Hatem Abdul Wahid Saleh Translation: Salah Ali
Mexico City Norway
Preface
Before setting on explaining the details of what has been going on in Iraq since the American occupation, it is significant to make clear the meaning of a minority in Iraqi context as well as according to the generally perceived concept of a minority. It is significant to stress that the term minority did not exist in Iraq until recently. Also, the concept did not materialize outside the Kurds’ sporadic uprisings in Monarchic and Republican Iraq. Conceptualizing the concept of minorities and ideologising it only began after the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Nowadays the minority issue is one of the thorniest issues in Iraq since it accounts for most of the violence and unrest in that country.
ve term, rather it’s semiotic and when such expressions have these two aspects, they become political words that are usually employed in conflicts over power. Nationality has become a basic component for the foundation and legitimization of any modern state, thus, national claims have increasingly become an effective tool for state foundation and if a group of people were capable of convincing others of their claim that they are a nation, this group would seek their national rights and resort to these rights as a weapon against their enemy. For instance, Arab countries were capable in the 1970s of lobbying UNO General Assembly into issuing of a resolution (abrogated in 1991) which labeled Zionism as a racist movement. The Arabs objective was clearly to deprive Israel from being considered a nation for racism contrasted with nationalism is negative contrasted to positive and describing Israel as Zionist is an example of using words as weapon. The problem in this inquiry is that religion can be viewed as a foundation for the national identity but it is also a common fact that religious foundations may complicate and hinder the merging of religious minorities into the national identity of any nation. Thus, life of Muslims in Israel is harder than it’s for Jews and the same can be said of Hindustanis in Pakistan.
Nationality, nevertheless, was not as powerful as it is in modern time, one would wonder why?? It is a common place fact that people can both shift and multiply their belonging beyond as well as within the State. These movements towards multiplication and/or shift of belonging depend on change affected on traditional ways of life. The idea of nationality thus occurs to those most dispersed or displaced, those who live on the margin of a given culture, or those who are incapable of defining their identity precisely. Those people usually suffer being ousted from a traditional pattern. They start asking questions and nationality claims emerge within the educated or religious groups among them. This interprets the fact that most pioneers who called for Arab Nationalism were Christian Arabs”.
Ethnic and religious minorities which constitutes important components of the demographic and age-long texture of Iraq and which participated in the formation of Iraqi history and culture are as follows according to demographic concentrations:
1. Turcoman: the number of this minority according to unofficial statistics ranges between one million and one million and a half, 75% of whom embrace Sunni doctrine. They live in all Iraqi cities but the majority of Turcoman live in the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
2. The Christians: The number of Iraqi Christians approaches one million who live in all Iraqi cities. However the largest concentrations of Christians live in villages in Nineveh plains in the north near the Kurdish regions. The majority of Iraqi Christians are Chaldeans, Syrian Catholics and Assyrians.
3. The Yezidis: The Yezidis number is 250 thousand living in the villages of Nineveh and mostly in the north-west region near Sinjar and the Syrian borders.
4. Mandeans: The number of Mandeans is 60 thousand in Iraq out of a total of 100 Sabians living in both Iraq and Iran. They concentrate mainly in the south-east in the marshes region in Omara, Basra, Nasiriyyah since their rituals are strongly related to water and the existence of water in profusion.
To know who is threatening the lives of these millions of Iraqi citizens, we have to draw a clear dividing line between the State’s authorities and the authorities of militias which owe their allegiance to the political factions that occupy the higher strata of the institutional and governmental pyramid in Baghdad: The supreme council of the Islamic revolution led by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim which is patronized by Iran since it was Iran that has nursed and supported this faction in its land since the 1970s, has its own militia of Badr troops whose offices are spread over all Iraqi cities and villages. This militia has been armed and trained in Iranian camps and whose leaders are Iranians besides Iraqis who were POW during the Iran-Iraq war. The Iranian intelligence has brainwashed those Iraq POW and turned them into skillful killers who profoundly hate everything that is Iraqi in character. This militia is logistically supported by Iran on whose kill list there are names of several Iraqi pilots, physicists, mathematicians and scholars. These kill lists are usually handed out to commanders in this militia and are updated with the highest intelligence know-how from time to time. The number of Iraqi pilots who took part in the Iran-Iraq war has reduced almost to zero after the killing of a large number of them and forcing the others to escape. Ironically, the political faction representing this militia is the majority in the Iraqi parliament which places them beyond prosecution. Moreover, members of this militia have assumed control of main media offices in Iraq and abroad. They work in the cultural attaché departments in Iraqi Embassies to enable this militia to follow up and watch the activities of their opponents abroad.
