Alex Poppe's Blog, page 2

Cages

“What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical … that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires … the willingness to speak out for what’s right …” President Barack Obama, Selma Alabama, March 7, 2015.

Three days after President Obama’s well-received speech to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, the Supreme Court declined to consider a case concerning videos and photos. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, these photos and videos prove the torture of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani. The Supreme Court claimed the images could threaten national security by stoking anti-American sentiment. I shook my head when I heard the news bulletin: the United States’ official denial of its torturous acts, its reluctance to bring American perpetrators of terror to justice, and the continuation of its terrorist behavior is what stokes anti-American sentiment, no videos or photographs necessary. Unfortunately, justice is willfully, woefully blind. Why is America so afraid to be self-critical?

Noam Chomsky, author and Institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that American society has been a frightened society since colonial times. Therefore, mobilizing people’s fear of “them” is an effective political tool. From its position of privilege, American society does not tolerate criticism. Where does America’s privilege come from?

Drawing on The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist (Basic Books, 2014), Noam Chomsky reports that the Unites States’ economy, wealth, and privilege derive from the output of slave labor camps, which existed for more than a century. In slave labor camps (otherwise known as plantations), productivity increased more quickly than it did in industry, without any technological advances. Output increased because overseers implemented a “pushing system” of brutal labor management: people were driven harder and harder to increase productivity and, therefore, profit. Edward Baptist argues that slavery’s brutality is and should be called torture. The camps where this torture took place are the foundation of the United States’ wealth and privilege today because cotton production fueled the Industrial Revolution and supported the financial system, the merchant system, and commerce in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Torturing slaves in labor camps, as well as the extermination or expulsion of the native population, is at the core of the United States’ history, argues Mr. Chomsky, but it is not part of the United States’ consciousness. (“Black Lives Matter: Why Won’t the US Own Up to History of Slavery & Racism?” Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org, 3 March 2015. Web. 5, 7, 14, 15 March 2015)

It’s not part of the US’ consciousness because we (I am American) make it so. Our creation narrative characterizes Native Americans as savage and inhumane, completing ignoring their close relationship to nature and their spirituality. Our history books claim that slaves were “well-treated,” at least by some, (middle school text books frequently point to Thomas Jefferson as the example), while market fundamentalists claim slaves were “well-treated” because they were valuable capital. They say nothing about the rape, harsh physical punishment, and murder of slaves. Those who do acknowledge these atrocities relegate them to the past: slaves may have been tortured in slave labor camps/plantations, but that was one hundred and fifty years ago. True, we don’t have slave labor camps today; we have unarmed blacks being shot by police and police forces being armed with military grade weapons such as tanks. Why?

Let’s take a look at the connection between privilege, fear, and terrorism. When you have something of value that others don’t have, you fear “others” taking it away from you. You’re placed on the defensive because you want to hold onto what you have, ill-gotten or not. If Noam Chomsky is correct and American society has been a fearful society since colonial times, this fear may have derived from our usurping the land and burying our guilt in our subconscious. We feared losing the land, our privilege, as much as we feared owning our uncomfortable truth about how the land was acquired. This fear kept us aggressively defensive until we controlled the whole of the country and what was left of the native population had been relegated to a few reservations.

In Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1865–1877 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, III Edition, 2002), historian Eric Foner explains that during Reconstruction, the concept of equal citizenship was put into US law and the Constitution with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which added the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Civil Rights Act states that anyone born in the US is a citizen, and as a citizen, he (notice the gender specificity) is to enjoy equal civil rights. Before the Civil Rights Act was passed, only whites had civil rights: whiteness was a privilege. Reconstruction caused a violent reaction among some whites: in order to hold onto their privilege, some whites formed groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to restore white supremacy. Foner characterizes this aggression as homegrown terrorism. If man fears his privilege will be taken away, he resorts to preemptive violence to maintain his privilege, which is terrorism.

The United States enjoyed unprecedented world power, which is privilege, after World War II, and its fear of losing this power makes it desperate. Much like the white supremacists after Reconstruction, the US resorts to terrorism in order to hold onto its privilege. I won’t bother cataloguing its list of sins, the historical record speaks for itself. Instead, I want to explore its fear, so let’s talk a bit about addiction.

In Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury USA, 2015), Johann Hari dissects what we think we know about addiction. Conventional wisdom says addiction is either the result of hedonistic overindulgence or a drug hooking and hijacking you. If you put a rat into a cage and give it two water bottles, one laced with cocaine or heroin and one without, the rat almost always prefers the drugged water and almost always kills itself within a couple of weeks.

What if you change the cage?

Psychologist and professor emeritus from Vancouver, BC, Canada, Bruce Alexander, changed the cage, with startling results. He built Rat Park, which is like heaven for rats. It has food, other rats to be friends with, colored balls and the water bottles — one drugged and one not. In Rat Park, the rats don’t like the drugged water. They hardly drink it; no one overdoses. None of them drink it compulsively or addictively, which means addiction isn’t about hedonism or your brain becoming hooked. It’s about your cage. Addiction is adaptation to your environment. Therefore, Johann Hari argues, to fight addiction you need to change your cage. That is, you need to change your environment.

Citing the work of the Director of the Center for Drug Research at the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Professor Peter Cohen, Hari argues that human beings are bonding animals that need to connect and love. We need to have things we want to do, events we want to be present for in our lives, reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Bonding and connecting are how humans find satisfaction. If we can’t connect to one another, we connect to anything we can find. Therefore, addiction is bonding, driven by disconnection. The first cage was devoid of any such purposes or opportunities for connection. The rats became addicted to the drug-laced water because of the isolation which was endemic in their environment not because of the drug. According to Hari, the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; it is connection. Disconnecting people from society partly explains why Westerners are drawn to jihad. Those in the West who are drawn to jihad become estranged from their community partly because the community brands them as “other,” demonizes Islam or scorns hijabs, while accepting crosses and crucifixes worn in public. As a result, the disconnected look for inclusion/belonging someplace else. Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE, an independent advocacy organization working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror, questions, “When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they’re outsiders, they will inevitably feel like outsiders, and they will look for belonging elsewhere?” (“To Deal with ISIS, US Should Own Up to Chaos of Iraq War & Other Radicalizing Acts” Asim Qureshi. Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org. 3 March 2015. Web. 18 March 2015)

Hari also argues that the war on drugs is steeped in human history. He describes it as a symbolic war where we go to war against the embodiment of our fears. We fear our own addictive impulses rising within ourselves and we fear them because we are disconnected. Instead of confronting our fears, we make the fear external and then try to hunt it down and destroy it. He points to the Crusades or the witchcraft crazes as examples.

Is the War on Terror any different?

If we go to war against the embodiment of our fear, and our fear is the fear of losing our privilege, and we fear losing our privilege because we, collectively, unconsciously, know our privilege was ill-gained, shouldn’t the remedy start with acknowledging our uncomfortable truths? We could build museums acknowledging the horrors of slavery (the first is said to be built in Louisiana in the near future) and pay reparations in the form of subsidized housing, funding for job training programs, or free college tuition for black Americans. Most importantly, our police need to stop killing unarmed, black Americans.

Next, the United States government should own its terrorist activities and call its perpetrators at the highest level to account. The US cannot enjoy impunity as it carries out targeted drone strikes on civilians, tortures victims of extraordinary rendition, or arms other sovereign actors’ terrorists. These are the activities which stoke anti-American sentiment. It is doubtful anyone believes in the United States’ democracy-building creation myth anymore.

American society has become militarized under the guise of terrorism. As a result, domestically, more and more black and brown people are being shot and killed by police officers who overreact to street confrontations, which should be handled without excessive force or shooting (Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Akai Gurley, recent events in Ferguson, Albuquerque, Cleveland, New York and California). Internationally, the United States has increased its use of drone strikes (Pakistan, Yemen), arms factions which overthrow democratically elected leaders (Ukraine), supports dictators who are politically aligned with US interests (Egypt), and arms other perpetrators of terror at the state level (Israel, Saudi Arabia). The United States is addicted to terror because it fears losing its privilege; its fear makes it pre-emptively violent and its violence terrorizes others. If addiction is adaptation to your environment, to fight terror, the United States needs to acknowledge its addiction to it and then change its cage.

What would that new cage look like?

