbers of people to urban and semi-urban settings, dramatically transforming the social, cultural, and political composition of Iraqi cities.
Expanding rapidly each year, Baghdad in particular became a city of ethnically and religiously mixed neighborhoods beset by economic and infrastructural disparities. Lacking a diversified economy and little industry that was not oil-related, Baghdad's economy was characterized by banking, sales, insurance, and services activities, and thus could not absorb the growing numbers of largely uneducated migrants spilling into the cities from the Iraq’s depressed rural hinterlands.
A coup in 1958, resulting partly from growing socioeconomic disparities and political tensions, replaced the constitutional monarchy and its social base of traditional elites in urban and rural settings with a Pan-Arab nationalist republic that emphasized modernist secular values and socialist models of governance. The new government, led by army officers with very different social and regional origins from the previous monarchical government, undercut private property and attempted to assuage the needs of the poor. The Iraqi Communist Party, in which Shi`is played key roles, attained the height of its national power and influence from 1958 to 1963.
The 1960s, however, witnessed even more rural-to-urban migration and increasing political instability as Iraq experienced a series of coups and episodes of intercommunal violence, particularly in Mosul and Kirkuk. This period witnessed the rise of new urban socioeconomic classes in Iraqi cities. The Ba`ath party, with a leadership cadre dominated by Sunni Arabs from northwest Iraq, came to power in a bloodless coup in 1968.
None of the top Ba`ath party leaders came from Iraq’s major cities. Most hailed from small towns in the Sunni triangle of Iraq’s northwest, and had arrived in Baghdad to pursue studies or as the result of enrolling in the army. The traditional Ottoman urban elite had now been decisively eclipsed.
Thanks to rapidly rising oil revenues resulting from profit sharing between the government and private oil companies in the 1950s, the post-monarchical regimes of 1958 and 1968 controlled increasing levels of wealth, which granted them considerable autonomy in decision-making and resource allocation. These regimes nationalized productive sectors of the economy, directing even more wealth into state coffers, which they then channeled into massive public works projects that enriched construction companies and other businesses loyal to the regime. These developments blurred the divide between the public and the private sectors and fostered corruption.
State investments provided housing, schools, clinics, and modern services to Iraq’s rapidly burgeoning urban population. Big-budget construction projects served to offset, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the potentially destabilizing sociopolitical tensions and economic hardships that massive rural to urban migration could have engendered.
After 1973, with the worldwide rise of oil prices and the Ba`ath regime’s complete nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, the state was well poised to accumulate, channel, and utilize even larger sums of Iraq’s national wealth independent of any public opinion or oversight. All of the elements of totalitarian rule were now in place. Writing in 1977 in the conclusion of his momumental work on Iraq’s social and political transformations, the social hisorian Hanna Batatu advised the Ba`ath regime to use Iraq’s immense resources to
…bind the peasants to the townsmen and the Shi`i to the Sunni, and create mutually advantageous relations between Arabs and Kurds. At the same time, it should also raise qualitatively the standards of living and levels of culture of all Iraqis. All of which presupposes, before everything else, the ability to channel into agricultural and industrial development the wealth that oil generates, rather than dissipating it into unproductive consumption (1979, page 1133).
The Ba`ath regime clearly did not follow this advice. Rather than diversifying and strengthening the economy by investing in Iraq’s promising agricultural sector, the regime instead directed money to projects that served the regime's rather than the people's, interests. In fact, by the late 1990s, agriculture accounted for only 6 percent of Iraq’s GDP. Partly, this may be due to the lack of agricultural equipment and supplies, much of which were forbidden to be imported into Iraq during the economic sanctions regime on the grounds that these items could have dual uses, e.g., fertilizer and pesticides could be used to manufacture weapons.
As a result, Iraq, a potential agricultural power-house, was importing at least 65 percent of its food and consumer goods by the early 1990s. The drawbacks of such short-sighted, opportunistic economic planning and the lack of diversified investments became starkly apparent after the sanctions regime was imposed in 1991 and the regime had less revenues for co-opting the populace.
Sanctions’ Impact on Human Development Indicators (HDI) in Iraq from 1990 until 2000:
Iraq’s HDI rating (out of 174 countries): 91 in 1990; 126 in 2000
Iraq’s GDP per capita (in US dollars): $3,181 in 1990; $1,300 in 2000
Iraq’s Literacy Rate: 89% in 1990; 73.5% in 2000
(Source: United Nations Development Program, Annual Report, 2000.)