Pertinent to the above is the fact that elements of Badr militia form the backbone of the strike force and intelligence configurations belonging to Iraqi Ministry of Internal Affairs. Even those ministries, which following the sectarian division of top seats, became the share of the Sunni factions harbour elements of Badr militias, a case in point is the office of the spokesman of the Ministry of Defense which is presumably given to a Sunni Arab officer while it is now granted to an ex-officer expelled during Saddam’s reign, namely: Muhammad al-Askari who works under the thumb of Badr militia and was promoted to a field marshal rank in only 5 years of the American occupation.
Most significantly is the fact that the doctrine of the Supreme council of Islamic revolution is brash radicalism which actively antagonizes any gesture of religious tolerance and openness to the other. It silences and kills any voice that opposes or runs counter to their religious illusions which hurt the movement of life. This Council spares no time or effort in revenging of any Iraqi who happens to object to their orientations. The mass internal sectarian immigration and ethnic cleansing in Iraqi cities and living quarters is a self-evident testimony to the practices of this obscuritan dogma which views all Iraqis an infidel nation leaving them either one of three alternatives: to adopt the Iranian dogma of Twelfism, immigrate or get killed.
As for the two Kurdish parties that are led by Jalal Talabani which the USA placed as a President of the Republic of Iraq and Mas’ud Barazani the President of Kurdistan region, they have under their command Beshmerga militia and an Intelligence apparatus known as “Assayesh” . Both these configurations are armed by the weapons of Iraq’s Army which Bremer sent home. Other sources of weapons include American and Western weapons which the Kurds bought with the money of Iraq’s oil which they sell out without consent of the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad.
Elements of beshmerga have occupied the front seats of diplomatic offices as they monopolized off the office of ambassador in most Iraq’s embassies to the world. One may not wonder of that for the minister of Foreign affairs of Iraq which had been one of the founders of the Arab League is Kurd from Talabani Party. Any inventory of the name of Iraqo ambassadors in the world will reveal that the beshmerga militia controls the Ministry of foreign Affairs as they share the Ministry of Internal affairs with the Badr troops which belong to the Supreme Council of the Islamic revolution in Iraq that is molded after the Iranian pattern in doctrine and objectives. The Kurds also grasped the office of the Minister of Defense, besides the office of the President of the Republic. This is in flagrant contradiction with the real practices of the Kurds on the ground. Reading in the Kurdish constitution issued by the American-founded Kurdish parliament, we will see that most of its provisions are based on the displacement of other ethnic minorities which share the Kurds the geographic cradle in northern Iraq. Let’s take article 2 of this constitution, it goes as follows:
“First. Iraqi Kurdistan is made of Duhok Governorate in its current administrative units besides the governorates of Kirkuk, Sulaimaniyah, Erbil and the districts of Aqra, Shaikhan, Sinjar, Talafar, Telkeef, Qaraqosh, and the sub-districts of Zummar, Aski Kalak, in Nineveh governorate as well as the districts of Khaniqeen and Mendeli in Diyala governorate, the districts of Badra and the sub-district of Jassan in their administrative borders prior to 1968”. The article also talks about the prospective administrative borders of Kurdistan which even stretch beyond this definition. This article entails more of political ridicule than of federal thought or co-existence on equitable terms whether in past, present federations or the federations that are to come!
These borders that extends from Duhok through Telafar, Ba’shiqa, and Badra, etc. is a “political leanness” and a “diplomatic joke” which the politicians of the colonial West has used to and which they transferred by way of contagion to the Kurds still remind us of Churchill’s statements on India, de Gaulle’s on French Somalia and Bush on American Iraq. What has come out is a completely different image: India has not become British, Somalia hasn’t kneeled before Tour Eiffel and Iraq hasn’t turned into a State of the US. On the contrary, these nations are fighting those superpowers which tried to swallow them up and colonize them.