We would own our wrongdoings and bring our perpetrators to justice. Currently, we live in a culture that severs connection. We have become highly individualistic, hyper-consumers who connect with things, not people. Hari argues that we are trained from an early age to focus our hope and dreams and ambitions on things we can buy and consume. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, President George Bush urged the American public to go out and spend and to support the American economy. Our new cage would have seats at the table for everyone. There would no longer be a fear of “them” because “them” would be “us,” and all of us would have a claim to the table where we fed. Our new cage would encourage a social recovery where we connect to people and not things. In our new cage, no one would be isolated.

You might be tempted to scoff at this utopian cage. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal, it was considered radical at the time. He reasoned, “This country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it, and if it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all try something.” In his speech in Selma, President Obama celebrated, “Oh, what a glorious task we are given, to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” Isn’t it time we tried something new?

Originally published at todayandyesterday.co .

A Muslim, a Catholic and an Orthodox Serb Walk Into a War

The Miljacka River gossips with the sixteenth century bridges as it runs through Sarajevo. From my bedroom window, I hear it giggling. Water runs through the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina, cleansing a land once strife with conflict. Maybe water is the key to the Bosnian dusa, or soul.

Although it was my first visit, Sarajevo seemed familiar: the rolling green hills hugging the city echo the mountains surrounding Sulaimaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan where I currently live. The alabaster headstones in graveyards dotting the hillsides rival those in Halabja where Chemical Ali spread his poison apple gas, or in Barzan where Saddam marched 8000 Barzani men to their deaths, mirroring the genocide in Srebrenica.

The Ottoman Empire left its indelible imprint on Bosnian culture. Sarma, dolma, burek, salep and raki were ready for the taking, just as they had been in Turkey where I had once lived. Tea and water pipe cafes clog the narrow lanes of Bascarsija, the old Turkish quarter, just as they do on the streets of Istanbul, Izmir or Ankara.

The Austro-Hungarian architecture peacocking among the Communist era apartment blocks evokes the neighborhoods of Eastern Europe that I have also called home. Swan-necked girls with long limbs prance along the cobblestone streets in four-inch heels, their silhouettes as tall as skyscrapers.

For all that was familiar, I was in a strange new world.

For centuries, Bosniak Muslims, Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox and Sephardic Jews have lived in harmony in Sarajevo. Inter faith marriages are common. A video in the Jewish Museum tells the story of one Sephardic Jewish family’s history during World War II. The narrator’s Jewish aunt had married a Muslim man and their children celebrated Eid, an important Muslim religious holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, with the other kids in their community. Many Muslims hid or protected Jews during the Nazi occupation. Watching that video I thought about my time working with a peace-through-education nongovernmental organization (NGO) in East Jerusalem in 2012. My students, sometimes from the poorest camps in the region, had to pass through countless checkpoints to attend school. There were restrictions on when they could pray at Al-Aqsa Mosque. Once I received an essay about becoming a suicide bomber — a gauge on how well the peace-through-education initiative was working. Likewise, when inquiring to do volunteer work with Israeli peace and reconciliation NGOs in West Jerusalem, I often received a sarcastic “nice neighbors” when I explained I was living in Ras Al-Amud, the Palestinian heartland of East Jerusalem, from program directors.

What was Bosnia’s secret to living peacefully together?

Many Bosniaks do not consider the Balkan War of 1992–1995 to be a civil war or a religious war. They consider it a Serbian aggression. Nermeen, a Bosniak Muslim, who was a police officer during the 1992–1995 siege, served alongside Orthodox and Catholic officers.

Over 300,000 Serbians Orthodox lived side by side with Bosniaks Muslims and Croatian Catholics in Sarajevo through the thousand plus days of no electricity or running water. Nermeen explained that for Sarajevans, religious identity did not matter; what mattered was being human. He calls the Serbian army’s action inhumane. Every Sarajevan was under constant threat of sniper fire. Nermeen wonders how a sniper could tell he was shooting at a Muslim from atop a building. Many Bosniaks are fair-skinned and smooth-chinned. What do Catholics look like?

Sniper fire was especially intense between Butmir, the last Bosniak-held part of the city with links to the outside world and Novo Sarajevo, the newer part of the city just inside the Serbian siege lines near the airport. Between Butmir and Sarajevo lies the airport runway, which was supposedly neutral territory under tenuous UN control. However, Serbian snipers kept a hawk’s eye and a soldier’s rifle trained on the runway. For the Sarajevans living under the siege, to cross the runway in search of supplies was to a play a game dubbed “Sarajevan Roulette”. Instead, shifts of soldiers from the Bosnian Army — Muslims ,Catholics and Orthodox — using rudimentary tools, MacGyver-like ingenuity and rotating teams of diggers on either side, dug an eight hundred meter tunnel five meters beneath the runway in slightly over four months. They dug by hand, using shovels and picks and carting the debris away in a wheelbarrow. Amidst constant shelling, workers dug in eight-hour shifts and were paid with one pack of cigarettes a day, which Nermeen told me he traded for food.

Every meter, the diggers poked a metal pipe through the surface and used the holes to align the two ends of the tunnel. Under the runway where they were unable to break through concrete, they banged on the metal pipes that reinforced the tunnel to orient construction by sound. When the two sides met up, they were only inched off mark. One of the biggest technical problems of constructing the tunnel was the underground water, which had to be thrown out manually. Flooding was a problem after construction as was poor air quality. Video footage shows men coming through the tunnel in waist-high water carrying what they could, wearing masks. Nermeen told me he averaged two trips per week through the tunnel, and a personal record of seven trips in one day. An average trip through the tunnel took two hours. The tunnel was a little over a meter wide and one and a half meters tall. After it was built, Germany donated electro-cables which were placed through the tunnel so electricity and telephone lines could connect Sarajevo to the world. A pipeline was also added to bring oil into the city.

At the Tunnel Museum in Sarajevo, video footage shows Bosniaks using the tunnel to transport food, medicine, war supplies — even a goat — from Butmir to Sarajevo during the siege. A courier passing through notices the video camera and doubles back to say “Hi Mom” to the camera. This is the Bosniak dusa, which comprises the spirit of Sarajevo, and atrocities have not dampened it.

At the Svrzo House, a restored eighteenth century house museum, the caretaker Mustafa invited me to have elderflower juice as the museum was closing. He brought out chairs and we sat in a cobbled courtyard among vibrant fuchsia-colored roses climbing the white-washed walls for a few hours. A bit older than Nermeen, Mustafa was more reticent about his life under the siege, so I didn’t press him. His face lit up when he recalled the Olympic logo jacket he received from his father and how stylish he felt wearing it. Later, when it began to rain, he wanted to give me his umbrella so I wouldn’t get wet on my walk home.

Dino was five years old when the aggression started (he too dislikes the monikers of civil or religious war). Fortunately, his father was a contractor and was connected. He paid a lot of money to get his family out. Dino says they spent three months in a refugee center in Geneva before settling in their own home. He told me he tries to find the good in everything: because of the aggression, he learned French and is as fluent as a native speaker.

Dino and Nermeen both asked me about the Sunni/Shia sectarian divide in Iraq. (Bosniaks are Sunnis.) Both didn’t understand why the divide exists, why there is so much violence, why there is war. They look at their own religiously intertwined communities that live together harmoniously and are baffled.

Dino is a Muslim but does not like the current Bosnia-Herzegovina constitution which requires citizens to identify as either Bosniak Muslim, Croatian Catholic, Serbian Orthodox or Other. For him, he is Bosnian, or Other, and by identifying as so, is ineligible to run for high public office. For Dino, as well as for other young Bosnians I spoke with, being Muslim is more of a cultural identity than a religious one. (His viewpoint reminds me of how pre-World War II German Jews who had assimilated into German culture felt — they considered themselves Germans.) Dino explained this to me over cigarettes and a few beers at Sarajevska Pivara, Sarajevo’s oldest brewry. When I told him of the frequent harassment other foreign female teachers and I experience in Sulaimaniyah (being grabbed by taxi drivers at any of the day or evening, cars following you as you walk down a street, cars driving up to you so the driver can grab you through his open window, stares, leers, etc.), he was appalled. He said that kind of behavior didn’t happen in Sarajevo. In my five days of walking around in sleeveless dresses, I was never once harassed, stared at or made to feel uncomfortable, so I believe him. In contrast, there was an honor killing in a public park in Sulaimaniyah last October.

