Pre-Occupied

December 2, 2008, 2:55 am

By Atheer Kakan AND Stephen Farrell

Atheer A. Kakan writes on the historical lesson from a century ago which left many among Iraq’s Shiite leadership majority determined to pass the recent security agreement with the Americans.

Five years ago, just after the fall of Saddam, I worked with the Shiite Islamist party Islamic Dawa.

As a person who comes from Sunni roots I was very curious about who those people really are, and was it true what the Baath Party’s negative propaganda had said about them for years.

I worked with them for more than a year on their official newspaper in Iraq. Most of them had lived in exile during Saddam’s era, and it was the first time that many of them had been able to return to Iraq for many years. But they were not yet in power.

We had many differences, discussions and arguments at that time. One of the most noticeable things about them, that I have never forgotten, was the influence of history on those who came back home after decades of marginalization, pursuit and execution.

Now that they were victorious and it was time for them to exercise the influence that they had been prevented from doing before, the one historical fact they kept in front of their eyes was that they would not let history repeat itself and let what happened after the revolution of 1920 against the British Empire happen again.

Then, their analysis was, that because the Shiites refused to deal, the British who negotiated with the Sunni minority and installed it in power, commencing nearly a century of Sunni dominance.

That historical ‘mistake’ of 1920 wasn’t just the obsession of Dawa. Many Shiites say that after this time they were marginalized and never treated fairly as a majority. Even now this historical fear still affects many of their decisions. They argue “we cannot neglect the political process, so that no one will ever turn around and take control again, after all the blood that we sacrificed.”

After a year I left and I carried with me all the memories about how the Shiites have suffered for centuries, and how history has influenced their positions and attitudes in the present time.

Iraqis adore history. You can hardly find an Iraqi who does not talk about the past in every conversation. Sometimes it prevents them from dealing with the present and planning for the future.

This what historians and sociologists say about Iraqis - they love history so much, to the level that they live in it.


Stephen Farrell writes:

I encountered the very phenomenon Atheer mentions on the streets of Basra in January 2004.

The most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, was chafing at decisions by President Bush’s proconsul L. Paul Bremer III, and called out more than 100,000 supporter onto the streets to demand a directly-elected parliament.

For hours the streets were packed with Shiite marchers, in numbers that could easily have overwhelmed the tiny number of British troops in their Land Rovers on the edge of the throng. There was no violence, not even the threat of it. But there were plentiful pointed references to historical violence against the British, just after the First World War.

From a mosque loudspeaker one of Ayatollah Sistani’s followers told the protesters that Basra and the southern provinces remained quiet “not because of weakness or the acceptance of the occupation” but because the people “are waiting to see if they will be able to get their rights in a peaceful way.”

All day Shiites on the march, including many of the black-garbed armed stewards who were there to ensure order, came up to me at the crossroads where I was standing and insisted on reciting the same mantra, almost word for word. It was to the effect of:

“We could easily kill you, as our grandfathers killed thousands of British a century ago. Make no mistake, we choose not to kill you, not because we are weak but because our leaders instruct us not to kill you. You are welcome today, and you are safe.”

I wrote it down the first few times, then stopped as it became too repetitive. I nodded, I smiled, I made sure my Irish passport was within easy reach.

Certainly in Basra and the south fragments of history are everywhere, even in the desert. Half an hour’s drive outside Basra, where the demonstration was taking place, I had just visited a deserted British-built monument to the 40,000 plus “Officers and Men of the Armies of the British Empire Who Fell in the Iraq Campaign in The Years 1914-1921 and Whose Graves are Not Known.”

Those armies of empire included regiments drawn from colonial Indian units, whose fallen British officers’ names were inscribed on the walls, but whose junior ranks were for the most part identified only as nameless tallies of “other Indian soldiers.”

One that stuck in my mind was the 124th Duchess of Connaught’s Own Baluchistan Infantry, dating back to before the British 1947 partition of India, when that remote mountainous region was part of pre-Independence colonial India.

Now the westernmost province of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, it is unlikely that Baluchistan will be sending soldiers to Iraq again any time soon. It being caught up in another - historic - conflict altogether closer to home.


Atheer Kakan is an Iraqi journalist with The New York Times in Baghdad. Stephen Farrell is Baghdad Correspondent.