One may also wonder what are the legal, demographic and historical which prove that these purely Arab, Turcoman, Jarjar, Yezidis, Shabak and Cheldo-Assyrian are Kurdish? Where from did the Kurd chieftains extracted information on the demography and ethnic belonging of these regions? Was a census on the demography and population of these regions made whatsoever to conclude that the majority of these people are Kurds? Are there any archaeological-sociological features that testify to the Kurds’ claims that those populations of these areas are Kurds, what are the proofs?!
If we suppose that there are historical criteria to clarify these issues, the Turkomen and the Arabs are older than the kurds in the majority of these places. But if we go to the Kurds’ allegations about population, the inhabitants of these regions become according to this statistics Kurds. However, the official statistics prior to the American occupation gives us the following figures of the Kurd population in percentage:
Shaykhan: 5%, Sinjar: 5%, Telafar: 15%, Telkeif:5%, Qaraqosh:30% (the percentage mentions the Shabak minority which was included as non-Arab), Zummar:30%(the percentage describes the Jarjar who consider themselves Arab in origin and appearance), Bashiqa:5%, Aski Kalak: 5% (the name itself is Turkish Aski means old), Khaniqeen: 50%, Mandeli: 20%, Badra:3%, and Jassan 3%).
The third article of the Kurdish constitution states the following: “ It is not allowed to find another new region inside the borders of Kurdistan region”. This is a racist logic that runs counter to the principles and provisions of the the UNO Charter, to the International Convention of Rights besides its flagrant disrespect of the UNO convention of the civil and Political Rights, the Convention of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and the right of self-determination. The article also contradicts the purport and the text of article 119 of the present Iraqi constitution which states that any governorate or more have the right to form a region depending on a request to be agreed upon.
The interspersion of of several ethnic and religious groups with those of the Kurds in the Iraqi mountaninous area. This rather geographic determinancy has brough on these ethnic groups unthought of and unprecedented calamities. Yezidis for example are considered Kurds linguistically. Still, they have been the subject of savagist oppression by the Kurds since they live in the mountainous terrain stretching from Mosul outskirt to Aqra, Zummar and Sinjar. This was because they held a different dogma and perfome different rituals. The Christians who live in Nineveh plains and the mountain feet surrounding Duhok, Al-Qosh, Al-Hamdaniyah and Bashiqa since the 2nd century A.D. have almost disappeared from their towns and villages after their peers have left other iraqi cities due to the incessant campaign launched against them by fanatics from both Shiite and Sunnite groups that came into existence in reaction and response to the American aggression. And despite the fact that those two groups have their representatives in the American backed Kurdish parliament, the reality is that these representatives are marginalized and have no impact whatever on the decisions made by the Kurds. In addition to the Yezidis and Christians, mention should be made to another minority that has received most inhuman treatment by the Kurds. These are the Iraqi Shabak who had actively participated in the building of Iraqi State and defended its sovereignty and independence. The number of Shabak according to government statistics in 1977 was 80 thousand and if we reconsider their number since then, it sure has multiplied. Shabak now live under various forms of fanatism maily by the Nationalist Kurds and Salafi obscuritanism. Shabak embrace the Shiite doctrine of Twelfism, live in Sunnite area and being non-Kurds ethnically, they were the target of both extremist: The brash nationalist Kurds and the Salafi Muslims. The latter attack Shabak because of differences in doctrines while the former attack them because they are not Kurds living in a region which the American-backed Kurds crave to swallow up.