Just shy of thirty years old, with his blue eyes, fair skin and tolerant, inclusive attitude, Dino is a face of Islam, one that is not represented by the press, at least in my native country of the United States. Nermeen, Mustafa and Dino asked me about presidential candidate Donald Trump. When I ping-ponged the question back to them, they shook their heads in bewilderment but diverted their eyes. They know the prejudice Muslims suffer. Photographer Tarik Samarah documents the life and suffering of Srebrenica survivors in his artistic documentary “Srebrenica” on permanent exhibition at the Galerija 11/07/95 in Sarajevo. Part of the exhibition displays the graffiti found in the Dutch peacekeepers camp in Potocari, near Srebrenica. Pieces of graffiti read “No teeth…? A mustache…? Smells like shit…? Bosnian Girl!”, “My ass is like a ‘local’. It’s got the same smell. Bosnia ‘94”, “I’m your best friend. I kill you for nothing. Bosnie ‘94” and “UN, United Nothing”. Both Nermeen and Dino referenced the “United Nothing” moniker, commenting on the expired food that was air dropped during the siege or the malaria pills that were sent. Maybe someone in the UN office confused Bosnia with Botswana.

Folklore says that whoever drinks from the Sebilj public water fountain in Bascarsija is destined to return to Sarajevo. I hope I make it back: the tolerant, inclusive attitude of Sarajevans makes Sarajevo unique. I wish I could bottle Sarajevo’s soul and give it to the world.

What’s In A Name?

| by Alex Poppe |

The passport depends on the checkpoint. At Kurdish checkpoints, he uses the passport with the first name “Omar.” If it’s an Iraqi checkpoint, he uses the one calling him “Ali.” It’s practically a death wish to have a Sunni name like “Omar” or “Othman” or “Bakar” in his home town of Basra, Iraq, a Shia dominated city where Sunnis are targets of sectarian violence.

I met 21-year-old Omar Alkhalidy at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani where he studies English as a second language. He was my student for one term. I’m in the midst of my second stint teaching English in northern Iraq and my fifth in the Middle East. The Kurdish and Iraqi students draw me back. No matter what horrors they have experienced, their humor, compassion and generosity triumph. Alkhalidy is no exception.

Alkhalidy has fled for his life three times.

…………

Before the war, Basra was a diverse and culturally vibrant city. No one talked about sectarian divides. Women went to school, and they weren’t forced to wear hijabs or burqas in public.

“You could do anything,” Alkhalidy said.

But Basra was the first city to fall to the coalition forces in the Iraq War. In the 2003 invasion, British and U.S. forces entered Iraq from Kuwait, caravanning to Basra on the “Highway of Death.” The U.S. predicted that the Shiite population of Basra would welcome the coalition forces and rise up against Saddam, but they were met with unexpected resistance. After a few days of conflict, U.S. forces moved north to continue the invasion. They left the British to siege Basra, which was in the midst of intense sectarian violence enflamed by the invasion.

Alkhalidy’s family was not exempt from the violence. As eight-year-old, he watched his father and uncles fire their shotguns out of windows at Shia militia members during a skirmish. Hearing gunfire, British soldiers on a tank patrol approached Alkhalidy’s street. The soldiers told everyone to drop their weapons, or they would shoot. They seized the weapons and put them in a car, which they then ran over with the tank. They took the Shia militia into custody, but Alkhalidy’s father and uncles were spared from arrest when his father explained that he was a doctor in the Iraqi Army and showed his badge.

At that time, the U.S. Army was creating the new Iraqi army under Paul Bremer (who foolishly disbanded the original Iraqi army) in Baghdad, so the British army arranged for Alkhalidy’s father, who is fluent in English and Arabic, to join the new force. Alkhalidy was 10-years-old when his parents, cousin, brother and he moved to Baghdad, where they resided in the multi-religious neighborhood of Al-Jihad in the west of the city. Unfortunately, trouble followed them.

…………

Following the collapse of the Iraqi government in 2003, a number of Shiite Islamist groups, specifically the Sadrist Movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr, expanded their influence in southern Iraq. Muqtada, who’s known to have close ties to Iran, created the Mahdi Army, which served as the military branch of the Sadrist Movement and spearheaded the first major Shia confrontation against U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

The Sadrist Movement was part of the shaky United Iraqi Alliance coalition in the 2005 elections in Iraq. The coalition was mainly comprised of Shia Islamist groups, including former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, and had a platform based primarily on national securi- ty and reconstruction. In December, the coalition earned a total of 128 seats, with the Sadrist Movement and the Islamic Virtue Party, a branch of the Sadrist Movement, gaining a total of 44 seats, solidifying their presence in Iraqi politics. At the height of its power in 2005, the Sadrist Movement was strong enough to influence local government through its link with the National Independent Cadres and Elites party, and it was especially popular among police forces.

In February 2006, sectarian violence flared in Iraq after Al-Qaeda, a Sunni Islamist group, bombed the al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest Shiite mosques. This act set off a wave of violence that displaced some 370,000 Iraqis and led many scholars to label it as a civil war. The Mahdi Army was a primary belligerent in the conflict and was accused of operating death squads that targeted Sunnis in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Masked gunmen — allegedly from the Mahdi Army — set up a roadblock in Alkhalidy’s neighborhood of Al-Jihad, checking identification cards and murdering anyone with a Sunni name.

Once again, it was bad to be an “Omar,” and the streets were filled with gunshots.

Masked gunmen — allegedly from the Mahdi Army — set up a roadblock in Alkhalidy’s neighborhood of Al-Jihad, checking identification cards and murdering anyone with a Sunni name.

In the summer of 2006, Alkhalidy was 12-years-old. One day, Alkhalidy’s Sunni neighbor jumped over the wall between their houses to warn his family that the Mahdi Army was coming. Alkhalidy’s family grabbed gold, money, passports and clothes and got into a car headed for Syria. Alkhalidy’s father was still enlisted in the military, so he promised to join them later. Alkhalidy’s last image of Baghdad is of a rocket exploding in one of his neighbor’s houses.

The family settled in Bloudan, Syria. Bloudan, boasting cool summer temperatures, parks, and springs, was once a major tourist destination for Arabs. Alkhalidy spent five years in Syria and described his time there as harmonious and calm. “The people are beautiful,” he said. “There were no problems with Shia and Sunni and Iraqi.”

Alkhalidy’s father was still a doctor with the Iraqi army while the family lived in Bloudan, a position which provided the family with enough money for a good life. When Alkhalidy reflects on life in Syria, he shakes his head. “Now Syria has nothing,” he said.

In 2011, Alkhalidy’s brother was stopped by the Syrian army for driving a car with Damascus plates. “You’re Iraqi,” they told him. “How do you have this car?” Alkhalidy said his brother rented the car, which had a loud-speaker system and siren, something his brother failed to notice or consider. The police believed the car to be linked to incidents that had instigated civil unrest. They beat him with the butt of a rifle, severely injuring his face. Fearing for the safety of his family, Alkhalidy’s father organized two cars so they could flee Syria. Again, Alkhalidy’s family packed up their life in minutes. Again, they ran.

…………

The family settled in Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northern Iraq, where they remain today. In Sulaimani, Alkhalidy doesn’t have to worry about being Sunni, he has to worry about being an Iraqi. From his experience, Kurds hate Iraqis. He is quick to point out not all Kurds, but in all of his five years there, none of his neighbors have even said “Hello” to him.

The Kurd-Iraqi conflict has its roots in British occupation in the early 1900s, but it is Saddam Hussein’s al-Anfal Campaign that most Kurds remember. Led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, who at the time was the secretary general of the Northern Bureau of the Ba’ath Party, the al-Anfal Campaign was a genocidal effort from 1986 to 1989 to rid Iraq of ethnic Kurds. Mass deportations, firing squads and chemical warfare were just some of the tactics used by the regime to exterminate Kurds. The campaign is said to have killed as many as 180,000 people and displaced around 1 million.

British forces lay siege to Basra, Iraq in 2003. (Photo by Rhonda Roth-Cameron)

Kurdish animosity towards Iraqis was recently rekindled when Kurdistan experienced an economic crisis in 2015, the contributing factors of which included the expansion of ISIS, an influx of 1.8 million refugees from Syria and northern Iraq, declining oil prices and an ongoing feud between the central government in Baghdad and the regional government in Erbil. The continuous arrival of refugees in Sulaimani has driven up the price of housing, increased traffic and pollution, and squeezed the already limited number of vacant spots in public high schools and universities.

