Why The Kurds Have Reason to Be Wary of Lakhdar Brahimi

KurdishMedia.com ^ | 02 May 2004 | Sabah A. Salih

[chava]

Why the Kurds have reason to be wary of Lakhdar Brahimi

02 May 2004

KurdishMedia.com - By Dr Sabah A. Salih

A critic of Arab patriotic bluster he is not. A man without ideological blinkers he is not. A universalist questioning racial privilege and the limits of nationalism he is not. On the contrary, Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi is a voice of Arab particularity.

It is a voice that sees the Arab nation as a perennial victim of western imperialism and Zionism, a voice that vehemently opposed the American intervention in Iraq, a voice that, rather speaking out against Saddam’s authoritarian rule, threw its support squarely behind it.

It is a voice that has not been very welcoming to the limited recognition the Kurdish narrative has finally received. It is a voice that looks at Kurdish nationalism on the whole with withering scorn. To my knowledge, Mr. Brahimi has yet to utter the word Kurdistan. He has yet to visit the museum of genocide at Halabja. And he has yet to show that he is capable of feeling his way imaginatively into the Kurdish experience under an Arab tyranny.

Mr. Brahimi obviously has no time for the Kurds, even when the subject is Iraq. Last week, during a stopover in Paris, Mr. Barahimi made it sound like he was on a mission, not to help bring about a transitional government in Iraq, but to speak out in support of the Palestinians. Iraq was completely eliminated from his vocabulary. And the idioms he used weren’t all that different from the ones that have come to define Arab and Islamic militancy, which has been in a permanent state of opposition to Kurdish nationalism.

More important, Mr. Brahimi has yet to apologize to all those who have suffered under Saddam’s tyranny for his unabashed support of the regime, first, as a former Algerian foreign minister and, second, as a high-ranking Arab League official for several years.

He has used instead his visits to Baghdad to shore up support for Ba’thists, calling for their unconditional return to positions of power and influence and castigating those in the Iraqi Governing Council opposing the move. What is more, he has added his voice to the growing chorus of Saddam helpers in calling the council illegitimate-which is really another of way of bestowing legitimacy upon Saddam’s dictatorship.

Words like legitimate and illegitimate without some definable context are well suited for those with a flimsy grasp of the factual world; they are also the demagogue’s favorite hiding place, those always at the ready to pounce upon such defenseless terms in order to claim the moral ground for themselves. In the absence of a well-established democratic tradition, doesn’t a leader’s legitimacy come mainly from putting his/her life on the line fighting tyranny, something Massoud Barzani, Talabani, and Mahmood Othman have been doing in various degrees for as long us most Kurds remember? To question their legitimacy is to be no friend of Kurdish nationalism. I am sure others on the council are every bit as legitimate from the point of view of their people and historical situations-and that is all that matters.

Yes, Mr. Brahimi represents the United Nations in an official capacity, but he has conceded his moral authority to the collective passion of Arab political culture, in whose idioms the Kurd is still an occupied voice. He has been conspicuously silent about the atrocities the Syrian tyranny has unleashed on defenseless Kurds. His silence on this and willingness in recent interviews to shift the focus from the victims of Arab tyrannies in Iraq and Syria to the Palestinian question, even when the occasion has nothing to do directly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is clearly an effort to legitimize one suffering and delegitimize all the others.

A colleague of mine, at an academic conference in Arizona, recently ran into a university lecturer from Egypt. He invited the Egyptian for a drink and told him he was glad to have a friend (me) from Kurdistan. The Egyptian instantly lost his affability. My friend, not realizing that he had pushed the wrong button, preceded to draw a map, like the one I have in my office, on his napkin. The Egyptian became hysterical. "There is no Kurdistan. Kurdistan does not exist. Kurdistan is nothing," he shouted as his hand darted towards the napkin, nearly knocking off the drinks. As my friend put it, "He wasn’t just satisfied with wounding the map; he went for the whole kill. He tore up the napkin into a million pieces." For him, roundly defeating Kurdistan was not good enough; Kurdistan had to be canceled, even if it was on a napkin.

Mr. Brahimi, being some sort of a diplomat, may not to be that extreme, but the national paranoia that the Egyptian was able to tap into on impulse also provides a fair amount of Mr. Brahimi’s own thinking about the Middle East. The Kurds-as well as others in the anti-Saddam camp-have reason to be wary of his intentions. President Bush, in his eagerness to be seen as a man of his words in this election year, may score some points with the American people by his embrace of Mr. Brahimi. But in that events will soon prove him to be misguided.

[meenie]

A supporter of Saddaam is just what we need in charge over there.