Identity and Urbanization in Iraq
Unsurprisingly for a country characterized by ethnopolitical diversity, dramatically different ecological zones, and a mixed economy, Iraq’s urban social profile is not uniform. Yet the institutional and administrative underpinnings of Iraqi cities are more alike than not throughout the country.
Up until 1918, Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra shared many common structural characteristics: political dominance by Sunni military officers or and administrators representing the Ottoman sultan, most of whom were of Mamluk Georgian origin; ethnically distinct city quarters (mahallat) controlled by prominent and well-connected extended families organized by patrilineal kinship principles; a division of labor and a class system that closely paralleled ethnic and religious distinctions, although usually in a complementary rather than a competitive manner; the unifying influence of Islamic Law, and traditional economies based on trade, crafts, agricultural and markets that centralized and redistributed resources, taxes, and payments of tribute from agricultural and nomadic hinterlands.
Baghdad exercised more of a gravitational pull on Basra than it did on Mosul, which was oriented economically and culturally towards Syria and Istanbul, while Basra was oriented towards the economic activities and possibilities of the Persian Gulf and India. Geostrategic interests also played a key role in influencing the relationship between Iraq’s key cities. The British were awarded the mandate over the provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul in 1920, an event that sparked fierce anti-colonial demonstrations among Sunni and Shi`a communities alike.
The British later waged a diplomatic battle with Turkey to include Mosul and its surrounding territory in the proposed new state of Iraq. Given a significant number of Turkmen living in this region, no less than the presence of oil reserves in Kirkuk, the Turks wanted to incorporate Mosul into their new state, but the British prevailed. Turkey has maintained an interest in the northern and northwest governorates of Iraq ever since, due to this region’s importance to Iraqi Kurds and their political relations with, and influences upon, Turkey’s own large Kurdish minority.
In addition to Ottoman land reform laws’ impact on the sociopolitical structures of rural Iraq, another development that profoundly influenced the social fabric and political organization of central and southern Iraq from the early 18th century until the late 19th century was the conversion to Shi`ism, and the subsequent sedentarization, of numerous Sunni Arab nomadic tribes in the towns of Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra. These southern Shi`i holy sites (called al-`aatiba, or “the threshold” cities), were frequently beyond the administrative reach of both the Ottoman and the Savafid Empires.
Although nearly two thirds of Iraqis are Shi`i, they have never attempted to affiliate politically with Iran. Rather, they express pride in their Iraqi identity and Arab cultural heritage. Furthermore, significant philosophical and theological differences concerning the role of Shi`i clergy in politics divide most Iraqi Shi`as from Iranian Shi`i communities, with fewer Iraqis supporting the concept of velayat-e faqih (rule of the Supreme Leader) advanced by the late Ayatollah Khomeini and his hard-line followers in Iran. The political domination of Iraq’s government and military, from 1932 until now, by the country’s Sunni minority, primarily army officers guided by pan-Arab nationalist ideologies, has obscured the extent to which Iraq’s roots and heritage are profoundly Shi`i.
Contrary to much of current US political rhetoric, however, Iraq’s Shi`a population cannot easily be categorized economically, politically, or ideologically. The wealthiest as well as the most impoverished Iraqis tend to be Shi`a; Shi`ias have been at the forefront of Islamist as well as secular and communist political organizations throughout Iraq’s history. Shi`a are found in cities (they are the majority in Baghdad and Basra), but they are also peasants working the land in the river valleys of the central and southern parts of the country.
With the recent demise of a Sunni-dominated regime, it is increasingly likely that future politics in Iraq will be dominated by the concerns, opinions, and hopes of the Shi`a community for the first time in Iraq’s history. Given the profound emphasis on struggles for social and economic justice in Shi`i theological thought, not to mention a more flexible and pragmatic Shi`i approach to ijtihaad (reasoning from faith, whereby current issues and conundrums are solved with reference to Islamic precedents), an Iraq dominated by a Shi`i governing elite could conceivably lead to a more equitable socioeconomic order as well as a more flexible interpretation of Islam’s role in law and politics -- if Iraq survives as a nation state, that is.