When Alkhalidy arrived in Sulaimani, there were still places in public high schools for Iraqi kids. He told me he had good grades in high school, but as an Iraqi, he was given an unwarranted low score on a compulsory, standardized test given to all graduating high school seniors. When Alkhalidy went to the Ministry of Education to dispute his scores, he was told he had waited too long. Alkhalidy challenged the government official.

“I told him that even if I had come right away, he wouldn’t have helped me,” Alkhalidy said. “The official told me, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’”

Receiving the low score bars Alkhalidy from attending public university. He said the same is true for most of his other Arab friends. However, a few of Alkhalidy’s friends were able to attend public university because they had connections. For example, one has a Kurdish father who serves in the Peshmerga.

Alkhalidy said the Ministry of Education intentionally gives poor grades to Iraqis to force them to leave Kurdistan. Some private universities, such as the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, admit Iraqi students to undergraduate programs, but they are very expensive whereas public university tuition is nominal. Thus, Alkhalidy became my student by circumstance, not choice. His only hope for a public university education is to study abroad. He hopes to score well on the TOEFL test and study in Turkey.

Alkhalidy said his friends who stayed in Syria are doctors and engineers now, which makes him feel ashamed about his situation. “Look at me,” he said. “I am nothing.”

“I told him that even if I had come right away, he wouldn’t have helped me,” Alkhalidy said. “The official told me, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’”

Alkhalidy is one of many in his generation without hope. He told me he heard a U.S. Army officer once say that the coalition forces “gave Iraq on a plate of gold to Iran.” Alkhalidy doesn’t know if this is true or not. He also doesn’t know if the 2003 invasion was good or bad, because he doesn’t know what Saddam Hussein would have done as president. All he knows is that if he can go abroad, he is going abroad.

“After what happened in Basra and Baghdad,” he said, “I don’t care anymore. Everyone tries to kill me if I leave Kurdistan for Iraq. In Kurdistan, I am Arab. In Iraq, I am Sunni. Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul used to be safe for Sunnis, but that changed with ISIS. Now Iraqi people are hated by the whole world.”

Were I in his shoes, I’d probably feel the same way. Alkhalidy can’t stay where he is, but he has nowhere to go. The Mahdi Army was disbanded in 2008, but in 2014, the senior Shia cleric of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued an edict calling for Shiite men to fight against ISIS. Sheikh Abbas al-Mahmadawi, the leader of Iraq’s Hezbollah, stated that some 800,000 people responded to the edict, creating a military force significantly larger than the Iraqi Security Forces.

After Ayatollah Sistani’s edict, the Mahdi Army then remobilized as the “Peace Companies” and vowed to defend Baghdad against ISIS. And they weren’t the only Shia militia to do so. Foreign Policy’s Ali Khedery reported in February 2015 that “within months, hundreds of thousands of young Shiites responded to the call — and today, virtually all of them have been absorbed into Iranian-dominated militias, whose fundamental identity is built around a sectarian narrative rather than loyalty to the state.”

ISIS controls a vast swath of northern Iraq, while the Shia militias control the south. Shia militias, like al-Hashd al-Shaabi, guard Baghdad. Militia members sometimes extort money or sexual favors from women and take cars from the Sunni refugees fleeing ISIS. Other times, they deny them entrance into Baghdad, and the refugees disappear.

As fences go up in Europe, as Syria descends further and further into chaos, as the terror attacks in Turkey proliferate, as the Greek economy collapses, ad as certain American Republican presidential candidates spout their xenophobia, I wonder: where can someone like Alkhalidy go?

(Top Image by Adam Emerson)

Originally published at on April 7, 2016.

A Letter from Kurdistan

Alex Poppe writes of her experiences in Kurdistan, Iraq where she taught English, on the alienation and social exclusion that leads to radicalisation.

Just know that I am with you. Every stream, every lake, every field and river. In the woods and in the hills, in all the places you showed me. I love you.
 — From Peter Kassig’s last letter to his parents, smuggled out of a prison in Raqqa.

When I started thinking about this article, the November 2014 beheading of Peter Kassig had been on my mind. In 2013, I volunteered with the Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED), a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Kurdistan, Iraq and developed a short-lived crush on one of the aid workers. Later, after I moved to Germany, I learned he had been kidnapped by ISIS while delivering tents to a refugee camp. Thankfully, he was released, probably because his country’s government had paid a ransom.

Peter’s last letter, as reprinted by the New York Times, romanticized places with hills, lakes and valleys; places he was shown by loving parents; places where he felt he belonged. Why would any Westerner be drawn from a land of plenty to a war zone? Referencing my experience of working with teens in Kurdistan and East Jerusalem from 2011 and 2013, my own period of social isolation and expert opinions gained from research, I want to explore what motivates people to join jihad.

I taught high school literature, composition and advanced exam preparation in Kurdistan, Iraq from 2011 to 2013 and spent my summer break working for a Palestinian education NGO in East Jerusalem. That NGO, partnered by the US government, gave the most promising teens from poor Palestinian communities, including refugee camps, scholarships to prepare for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The strategy behind the program is if teens have hope for the future and have positive interactions with North Americans, they will be less drawn to jihad. Although the program is United States culture propaganda heavy, it can’t compete against decades of oppression which breeds systematic generational hatred. Fast forward to summer 2014 and the destruction of Gaza, especially the Shejaiya massacre. Follow the blood trajectory to the November killings inside the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in West Jerusalem, leap-frog to the massacre at Charlie Hebdo and remind yourself that at the same time Boko Haram was carrying out a week-long killing spree, torching at least ten towns before using ten-year-old girls as suicide bombers.

Teens are my favorite age to teach because despite cultural differences and economic disparity, they share similarities worldwide: they are energetic, curious and funny. They are wiser than most adults give them credit for being. When they experience growing pains, they act out. They start from a fundamentally human place until experience pushes them in different directions. One of those directions is radicalism.

ISIS understands that people with brown skin are often treated as second class in the first world. Western Muslims suffer from alienation and hopelessness as they are methodically marginalized by broken political systems that benefit few at the expense of many. (Although not considered the West, this is especially true in the West Bank.) Katherine E. Brown, a lecturer in Defense Studies at Kings College, London believes that Westerners join ISIS because it promises a new utopian politics where recruits participate in the creation of a new Islamic State. Participants are promised a stake, a sense of ownership and increased self-esteem through their participation. (1)

Suraj Lakhani, writing for the Guardian, concurs with Ms. Brown. He, too reports that involvement in jihad induces a feeling of being special or significant. In addition to defining a distinct self-identity, participation in extremism is described as cool, offering an escape from normal and predictable lives. It provides ordinary citizens a feeling of exhilaration by allowing them to handle powerful military hardware, and promises the excitement of an adventure abroad. It also affords male participants an opportunity to feel masculine. (2)

Young Muslim women are as likely to be radicalized as young men. Kalmaleep Bhui, a professor of Cultural Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Queen Mary University of London, found that women who sympathized with extremist movements were younger, in full-time education and more middle class. “They were more likely to be depressed and socially isolated.” Recent immigrants who were poor and busier than second or third generation immigrants were less likely to have radical sympathies in part because they remember the problems of their homelands. (3)

The fact that poor immigrants are less sympathetic to extremism than middle class students seems counter-intuitive. However, the answer may lie in feelings of entitlement. Imagine the following: your parents or grandparents move to a Western country, they work hard so you can be educated, you speak the local language because you were born there and are educated there, and yet you are under-employed and experience racism as you read about the top one percent becoming richer at the expense of the shrinking middle class. You might feel enraged. You might wonder ‘Where’s mine?” You might give up on a system that has let you down. You might be tempted to act.

Dounia Bouzar, the founder of the Center for the Prevention of Sectarian Excesses Linked to Islam, reports that in most cases young women who seek jihad do not come from particularly religious families but are good students who want to go to Syria to marry a devout Muslim or to provide humanitarian aid. “There is a mix of indoctrination and seduction,” Ms. Bouzar said. “They [ISIS recruiters] upload pictures of bearded Prince Charmings on Facebook.” (4) ISIS’s messages are positive in contrast to the Islamophobia coming from Western governments who communicate a negative message so young Muslims feel demonized and alienated from society in their adopted/home countries. (5) According to Ruth Manning, a Quilliam Foundation volunteer, ISIS recruiters tweet images of sunsets and Starbucks frappuccinos to present a positive image of life under ISIS, to make extremism appear as a normal lifestyle decision for disaffected Muslims and to generate a sense of sisterhood among female jihadists. As a result, many girls are drawn to the cause by the promise of a feeling of empowerment, freedom from their parents and the search for belonging. (6) Their lack of strong personal relationships offline pushes them towards virtual communities.