The Turcomen who live in Kirkuk and see it the sacred shrine and homeland pose another case of ethnic cleansing at the hand of the Kurds in their historical homeland in whose heart stand Kirkuk. The Iraqi State’s documents clearly point out that the first governor of Kirkuk after the foundation of monarchic Iraq was a Turcoman who lived in Teseen (now a quarter in the city of Kirkuk), namely: Sulaiman Fattah. Jertrude Bell wrote in a letter to her father in 14 August 1921 the following message “Darling Father. We have had rather an uneventful week. The referendum is finished and we are only waiting for the last of the signed papers to come in from the provinces, after which Faisal will be proclaimed King without delay. With one exception he has been elected unanimously but in a great number of cases - more than half the country I should say - the people have added a ryder [sic] of their own, saying that they agree to his being king as long as he maintains friendly relations with the British Govt, or as long as he accepts {the} British protection. The additions are differently worded but they all come to the same thing. The one exception is Kirkuk. There, as you know, the town population is Turcoman and the village population Kurd. Neither want Arab rule and among the Turks there has been a good deal of Turkish, anti-British propaganda”. Documents also state that the last Iraqi house of Deputies had 14 deputies from Kirkuk 9 among them were Turkoman, 3 Kurds and 2 Arabs. Where then is the majority which the kurds claim?!
The ethnic map which the British charted for ethnic diversity in northern Iraq has made clear the living zones of Christians, Arabs and Turks. It defined the Turcoman zones as follows: Telafar, , villages around Mosul, and Erbil, Alton Kopri,Kirkuk, Kufri, Qaratepe, Khaniqeen, Qizlerbat, Mandeli, in other words what the Kurds claim in their constitution as belonging to them do not include but those cities that have no relation what ever to them in culture, history and existence on earth. If the Kurds have stolen taking advantage of American destruction of the Iraqi State, the civil records, the topographic documents and the proceedings of courts and other State’s coffers in all that it contains, and if they have set on founding an existence for them where anther culture and nation have for centuries lived and prospered, by the machineguns of Beshmerga, their objective which they spared no efforts to achieve will not materialize. This is because papers are not history and history cannot be stolen or maimed. What makes all observers yet wonder the most about the Kurds’ behaviour is their insolence that is based on ignorance of historical references. They belie historians, belie anthropologists, belie architecture, belie archaeology and belie neutral International documentation and research centre and go far as facing up any opposing remark against their oppressive project with words that do not show the Kurds as a nation that has any code of manners.
The number of the people who received government ration in the night of USA invasion according to the Iraqi Ministry of Commerce reached 834973 on the ration tickets. Today the number of the ration tickets that have been moved to Kirkuk is 500.000 people who are registered as Kurds coming from Erbil, Sulaimaniyah and Duhok in addition to Kurds who came from Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkey who speak Persians and do not know either Arabic or Turkish. To one who travels from Kirkuk to Alton Kopri it is a common novel sight to see assembleges where those new comers have been placed by Kurdish authorities. Revelations come from friends living in exile that the Iraqi Embassies headed by Kurd ambassadors have issued an additional passports to the immigrant Kurds placing in the field of the the city “Kirkuk” in order to make them ready for the referrundum on article 140 of the Iraqi constitution which provides for the Kurds to annex the city of Kirkuk to their region. If the leaders of Kurdish parties had expressed their repulsion and disgust of the Arabization policy of Kirkuk during the past regimes, why do they then refrain from the policy of Kurdification of the same city, given the fact that this sort of practice rests on the usurpation of the rights of the other in his geographic and cultural melieu?
The meaning of Federalism does not go beyond the redistribution of the State authorities and allocating them to the component parts provided that these parts or regions commit themslves to the interest of the State and the country as a whole in their application of Federalism. The stories of the Assyrians fleding the hell of Islamic fanatism to their bithplaces in Duhok and Zakho tell us of the primitive treatment of the Kurds who planted checkpoints in the whole region. They told of the Kurds preventing them from taking their luggage and property with them on plea that they had not been registered in these cities from a long time. Iraqis who escape the hell of terrorism to the north, are tantalized at checkponts around Mosul and are considered as temporary guests while they are in their country, they are forbidden from work and are lodged in tents outside the cities living on the assistance of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations. What kind of Federalism is this?!