Unlike Iraq’s Shi`a, Kurdish Iraqis, whose communities, history and interests extend far beyond Iraq’s borders into contemporary Iran, Turkey, Russia and Syria, have long hoped for their own state. Iraq’s Kurdish community has been fragmented, dispersed, and burdened by its own internal divisions, expressed through internecine violence between Kurds loyal to Masud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP, which controls the northwest governorates of Erbil and Dahuk and maintains ties with Turkey), and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, which controls the governorate of Sulaymaniyyah), as well as by the former regime’s brutal treatment and cynical manipulation of divisions within this non-Arab ethnic group. The fact that a Kurdish leader is now president of Iraq illustrates a desire to keep the country together, but does not address the most urgent underlying political dynamics unleashed by the 2003 invasion.
Although a 1974 law offered Kurds considerable autonomy within the Iraqi state framework, many Kurds hope to achieve more autonomy through federalism, an aim which most Sunni and Shi`i Arab Iraqis do not welcome. The Kurds also claim that Kirkuk should be part of any Kurdish autonomous area, a demand that the central Iraqi government has always rejected, given Kirkuk’s immense oil reserves and strategic importance.
After the failed uprisings against the Ba`ath regime in the Spring of 1991 following the rout of the Iraqi army from Kuwait, many Iraqi Kurds found themselves in an ambiguous administrative and political situation, being neither fully inside nor fully outside of the Iraqi state framework in the UN-protected safe-haven zone in Northern Iraq. The intent of the safe haven, or no-fly zones, in southern and northern Iraq was to protect the rebellious Iraqi dissident communities, Kurds and Shi`i Muslims respectively, from vicious revenge attacks by Saddam Hussein's Army. The US-UK Coalition flew warplanes over these zones –- without UN Security Council authorization -- to prevent Saddam Hussein's government from using military aircraft to attack Kurdish and Shi`a minorities. In historical terms, the No-Fly Zone is considered to have ended on March 19, 2003, when 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' and the “Shock and Awe” campaign began.
Despite economic privations resulting from massive population displacements and the cessation of most government-supplied rations from Baghdad, as well as the devastating impact of intracommunal conflict between the PUK and KDP in 1996, Kurds in the three northern governorates managed to establish a democratically elected administration while also founding a number of civil society and human rights organizations.
Iraqi society in crisis: challenges and choices three years on
Compared to other recent examples of post-conflict reconstruction and nation building, Iraq presents special challenges as well as unique characteristics. The dramatic transitions in Iraq did not emerge organically from within Iraqi society, due largely to the sanctions regime's weakening of the middle class, but rather, externally through a highly controversial and carelessly conceived military invasion of questionable legality.
Although Iraq is often described as separable into three distinct geographic and ethno-religious zones, the actual sociopolitical situation on the ground is much more complex and heterogeneous due to extensive intermarriage, joint entrepreneurial projects, and consecutive waves of rural-to-urban migration. It is neither possible nor useful to correlate Iraq’s ethno-religious diversity with geography, class, or political ideology. Identity categories are rarely fixed, constant, and inevitable, but rather are responsive to and shaped by administrative contexts of authority, resource allocation, and the codification of rights and duties.
Apparently, no one told the Bush Administration about this basic anthropological tenet. The dire situation in Iraq today is largely the result of their ignorance, delusions, and neglect.
Iraq’s social fabric and ethnopolitical geography has also been profoundly shaped by episodes of forced migrations, particularly since the rise to power of the Ba`ath party in the late 1960s. The long-term legal, political, social and psychological repercussions of these population displacements pose immense challenges to post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation processes.
Chief among these forced migration episodes was the mass displacement of Kurds, who were expelled from the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk and hundreds of surrounding villages in the north of Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the epic population movements of Kurds to the borders of Turkey and Iran following the failed anti-regime uprisings in the Spring of 1991, millions of displaced Kurds lived for over a decade in the aforementioned UN save haven zone comprising much of the northern governorates of Erbil, Dahuk, and Sulimaniyya. Many Kurds fled to Iran, and now are beginning to return.
During the Saddam Hussein regime’s genocidal Al-Anfal campaign of 1988, tens of thousands of Kurds were executed in mass killings. Launching an “Arabization campaign,” the former regime relocated Shi`a and Sunni Arabs from tribal and rural communities in the center and south of the country into the towns and villages of the expelled or murdered Kurds, primarily in the governorates of Tamim and Ninewa. With the fall of the regime in April 2003, many Kurdish families were able to leave the No-Fly zone for the first time in over a decade.
Accompanied by armed peshmerga (Kurdish guerilla forces), many families returned to Kirkuk, Mosul, and surrounding villages and forced hundreds of Arab families out of the only homes they had known for a generation. These internally displaced persons (IDPs) are now effectively homeless as most have no houses to return to in the southern governorates from which they were transplanted in order to serve the former regime's political ends. They are now affected by, and possible candidated for enrollment in, growing bands of armed groups.