That is a lot of expert quotes to tell us something elemental: feelings of alienation and social isolation are bad, we all want to be feel a part of something bigger than ourselves and to be seen/have status; when we don’t, we get depressed and gravitate towards people or groups that make us feel better, and this cycle of behavior is not gender specific. Sound familiar?

Depression, low self-esteem and feeling left-out prompted me to seek work in Kurdistan. In 2010, I returned to Brooklyn after teaching in Kiev and could not find gainful employment. I had a low-paying, dead-end office job without health insurance and was waitressing again at age 43. I was struggling financially and felt priced out of my friendships because I could not afford to socialize at my friends’ economic level. I saw myself as a loser, and I was white and educated. Imagine how much worse it could have been if I were brown, black or yellow and didn’t have a formidable university degree. When I announced my decision to go to Iraq (at that time, most Americans did not know where Kurdistan was), I became somebody brave, somebody heroic. People treated me with more respect when they heard about my plans, and I felt a renewed sense of purpose. Consequently, my self-esteem increased. My experience is not dissimilar to those who turn to jihad. The impulse to act was the same, but the avenue taken was different. Repression, alienation and low self-esteem, not religion, draw people to extreme actions.

Suraj Lakhani suggests that governmental agencies host/support local events such as sports days or athletic clubs where workers build long-lasting relationships with teens so that teens feel comfortable approaching them for advice. The idea is that a teen would seek counsel which could prevent him from becoming a jihadist. That (building relationships with teens) is what I did in the West Bank and Kurdistan; and as a result, I gained the confidence of many of my students, including the male students who came to me with typical teenage concerns: bullying and sex but also jihad. For example, I received an I-want-to-be-a-suicide-bomber essay from a lovely young student who occasionally emails me to check on my safety. He was one of the first people to contact me when ISIS came within forty kilometers of Erbil, the city I where I used to live.

I addressed the suicide bomber essay by evaluating its merit and appropriateness as an academic submission. Then I asked the student’s opinion about the effectiveness of such an action versus an alternate course of behavior, and then I listened. I did not argue with his complaints of repression and violence and injustice at the hands of the Israeli government because his complaints are valid. I felt guilty because I am a US citizen and the US continues to offer unwavering support for Israel. I responded by acknowledging the truth of his grievances, reminding him that the citizens of a country are not the same as the government of a country and telling him that although I wasn’t idealistic enough to think I could change the world, I did think I could have an impact on the little bit of it surrounding me, which was why I was there.

In the West Bank, a very simple action inspired the students’ trust and confidence. I usually had a full bottle of water on my desk in the classroom as I taught. It was summer and not all the classrooms were air-conditioned. When Ramadan started, I did not take my water bottle out of my bag because I knew my students were fasting. The classes lasted for four hours. Some of the students asked me where the bottle was. I told them I respected their decision to fast, and although I was not fasting myself, I did not wish to drink or eat in front of them. That was our beginning.

Actor-comedian Aasif Mandvi and actor-musician Jack Black have made a satirical book trailer to support Mandvi’s book No Man’s Land. In the trailer, when Aasif mentions he is Muslim, Jack is flabbergasted. Everything Jack says is now filtered through the knowledge that Aasif is Muslim: he has offered Aasif beer, is Aasif fasting, does Aasif need to pray? Then Jack opens his trailer door and announces Aasif is a Muslim and needs to pray. Why does one aspect of a person override all other aspects to become his defining characteristic? The book trailer highlights the Islamophobia in today’s society, and there is a double standard with regards to Islam.

Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani political commentator, historian and editor of the New Left Review reports that the Danish magazine that first mocked the prophet Mohammad in 2005 said that despite the cartoon offending Muslim believers worldwide, the magazine would not have published similar attacks against Moses, regardless of what Israel was doing in Palestine. (7) When a Muslim commits an extremist act, he is called a terrorist and Islam is finger pointed. However, when Anders Breivik massacred over seventy-five people in Norway, he was not portrayed as a white Christian or even branded a terrorist. Similarly, when ultra- Zionist extremist Baruch Goldstein killed over twenty-nine people in Palestine in 1994, no one said Judaism was the source of these killings. Part of this double standard stems from a sense of guilt about the Jewish genocide of World War II. However, there is not an equal sense of guilt with regard to France’s colonial past in Africa, which persisted in Algeria until 1962. (8)

The recent attack on Charlie Hebdo was carried out by French citizens of Algerian descent. Gilbert Achcar, professor at the school of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London explains, “The communities with migrant backgrounds from Muslim majority countries are subject to forms of racism, discrimination and oppression which are the breeding ground for the kind of hatred in response to that societal hatred. And Western intervention in the Middle East has been creating the ground for all this, especially the US’s conduct in the Middle East.” Achcar explains that in a society that is relatively wealthy like France is but where Muslims are the weakest segment of that society because they are the target of institutionalized racism and Islamophobia, hatred can grow into extremism. He calls this phenomenon the Clash of Barbarism: the barbarism of the strong leads to a counter barbarism on the side of those who see themselves as the oppressed. The barbarism represented by the US occupation of Iraq, the torture in Abu Ghraib, and the massacre in Fallujah bread a counter barbarism represented by al-Qaeda.

The Bush administration invaded Iraq to eradicate al-Qaeda but ultimately gave al-Qaeda a larger territorial base because ISIS is the continuation of al-Qaeda. (9) Cherif Kouach, perpetrator of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, testified in a French court that images of atrocities committed by US troops in Abu Ghraib motivated him to go to Iraq. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has claimed responsibility for directing his attack on Charlie Hebdo. “The target was in France because of its obvious role in the war on Islam and oppressed nations.” France fights its own wars in Mali and elsewhere in Africa using drone strikes and attacks, and supports the US battling al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. (10)

Tariq Ramadan, named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the twenty-first century says we won’t defeat violent extremism unless we deal with justice and freedom for all people. “We have the West supporting the worst dictatorships and coming to us, as Western Muslims, and saying ‘Ok, now apologize for the consequences of what is happening’.” (11)

Take the West’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Amer Deghayes was a young Briton studying business administration who became a jihadist. He says, “The Muslim nation is like one body. If one part complains, the other parts react so it’s not a Syrian conflict but an Islamic conflict…I came to Syrian to answer a call of duty: to give victory to the religion of Allah and the way to do that is to help the oppressed Syrians and make sure they receive justice.” ISIS uses this us-versus-them mentality with its YODO recruitment campaign, “You Only Die Once. Why not make it martyrdom”? (12)

Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield argues the US and the West need to understand their own roles in legitimizing terrorism and take away the justification for it in order to fight it. “Who catches you when you fall? A lot of times in a society that has been decimated, a religion that’s been humiliated, people are looking for some kind of greater meaning, and there are a lot of people willing to take advantage of them.” (13) Groups like ISIS and AQAP become attractive to people who believe what they are doing is justified and are not afraid to die. The US policy of the following: unquestioning support for Israel, drone bombing campaigns, invasion and occupation of countries and torture project the image that the US is at war with a religion. President Bush used the word “crusade” in the early stages of the post September 11 aftermath.(14) Groups such as ISIS, AQAP, Boko Haram and al-Shabab are united by their perception that there is a world war against Islam, so they will fight all the non-believers.