The whimsical logic of Kurdish political leadership considers the Arabs in Kirkuk a minority despite their existence in the city for hundreds of years. The authorities went so far as abolishing the agricultural contracts the past State has signed with farmers, to deport the Arab inhabitants and pave the way for the application of article 140 that aims at the Kurdification of Kirkuk. The Kurdish authorities are feverishly using every possible ruse to obliterate, distort and shift everything towards their unjust objective of usurping this city. Recent evidence show that the Kurds have forced shops owners to strike out the Turkish and Arab names and put Kurds names on their shops. If an owner doesn’t comply, he is put in Kurdish prison. Local sources stress that more than 20000 Turkoman are in Kurdish prisons guarded by the occupation troops, the Beshmerga and the militias of governing parties in Baghdad. The kurds have confiscated lands belonging to Iraqi Tukoman to build houses for the Kurds on them. In this respect even the cemetaries were not spared from aggression, an example of that are Musala cemetary which the Kurds overturned into a housing assemblage for the Kurds, let alone the humulating and marginalising behaviour towards the Turkoman in their mother city on a daily rhythm by the Beshmerga.
on of these minorities and used instead the expression Masihi in an attempt to delete the historical and cultural depth of those people who once have been the masters of Mesopotamia and the whole Middle East. All these practices are a droplet in the sea of the subhuman practices of the Kurds against other ethnic and religious minorities who share the Kurds this geographic cradle, a cradle which had embraced the first seed of human creativity and the message bearer of tolerance, progress and innovation.
on and coerced their women on compulsory marriage to fanatic Muslims. The wave of violence increased after the Falluja massacre as the fanatics attacked these peaceful families, displaced their children and killed their young.
Racial, ethnic and religious oppression after 5 years of American occupation of Iraq has reached unprecedented degree which forced the Mandeans on immigration leaving their native lands. Pressure on minorities and all other groups who pursued a different creed, doctrine or belief from the official one has tremendously increased. Churches and mosques were destroyed, civilians belonging to minorities were assassinated, robbed, and oppressed to abandon their rituals, great numbers were forced to immigrate leaving their houses and property to the militias to usurp. A campaign of Islamization of the non-Muslims by force. Tributes were imposed on those who catered for families in Basra, Baghdad, Maysan, Nasiriyah, Falluja and Ramadi. Women were kidnapped while shopping; children were kidnapped on way to schools, students and teachers were kidnapped while on way to institutes and universities and were forced to pay ransom or die. The Christians and Muslim alike were threatened to wear Hijab or get raped and killed. The Mandeans were considered non Muslim and non-Christians and were therefore a target with a distinction for fanatic Muslims.
The bloody campaigns against the Mandeans were terrible. They were not reserved for killing and kidnapping but covered other aspects of their life. The Mandeans were forbidden from appointment in government offices by a secret decision made by the government, their women are forced to wear hijab and eyewitness report that there are cases where Mandeans girls were used as slaves and forced to practice prostitution. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim had before his assassination issued a fataw which legitimaized the slaying of Mandeans, forgiving by the same token the killers from any proscution. The Iraqi government which is backed by the USA forces seem careless of these tragedies or at its best incapable of controlling things after it has been made clear that the militias in control of southern Iraq are given free rein to go ahead with its sectarian cleansing agenda, removing and killing any opposition that runs counter to their rotten radical doctrine. Stranger still than the government wishful powerlessness, is the attitude of Iraqi religious circles for neither the Ayat of Shi’ah nor the Emirs of Sunnah have denounced these acts of savagery and primitivism, acts that maim the visage of Islam and destry the history of Iraq characterized with tolerance and forgiveness.
The crimes of murdering, kidnapping, raping and forcieful immigration imposed on the Mandeans or coercing them to change their religion are tantamount to purposeful genocide. The blasphamization of the Mandeans by the terrorists and Islamic fanatic militias both inside the authority and outside it is a plea to exterminate this ethnic and religious minority.
Finally, it may be pertinent to mention the Iraqi Jews who were until the night of the American invasion, living in prosperity and peace in Basra, Baghdad and Baqubah, and who were 81 in number only. They were all old aged persons taking care of the Jewish properties after they had immigrated to Israel, and despite the animosity between Baath regime and the Jewish state, they continued their life in peace and I was occasionally visiting the head of the Jewish minority Mr. Naji Elias Robin in his office in Al-Mustansir Street enjoying our chat in peace and security – a peace and security which have been destroyed in face of this violent bull which the American let loose to butt everywhere, everyone and in every direction.
الاسم: حاتم عبد الواحد 