In the south, chronic and multi-dimensional crises resulted when the former regime drained extensive wetlands and marshes in the governorate of Missan. This ecological zone was the ancestral home of the Marsh Arabs (Ma`dan), a community that had lived by rice cultivation, fishing, water buffalo herding, and reed mat production in the marshes for centuries. In what Human Rights Watch called the greatest ecological rights violation of the 20th century, the former regime undertook massive civil engineering projects to divert tributaries and desiccate the wetlands, not only because they harbored war deserters and political dissidents and were situated on the Iran-Iraq border, but also because significant oil reserves are thought to lie beneath the marshes.
With the loss of their traditional modes of subsistence and sociocultural cohesion, Ma’dan Arabs were forced to relocate amidst rural and urban communities in Missan, Basra, and Thi-Qar governorates, possibly the most poverty-stricken governorates in all of Iraq. In addition, thousands of Ma`dan Arab refugees have begun to return from Iran, aggravating the economic crisis facing the hard-pressed governorates of southeastern Iraq. On an optimistic note, however, replenishment of the dessicated marshes appears to be working more than most had expected, though it will take a long time to undo such profound ecological damage.
This overview, although brief given the complexity of Iraq's current situation, illustrates the present urgency and future ramifications of repairing post-conflict Iraq’s distressed social fabric. While IDPs require housing, clean water, schools and medical facilities, they also interact with wider, similarly stressed communities in tense sociopolitical contexts that can be negatively impacted by assistance to IDPs. Animosities between various groups, exacerbated by income disparities, scarce resources, overcrowding, poor post-war governance, corruption, multiple armed factions, and ecological degradation, must be taken into consideration before the needs of IDPs can be met.
The challenge of solving Iraq’s complex IDP and governance crises in the absence of an effective, centralized, and legitimate political authority, underline that the greatest impediments to successful and cost-effective post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation are Iraq’s current social, economic, legal, and political dilemmas, all of which were exacerbated after the March 2003 invasion.
These dilemmas cannot be ameliorated by aid delivery, international outcries, or urban planning and public works projects alone, but will instead require capacity-building programmes designed to enhance all Iraqis’ quality of life and access to justice by improving systems for fair allocation of resources and rebuilding institutions of governance. Given the present chaos, destruction, and daily terror in Iraq, however, such programmes will be a long time in coming.
The administrative structures, practices and ideologies of the former regime were total and repressive, and instilled a sense of 'learned helplessness' in many Iraqis. Despite the existence of formal institutions of governance, the former regime actually ruled through the cultivation of informal (and thus unaccountable) asymmetrical patron-client networks that encouraged dependency while also fragmenting Iraqi society into competing identity groups based on sect, region, and tribal affiliation. This administrative style allowed the regime to accentuate and manipulate a variety of identity categories and social groupings for narrow political ends, playing some groups off against others in a bid to undercut competing power bases and “divide and rule” the entire Iraqi population, region by region.
The economic privations of the UN-authorized sanctions regime further entrenched inequalities and processes of sociopolitical fragmentation by reducing those outside the Ba`ath regime’s corrupt patronage networks to abject poverty, while simultaneously generating a vigorous black market economy controlled and exploited by Saddam Hussein’s relatives and associates. The sanctions era spawned a new class of nouveaux riches entrepreneurs, largely comprised of young men from lower socioeconomic backgrounds hailing from rural areas of Iraq’s central governorates.
This class owes its economic gains and improved status not to skills, merits, or training, but rather, to links with particular kinship and clan networks affiliated with the former regime. They will not easily give up their former privileges and comfortable positions, and it is likely that they, rather than shadowy Al-Qa`ida cells, are responsible for much of the curent bloodletting in Iraq.
The regime’s nepotistic governance style, coupled with the imposition of sanctions, had a deleterious impact on Iraq’s middle classes (which the US had assumed would lead a coup against Saddam). Educated professionals were forced to emigrate or to work more than one job. Female headed-households have been particularly affected, and many women were compelled to sell their wedding gold, one of their only sources of economic insurance, to feed their families.
Child labor became crucial to many families’ survival, keeping young people out of school and thus compromising the skill base of the next generation. Crime, alcoholism, domestic violence, and prostitution all increased, while new mafia-like networks of black marketeers enriched themselves at the expense of the wider public. The US/UK war on Iraq launched three years ago this week did nothing to ameliorate these stark conditions inside Iraq. Rather, it can be argued that the legally dubious, poorly conceived and pre-emptive military intervention has simply burdened Iraq, and surrounding countries, with more uncertainties and grievances than they had before.