During the days of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the following manhunt, Boko Haram burned villages and killed approximately two thousand people. Nigeria has the most powerful military in Africa, which it deploys around Africa in so-called humanitarian missions. Why can’t the Nigerian military confront Boko Haram in an effective way? Adotei Akwei of Amnesty International, USA states there are credible reports verifying collusion and support for Boko Haram by the Nigerian military. According to Horace Campbell, professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University, elements with Nigeria’s Central Bank finance Boko Haram. He speculates that the US government knows who these elements are but instead of taking that information to African Union or the United Nations to expose all the forces in France, Chad, the Nigerian government and Cameroon that finance Boko Haram, the US uses that information to pressure Nigeria politically. Much like the situation in Iraq, the chaos in Nigeria is about oil. Ten thousand barrels of oil per day, worth billions of dollars, are siphoned out of Nigeria. Currently, the political class of Nigeria controls forty percent of the oil wealth.(15) John Kerry called Goodluck Johnathan and persuaded him to vote against Palestine’s bid for statehood. Professor Campbell accuses the US government of having information on bunkering, exportive capital and financing Boko Haram, which it uses selectively to get what it wants from the Nigerian government. (16)

The following experience makes Professor Campbell’s speculations heartbreakingly plausible. Many of my students in Kurdistan were the children and grandchildren of the political elite. According to a newspaper article that has since disappeared from Google’s search engine so we’ll have to call the following hearsay (I used to show this article online to colleagues in Kurdistan only to have it vanish one day from the internet), a member of the political elite took tens of millions of dollars in suitcases out of Kurdistan to deposit in several Western countries including the US. It was the third such transfer of dollars in that year. Customs officials were rumored to have been complicit in the transport of the dollars, which many speculate came from the illegal sale of Kurdish oil to Turkey and Iran via tanker trucks because the former prime minister of Iraq restricted the amount of oil he allowed the Kurds to sell via pipelines. Allegedly, that member of the political elite was accompanied by his son, one of my students, who saw the rule of law did not apply to his father, and therefore reasoned the rules of school did not apply to him. This student was a challenge to motivate and discipline. I appealed to his natural charisma which destines him to be a future leader of his country, queried the type of leader he wanted to become and set an example by how I led the class. I did not belittle or humiliate my students. I followed the same rules I set for them. I did for them what I expected them to do for me and for each other.

What happened to leading by example and having honor in leadership? A government’s legitimacy is derived from the people it governs, and justice is the basis for that governance. When political systems become unjust, when a government attacks its people, terrorism becomes attractive. If the entity that is supposed to protect you turns on you, where can you go? What do you do with your outrage at being betrayed? All people have a common enemy: violent extremism. We need to support the dignity of any life because it is the same dignity. We need to confront our Islamophobia to build inclusive societies where every life matters. The West, especially the US, needs to stop the actions that galvanize individuals towards extremist activities. In the end, we all want to feel we belong to place beneath our feet.

(1) Erlanger, Steven. “In West, ISIS Finds Women Eager to Enlist.” The New York Times 23 October 2014. Web. 23 October 2014, 02 December 2014, 12 January 2015. (2) Lakhni, Suraj. “What Makes Young British Muslims Want to Go to Syria.” The Guardian 24 June 2014. Web. 12 January 2015. (3) Erlanger, Steven. “In West, ISIS finds Women Eager to Enlist.” The New York Times 23 October 2014. Web. 02 December 2014, 12 January 2015. (4) Erlanger, Steven. “In West, ISIS finds Women Eager to Enlist.” The New York Times 23 October 2014. Web. 08 December 2014, 12 January 2015. (5) Erlanger, Steven. “In West, ISIS finds Women Eager to Enlist.” The New York Times 23 October 2014. Web. 10 December 2014, 12 January 2015. (6) Dearden, Lizzie. “ISIS Supporters’ Offering Cash to British Girls as Young as 14 to Become Jihadi Brides in Syria.” The Independent 19/12/2014. Web. 20 December 2014, 14 January 2015. (7) “Leading Muslim Scholar Tariq Ramadan: Attack on Paris Magazine “a Pure Betrayal of Our Religion”. “Tariq Ali. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 7 January, 2015. Web. 7 January 2015. (8) “French Muslims Fear Backlash, Increased Islamophobia After Charlie Hebdo Attack.” Gilbert Achcar. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 9 January 2015. Web. 9 January 2015. (9) “Gilbert Achcar on the Clash of Barbarisms from the Massacre in Paris to the U.S. Occupation of Iraq.” Gilbert Achcar. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 9 January 2015. Web. 9 January 2015. (10) “Jeremy Scahill on Paris Attacks, the al-Qaeda Link & the Secret U.S. War in Yemen.” Jeremy Scahill. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 12 January 2015. Web. 12 January 2015. (11) “Scholar Tariq Ramadan, Harper’s Rick MacArthur on Charlie Hebdo Attack & How the West Treats Muslims.” Tariq Ramadan. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 8 January 2015. Web. 8 January 2015. (12) Vice Video “The Rise of British Jihadists in Syria.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 26 June 2014. Web. 13 January 2015. (13) “Jeremy Scahill on Paris Attacks, the al-Qaeda Link & the Secret U.S. War in Yemen.” Jeremy Scahill. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 12 January 2015. Web. 12 January 2015. (14) “Jeremy Scahill on Paris Attacks, the al-Qaeda Link & the Secret U.S. War in Yemen.” Jeremy Scahill. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 12 January 2015. Web. 12 January 2015. (15) As Nigerian Massacre Evidence Grows, Questions Swirl over Collusion Between Boko Haram & Military.” Horace Campbell. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 16 January 2015. Web. 16 January 2015. (16) As Nigerian Massacre Evidence Grows, Questions Swirl over Collusion Between Boko Haram & Military.” Horace Campbell. Democracy Now!. www.democracynow.org. 16 January 2015. Web. 16 January 2015.

Categories: Commentary, Iraq War

Tags: #1billionrising #reasontorise @vday, Boko Haram, charlie hebdo, East Jerusalem, Horace Campbell, Iraq, Jeremy Scahill, Jihad, Kurdistan, Peter Kassig

Originally published at bellacaledonia.org.uk on February 2, 2015.

Mirage

 

 

On my first day of first grade, I looked around the playground trying to decide whom I wanted to be friends with.  I picked Chris Murphy because of her wavy golden pigtails.  My decision was all surface, no substance.  My experience in Kurdistan, Iraq was a lot like that. As long as something looked like it functioned, it didn’t matter if it actually worked.  ATMs were plentiful in the city but were seldom stocked with currency or even on-line.  For profit schools boasted high test scores yet marks were doctored or exams sold for thousands of dollars.  New restaurants/lounges popped up around the Christian city of Ankawa playing the same music heard in Bangkok or New York, yet women were largely marginalized and excluded from everyday social life. The veneer of modernism confused:  although the outside was familiar, the inside was tribal and foreign to me.

My teenage students were my portal into cultural comprehension.  There is universality to teenage behavior that transcends religion, culture, and race.  Watch middle school students in an exam hall anxiously waiting to be dismissed. Legs kick, bottoms squirm, talking ensues.  High schoolers discover sex in Northern Iraq the same as in the west.  They make jokes about the reproduction units in biology class, tell stories about who was kissing whom in cars, and flirt outrageously.  There is gossip and rumor mongering, just like when I was in high school a million years ago.  One of my eleventh graders recently told me that when she is out with her father’s family (a prominent political family), she sometimes wears an abaya or a hijab out of respect for tradition.  I was amazed because I had never seen her wear a hijab, and she was clad in fitted denim as she told me.  Then she laughed as she confessed that if the hijab slips, she doesn’t bother to refasten it.  She lets it slide back or hang loosely down her back. I know her views on the hijab are personal and don’t apply to all girls who choose or are required to wear the hijab.  However, a slipping hijab is a fitting metaphor for Northern Iraq at this time. 

The autonomous Kurdish region has enjoyed unprecedented prosperity due to its huge reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, gold and silver. Where there is money to be made, expats come a running.  The influx of foreigners adds some flavor, but does it really foster change?  Erbil wants to be the next Dubai, but raising its prices will not magically make it so.  There must be fundamental changes including far reaching support for female education, gender protection laws, cultural institutions support, and tourism infrastructure development.  Otherwise, Erbil will eventually re-tie its headscarf.

 My time in Iraq has finished.  I am deeply grateful to the people who have shared their stories with me and tolerated my cultural blunders, and to my students who taught me a lesson in heartbreak. This is my final posting.

 

 

 

 

Screaming Against the Wind

I asked a Christian colleague of mine who studies the Bible about the Prodigal Son parable.   I have never fully understood it and when I told him that, he told me that it was my arrogance that kept me from understanding the story.  He likened the story to arguing which ant is taller.  The “good” son is one ant and the prodigal son is another ant.  The ants are a metaphor for people, who are all sinners.  The father of the two boys symbolizes God.  According to the Bible, only God can forgive sins.  The good son complains that he has always done the right thing whereas his wayward brother has not, and yet the father decides to forgive the wayward son and reward them both.  In essence, the “good” brother is arguing which ant is taller because all humans are sinners and compared to God, we are all ants. 

We are all flawed so who are we to judge another seems to be the takeaway lesson.    And yet we do, from socio-political-economic engines that systematically marginalize the disenfranchised to the day to day harassment of someone who has been judged as “BAD”.

Unfortunately, the disenfranchised are more often than not female, undereducated, poor, and rural.  In Nicholas d. Krstof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky:  Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the authors report how an intelligence officer at the Indian/Nepalese border laughed at the idea that watching out for trafficked girls at the border is as important as confiscating pirated goods.  The officer’s logic was that prostitution is inevitable because what is a young man to do from the ages of 18 to 30 when he marries.  (I won’t touch the subject of what a woman is supposed to do).  The officer reasoned that kidnapped and enslaved Nepali girls, who were usually the nationality forced into sexual slavery in India, were an acceptable misfortune in order to keep “good girls” safe.  When pointed out that the trafficked girls were “good girls” too, the officer replied that they were peasant girls from the countryside who could not read, and therefore were expendable to keep “good Indian middle-class girls safe.”  Society looks the other way just as many antebellum Americans did because the victims look different from themselves (Half the Sky, pages 23-24).  In reality, is any ant taller?

The World Economic forum rated 130 countries according to the status of women, and eight of the bottom ten were majority Muslim (Half the Sky, pg. 149).  However, it is simplistic to blame a country’s religion when the oppression may be rooted in the culture even when oppressors cite religion as a justification for actions like honor killings. Historically, Islam is not misogynistic:  when Muhammad introduced Islam in the seventh century, it was a step forward for women because it banned female infanticide and limited polygamy to four wives who were supposed to be treated equally.  Muslim women owned property with their rights protected by law.  At that time, women in Europe didn’t have equivalent property rights and the early Christian leader Tertullian called women “the gateway of the devil” (Half the Sky, pg 150-151).  However, Christianity has progressed while conservative Islam remains largely the same.  Although the Koran explicitly supports some gender discrimination in that a woman’s testimony counts for half a man’s testimony in a court of law and a daughter inherits half as much as a son, because it was originally progressive, it should not be allowed to become a defense for backwardness.

Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn offer Islam’s evolving view of slavery as support for oppression being rooted in culture and not religion.  They cite that the Koran encourages the freeing of slaves as a noble act even though the prophet Muhammad had many slaves and Islamic law accepted slavery.  Saudia Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 and Mauritania followed suit in 1981.  Even though there was a strong cultural tie to slavery, the Islamic world renounced it.  Mr. Kristoff and Ms. WuDunn question why Muslim countries don’t empower and enfranchise women since a precedent was set when the  Koran was read differently with regard to slavery (Half the Sky, pg. 152).  It seems that something other than religion decides which ant is taller.  When is that something going to realize all ants are the same height?

Looking for God in all the Wrong Places

On Good Friday, I ventured into the Christian city of Ankawa to find a Stations of the Cross service.  The service usually happens around 3p.m. in the States to commemorate when Jesus died on the cross.  I dragged a bunch of friends with me to church hop, to no avail.  At St. George’s Church, we were greeted by a guard with the ubiquitous Kalashnikov that I have almost become desensitized to.  The first thing he asked was if all of us were Christians.  Only Christians were allowed inside the main building. In fact, one of my friends was Shiite, so we side stepped the issue and lied by omission.   Next he told us we could not enter the church as it was closed, but we were welcome to pray outside at a fountain/statue area resplendent with a collection box.  Finally, he informed us that services began at 4:30p.m., but we would need advanced special permission from the head priest to attend.

I was very saddened by this turn of events.  I realize safety precautions are necessary, especially in sectarian Iraq, and that places of worship are popular targets, but that is what makes me sad!!!  Can you imagine being excluded from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Blue Mosque, The Wailing Wall, or the Borobudur Temple?  Places of worship used to be sanctuaries.  When did they become formidable targets?  (Atrocities committed in them seem so much worse than those committed in secular arenas).  How are communities going to bridge cultural divides when they exclude each other from limited participation in each other’s celebrations?  Participation breeds familiarity, which is the first step in viewing “other” as “us”.  It is more difficult to attack one of your own than it is to attack an outsider.  When I worked for an education ngo in the West Bank, an unofficial tenant of the program was to introduce Palestinians to American culture and to an American they could forge a positive relationship with in order to dissuade them from committing future acts of terrorism against the West.

Another foray into another church yielded similar results.  We decided to go to a secular church (read pub) and try our luck another day.  On Holy Saturday I visited the churches in Ankawa and found no services.  I couldn’t find God anywhere.

On Easter Sunday I volunteered with the French ngo Acted to assess the Syrian Kurdish refugees living in Erbil.  The goal of the project was to map how many families were in a host community and to perform a vulnerability analysis on the families.  Because the situation is dynamic, by the time information is processed (for example, a two week time lag) it is often obsolete.  That is how quickly refugees enter Kurdistan and are processed by the KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government).

Sometimes the families are not registered (issued a temporary residency card and issued an ID number from UNHCR), so aid organizations are not sure where they live.  Knowing where refugees are determines where service centers will be located and what kind of aid will be initially implemented.  Teams of two go into the field, find the local mukhtar (a poorly paid public servant), and ask him where the refugees live.  Next, assessors cold-call on doors.  The first door we knocked on was opened by a 21 year old tattooed Syrian Kurd who obviously hadn’t been expecting us.  At another time in his life he might have just woken up from a night of clubbing.

The initial response was one of suspicion.  The person behind the door wanted to know who was asking if he had a government registry number, and the person knocking on the door was wondering about the propriety and safety of entering the flat.  The number of people living in the flat was counted, both registered and non registered, health issues were addressed, and government services information was distributed.  Some two room flats house 6 adults; some two room flats house 2 families. 

The first door we knocked on houses 6 young males from the same village who are loosely related to each other.  Effort is made to keep families together.  One room was the sitting room with clothes, towels, and personal items rimming the walls suspended from nails or from a clothes line hung low from the ceiling.  Suitcases were strewn in corners, shoes neatly lined the wall near the entrance, possessions were kept packed in duffels along the floor.  There were no appliances in the kitchen except for a kettle to boil water. 

After both parties relaxed into something resembling trust, we sat on floor cushions in the main room as we took down information.  They made no mention of the half eaten breakfast lying on the floor of the kitchen being visited by flies, the first meal of their day so obviously interrupted.  They showed no signs of annoyance or inconvenience.  Rather they made us fresh tea and offered us cigarettes.  Slowly I realized I didn’t need to go to church to find God.  He/She/It was in that room embedded in generosity and patience. 

A Love Letter to Kurdistan

My father is a Berliner who emigrated to the United States when he was 14 years old in1947.  He loves America.  He is the embodiment of Horatio Alger, the immigrant who comes to The U.S. without language or education and makes a comfortable middle class living for himself through discipline and hard work.  I secretly think he’s a bit miffed that I want to live outside of The U.S. because he thinks nowhere in the world offers the freedom and social mobility that America does.  His experience has taught him that.

Obviously we are defined by our experiences, but lately I have noticed that instead of being enlarged by mine, I am becoming more narrow-minded.  This could be a refining of predilections or the cynicism of middle age, but I fear it may be the beginning of cultural bias.   It is also a good reminder that when you are abroad, you are a cultural ambassador for your country.  You may afford the only firsthand experience a foreigner has of your country, and you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression.  The stereotype of an American speaks volumes.

The idea of judging came up in a classroom discussion.  We are taught that it is wrong to judge, but it is also how we make sense of new information.  As we take in new ideas/experiences, we compare them to what we already know in order to understand the unknown.  As we classify new information into whatever hierarchies our minds work with, we form opinions.  I think the trick is to keep the opinions flexible and be ready to admit when you’re wrong.