Last but not least, the former regime exerted a paralyzing degree of coercive force in every domain of public and private life for three decades through extensive surveillance and police networks, as well as the constant and credible threat of arrest, imprisonment, torture and execution. As a result, Iraqis’ collective and individual capacities to trust, cooperte, and to take initiative have suffered. It is no exaggeration to state that all Iraqis have been psychologically traumatized and disempowered for a quarter of a century. The goal of state terror and torture is not to harm specific individuals, but rather, to destroy the intersubjective social fabric and confidence of society and to thus obliterate resistance and opposition. The 'civil society' model touted by most western aid organizations is virtually impossible to nurture in such a context.
Conclusions
Iraq's post-war rehabilitation -- indeed its survival -- requires psychological and interpersonal rehabilitation projects to assist those communities most devastated by the human rights abuse of the former regime, among them IDPs, political prisoners, and families of executed persons. High profile and daily, but very shallow, spin by the Bush Aministration that “democracy has come to Iraq,” as well as British PM Tony Blair’s assertion that he “would do it [the invasion] all over again,” bespeak a different—and more dangerous—form of mental disturbance than that affecting the long-suffering Iraqi people.
Alas, it is the Iraqis more so than Americans and Britons who will bear the burden of a deranged decision to launch a pre-emptive war that has destroyed an already weak social fabric, killed many Iraqis, Americans, and Europeans, while leaving the most potentially rich nation in the Arab world shattered nearly beyond repair. Yet these ills will not afflict Iraqis alone. Returning US troops, who have been placed in impossible situations for extended periods of time, are likely to suffer severe post-traumatic stress for years to come, and it is doubtful that the US Veterans' Administration will devote necessary resources to their rehabilitation. Many returning soldiers have already committed suicide.
The mistakes and chaos in Iraq over the last three years is a recipe for a civil war that may well have already begun with the destruction of a famous mosque in Samarra last month. The last three years, seen from the viewpoint of future historians, will mark a very dark chapter in the history of a potentially rich and creative country. But for responsible and wise leaders and an adequately informed and properly empowered democratic citizenry in the United States, this tragedy did not have to happen.
The third anniversary of the invastion of Iraq is an appropriate time to reflect honestly upon the sobering fact that the Iraqis, as well as the Americans, are now intimately and problematically tied together by this debacle. The two peoples have reached either a breaking point or a turning point. It is not too late to choose the latter.
For futher reading:
Batatu, Hanna (1979), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Graham-Brown, Sarah (1999), Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers.
El-Guindy, Tarek, Hazem Al Mahdy, and John McArris (2003). “The extent and geographic distribution of chronic poverty in Iraq’s center/south region.” United Nations: World Food Programme.
International Crisis Group (2002), “What Lies Beneath: A report on Iraqi Opinions.” Brussels: International Crisis Group.
Jacobs, Jane (1989), The Death and Life of the Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books.
Al-Khafaji, Isam (1987), “State Incubation of Iraqi Capitalism.” In Middle East Report, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 4-9.
___________ (2003), 'In Search of Legitimacy: The Post-Rentier Iraqi State.' Contemporary Conflicts page, website of the Social Science Research Council http://conconflicts.ssrc.org/iraq/khafaji/ .
Luizard, Pierre-Jean (1995), “The Iraqi Question from the Inside.” In Middle East Report, No. 193, pp. 18-22.
Nakash, Yitzhak (2003), The Shi`i of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tapper, Richard (1990), “Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East,” pp. 48-73 in P. Khoury and J. Kostiner, eds., Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tripp, Charles (2003), A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Development Programme (2002), Annual Report.
Van den Berg, Rob, and Niels Dabelstein (2003), “Iraq and Rehabilitation: Lessons from Previous Evaluations.” Unpublished research paper.
Watenpaugh, Keith, Edouard Metenier, Jens Hanssen, and Hala Fattah (2003), Opening the Doors: A Report of the Iraq Observatory.
Zubaida, Sami (1994), “National, Communal, and Global Dimensions in Middle Eastern Food Cultures,” pp. 33-48 in S. Zubaida and R. Tapper, eds., Culinary Cultures of the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers.
Laurie King-Irani is a social anthropologist and a co-founder of Electronic Iraq.