Thanks to a student lending me Joanna Al-Askari Hussain’s biography, I realized that I have been wrong about my students’ defiance to learning.  I could never figure out why they were fairly undisciplined about school work.  At first I thought it was because of wasta (nepotism based on family name, especially significant in tribal cultures).   (My students are the offspring of Kurdistan’s elite).  Most of the students don’t need their high school diplomas or even university degrees for their future careers.   I compared my Kurdish students’ tenacity to that of my Ukrainian students, who were the children of that country’s oligarchs.  My Ukrainian students of the same age were much more motivated to learn.  Then I reminded myself that there isn’t a cultural legacy of education here:  the country was largely at war for the last 50 years until the relative stability that came in 2007.  Most people did not have the luxury of going to school while they were trying to survive.  I cognitively knew that, but Ms. Al-Askari Hussain’s book viscerally reminded me of the Kurdish struggle for survival while much of the world turned a blind eye to Saddam’s plan for Kurdish genocide.  Now I understand where that defiance comes from and I admire it.  A person’s approach to learning stems from his culture.  Americans have that do-it-yourself-cowboy spirit that spurs innovation or leads a nation into unjustified war.  It stems from our rebellious tea party inception.  Kurdish defiance stems from  a desire to self-determine and prosper, which is why they are still here to teach us all a lesson or two.

This Land is Your Land; This Land is My Land.

High atop the Hill of Martyrs, young Kurdish men are buried up to their necks, round haloes outlined by the dying sun.  Villagers stand transfixed as Iraqi tanks pulverize heads pushed up from the ground.  Afterwards, proud Iraqi generals invite family members to view their accomplishments. They serve bloody kebabs and succulent dates as refreshments.

Students are disappeared from university classes into toilet pit prisons dug into black earth.  Metal lids roast them during daylight, intensifying their putrid smell.   No one gets a toothbrush.  Countless shiny circles dot the carrion fields.

The Lion of the Mountain gathers his hidden Peshmerga fighters from the hillside.  Ambush attacks push the Arab invaders back into the south where they reboot, reload, and recharge threefold.  Villages burn.

Chemical Ali escorts Snow White to Halabja.  There is more than enough poisonous apple gas to go around.  Old women curl dead around melted babies.  A whole city frozen in Edvard Munch imitation.  People die laughing.

The Mukhabarat round up men, women and children.  Off to the Red Security Prison they go.  They can check out at any time, but they can never leave.  The RSP offers something for everyone.  Men hang during whippings then lie down to have the bottoms of their feet pounded.  Women stand during beatings then lie down to have their wombs pounded.  Children sit and wait while their ages are faked then lie down now old enough to be executed. 

It is 1995; it is the time of Cain and Abel.  Kurd fights against Kurd.  Saddam fattens his belly.  Time runs away.  The cast of characters change but tell the same story.  And we sit amidst our bombed out lives, looking for survival in the rubble.

ROAR

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Today was a lesson in DIY philanthropy.  Coincidentally, Amy Goodman has a link on Friday’s Democracy Now about what happens when novices become ngos.  Not that I don’t think the everyday person can and should get involved in his community, but there are lessons to be learned.

There is a growing Syrian refugee population in Erbil.  Unfortunately, they get little international/national attention.  All the international focus is on the Domiz refugee camp.  Like minded individuals have banded together to bring food aid to these displaced families that are living in half built structures lacking windows and doors in the cold snowy weather.  Children run around in flip flops or even barefoot.  We had two trucks full of supplies to deliver.  When we got to the first location, the trucks were stormed by men, women and children desperate to get something, anything.  We could have been more organized:  prepackaging bags of essentials or dividing up rations.  Instead, we tried to get people to form a line (I know, really?) which failed miserably.  As a result, we were stampeded.  People were pushing and shoving to get anything from the truck.  People tried to pry the gloves off my hands or the scarf from my neck.  We couldn’t even get back into the car to drive to the next location.  Instead, we hung on to the back of the 4 by 4 hoping to outrun the bands of children following the truck like some present day Pied Piper (there were families in different locations in the camp we were to deliver to) when the driver seemingly panicked, accelerated, and hit a bump.  Of course I flew off the back of the truck and skidded along the ground, my dollar sunglasses from Thailand and hand-me-down camera faring better than my hands, elbow, knees, pelvis, and spirit.

What kind of desperation drives people to storm an aid truck like that?  I would guess intense.  If my tiny children only had sandals or no shoes at all, were living in cold houses with minimal food and water, I would be driven to extremities as well.  I am begging the Kurdish government, with all its oil, natural gas, uranium, gold, and silver wealth to do something for these displaced people.  There is money here.  There is good will.  Let’s translate it into meaningful action and not some accolade that look good in someone’s bio.

Something else I want translated into meaningful action is a re-education of men in terms of women, their place in society, and their proprietary rights to their own bodies.  The latest gang rape in India has really hit home.  Not only was the victim gang raped by five men and mutilated with a metal bar, but she was further denigrated by the prosecuting attorney when he said he had never heard of a “respected lady” being raped in India.  The prosecution blamed the attack on the victim and her companion saying an unmarried pair should not have been out on the street at night. They had been on their way home after going to the cinema.   Everyday life necessitates females being out on the street after sundown to return from work, attend school, shop for food for their families, and participate in sports or civic life.  Women are not to be kept behind closed doors no matter how much certain segments of society wish it so.

Political activist and playwright Eve Ensler has called for a re-education of men by men if violence towards women is to stop.  But what happens when the men in charge are as ignorant as the prosecuting attorney in the India case?  What happens when someone like the US congressman who said a rape victim can will her body into pregnancy gets to make the rules?  In my part of the world, the injustice is two-fold.  I am guilty of being female, but double guilty of being Western.  If a guard harasses me, I am accused of being drunk.  If I report unlawful entry into my apartment, I deserve it because I allow ‘strange men’ into my abode.  If I ask a driver to drop me off at a non-designated location, then I am inviting him for sex because nothing is for free here if you are Western.  The Peace Corps not only provides cultural sensitivity training for foreign nationals entering host countries, but it also trains host nationals on the cultural dictates of incoming foreigners.  That’s a start.  Another giant step forward would be to tear down the curtain of haram to justify why a local man can grab me, a Western woman, between my legs in the early evening in a public place.  Women are people, not blow up dolls.  We deserve respect and liberty as men have.

Progress Report

I was shopping at the hypermarket inside the Majidi Mall, which was outfitted in holiday splendor.  Christmas ornaments, wrapping paper, and artificial trees belie the religion of the region.  As I was looking for travel size bottles of shampoo (they don’t exist here yet), my attention was drawn to four late middle aged men shopping together. They were in the condom aisle, looking at the different varieties, picking up a single box, sizing up its individual attributes, discussing each brand’s individual merits, putting down the box, picking up the next,  and repeat.  In my part of the world, late middle aged men don’t go condom shopping in groups, nor do they discuss the would-be purchased condoms with their friends in public.  Was it a sign of progress?  I felt something akin to nostalgia as I watched them.  Just 4-5 years ago there weren’t even paved roads or highways in Erbil.  The nostalgia extended to the middle aged men marveling at the huge spinning cylinder set up to hold raffle tickets just past the check out aisles that stretched twenty minutes long.

Progress has hit nightlife in Erbil.  There are restaurant lounges, bar lounges with house music nights, a new soul night with bottle service in the works, sports bar wannabes, and a pseudo posh drinks lounge above a functional go cart track.  Walking into a particular popular nightspot is like breaking open a fortune cookie and getting self-help platitudes from a random stranger.  One week I was told that I hang out with bad people; the next I was told that I have a heart full of love, but I haven’t found the right person to give it to.  Observing the frenzied drinking and desperate flirting around me, I wasn’t sure there was anyone who’d want it.

Progress marches forward on the macro level as well.  It is not just oil that draws investors.  Some say Kurdistan’s natural gas deposits are more lucrative than its oil reserves.  There’s a geopolitical punch too.  If a pipeline were constructed in Kurdistan (a country that loves the United States because it killed Saddam) and connected to Turkey to serve Western Europe, it could cut Russia out, thereby reducing Russia’s regional influence.  Rumor has it there are also uranium, gold and silver deposits hiding in these verdant hills.  Canadian teams are already exploring.  Of course, the Turks, who wield their own amount of regional hegemony, would probably not take kindly to a politically rising, economically vibrant Kurdistan.

As long as the money flows, there is one sector that won’t, unfortunately, progress forward.  Education is lacking here as family name and tribal affiliation trump a diploma in all aspects, and most students know that.  There isn’t a premium placed on critical skills or applied knowledge because there isn’t a cultural tradition of education as the country has been at war for most of the last thirty odd years. Instead, the function of a diploma is much like that of a designer handbag:  status.  As long as the country prospers, fundamental education reform won’t come to the forefront of policy agenda any time soon.