There’s been much talk of late re: the partitioning of Iraq, into three ethnic zones. Question is: How difficult would this be, and how humanely could it be done?
Although the hypothesized partitioning would be done along ethnic lines, these regions are intermixed with ethnic groups, thus suggesting the need for forced removal from home cities and the surrounding countryside. On the logistics front, the expulsion and relocation of millions would entail massive dislocation, protest and civil unrest. Who would ensure remuneration for lost property, fields, etc.?
Discuss.
(I apologize for the brevity; am on way to airport.)
Probably the same people who provided remuneration in the ethnic partitions of Yugoslavia and India, and to some extent Palestine: Each other. Surviving refugees tended to take over properties abandoned by refugees who’d gone the other way, or been killed.
The separation of Kurdistan looks like it might be fairly clean - the Arabs who had been sent into the area by Saddam haven’t been there for long and aren’t in a good position to resist expulsion, and there aren’t that many Kurds elsewhere in Iraq to flow in. They might see a serious influx from the Kurdish areas of Iran and Turkey.
The Shiite area in southern Iraq also looks pretty homogeneous and geographically fairly well-defined. Baghdad and the surrounding mixed area is going to get much nastier, though, especially without a plausible “Sunni homeland” on the map. Partition is actually provided for in the constitution Bush loves to trumpet, as well as practically foreordained by human nature in a lawless society, so it’s pretty much a done deal. It would take a complete about-face by Bush to let the UN blue helmets in to at least hold down the bloodshed in the process, sadly.
I think the Shi`as would probably be reasonably okay with it if they got a hefty chunk in the south, including oil regions. I think the Kurds would definitely welcome it—a separate Kurdish state is what they’re ultimately after anyway—if they could annex the now-disputed Kirkuk oil region.
I think the Sunnis, stuck with the leftovers with no significant oil resources, would kick like mules. And since they have a lot of the most experienced fighters (ex-Ba’athist military), a lot of the military equipment, and connections to foreign jihad funders, I think their resistance would be a significant obstacle.
Mind you, I think it would probably be relatively easy for a nominally governing Iraqi body to draw lines on a map and declare the country partitioned. But then you’d get (as they are in fact already getting) the forced relocations and local/regional violence that the OP worried about.
At present, I don’t see how nominally partitioning Iraq would do more for its actual stability than keeping it a nominally unified state. The partitioning would have to involve some way of genuinely pacifying and rebuilding the country, and that’s the part we haven’t figured out yet.
Do you see any way of pacifying and rebuilding the country *without * first partitioning it? That looks to me like the necessary first step, just as it was in India and Yugoslavia, even though it means 3 countries, not 1.
Only if you assume that the northern oilfields will be divied up peacefully, which is a ludicrous assumption to make. If some sort of partition occurs (not yet a foregone conclusion - entirely possible for it to be settled more like Lebanon I think, not that the prospect of going through Lebanon’s recent history should thrill any Iraqis) I don’t see any way that it won’t be an exceptionally bloody process. A “clean” partition is a pipedream.
I am not an expert on this and have little add save on this point:
About a Quarter of Iraqi Kurds live in Baghdad . So it will lead to substantail disruption to them.
I know this becuase there was a General who was against partition said (I think it was NPR):
You know the the Largest Sunni City in Iraq is? Baghdad
You know the the Largest Shite in Iraq is? Baghdad
You know the the Largest Kurdish City in Iraq is? Baghdad
(Kirkuk has a poplulation of about 700K not all of them Kurds)
We are not able to understand Iraq from here.Read the blogs A Family In Baghdad And Baghdad Burning.They talk of Sunnus and Shiites intermarrying with ease.There is no simple demarcation. It sounds like a simple solution but is not.
Splitting up Iraq along such lines would be congruous to splitting up the US along similar lines. It’s all interwoven and such. There’s too much diversity in them there countries.
Besides, how would we figure out who gets what property? Say we split iraq into equal thirds (let’s assume for a second that it’s physically feasible/possible). Those thirds didn’t all build up equally. Some group is going to get a region that’s mostly desert and mountain and some other group is going to get a few fun cities, and some are going to get a bunch of the oil fields.
It’d be nice to simply split it up, but it can’t and won’t happen. First of all, it’s not possible, second, there’s money at stake. Gobs of it.
Perhaps a silly question, but who exactly would be driving the partitioning of Iraq? Who (besides the Kurds) WANTS to formally partition Iraq along sectarian/religious/ethnic lines? Assuming for a moment that the majority of Iraqi’s would NOT be in favor of the disintigration of Iraq, is the thinking that the US would partition Iraq by fiat? Would the UN be the partitioning agent ( :dubious: )?? Europe ( :dubious: !!)?
My impression (which may be flawed) is that relatively few Iraqi’s want a formal partitioning (i.e. into separate autonomous statelets). There MAY be more support for a federalization with semi-autonomous regions loosely associated with a small federal government (but still sharing the oil wealth between regions)…but even THAT isn’t all that popular unless I’m mistaken.
Assuming for a moment that my recollection is correct, who would be doing the partitioning is a key question to the ‘logistics’ of slicing and dicing Iraq…because those ‘logistics’ would probably take significantly more military than the US has been willing or able to commit there thus far.
Why would partitioning necessarily involve forced relocation of anyone? If a Sunni family wants to remain in the predominantly-Shiite partition, that’s their choice. If they want to move to the Sunni region, that’s their choice, too. Heck, if they wanted to move to the Kurdish region, that shouldn’t even be a problem. But if the majority in each region were of a particular ethnic group, then they could still govern themselves democratically.
At most, the US or UN could provide logistic and perhaps financial support to facilitate anyone who wants to move (which would be a lot cheaper than trying to force anyone to move who doesn’t want to), but why force the issue?
Who said any outside power would *force * relocation? That has never happened before, AFAIK. The only “force” in India or Yugoslavia was fear.
It all depends on how safe a particular family feels, when they find themselves in a minority in the region they consider home or at least live in, as well as how strong their allegiances are to their own group. Many Muslims left India proper for the new Pakistan out of fear of reprisals and repression if they had stayed, and many out of the desire to build a Muslim country - the same situation applied to Hindus in Pakistan. What would a Sunni family living as a minority, in an area rapidly becoming a Shiite theocracy, among people who had been oppressed by Sunnis for years, perhaps without close family ties in the area, but with a safe Sunni-controlled area down the road, do? Or how about a Kurdish family with no particular fears or close connections, but strong ethnic pride, with a new independent Kurdistan looking for people to help build it?
Yes, certainly there has been a long history of intermarriage and close ties between the different groups in cities where they live side by side. That was true in Bosnia, too - but it didn’t prevent Croats from shooting and pillaging the homes of the Serbs who’d lived next door for years, once the central government became powerless. But the place did divide along ethnic lines, with massive internal relocations, none of them forced by any outside power, but only with UN forces providing some protection for the many who chose to do so.
Nobody ever said partition would be clean or painless. Those are relative terms. It’s simply the most humane, and the most likely to succeed, of the realistic alternatives, and again, given that the new constitution actually provides for it, it’s by far the most likely outcome, ISTM. All we can do is advocate, and work for, it to happen as much by negotiation and as little by bloodshed as possible.
The same thing that forced black families from moving into predominantly white suburbs in the 50s, 60s, and maybe even the 70s: the promise of violence.
If relocation doesn’t happen, then what sort of change actually occurs? Isn’t splitting these factions away from each other the point?
Very few people would call the partitioning of India a success. The estimates for people who died in the riots and confusion surrounding the migration are in the millions. Now they are left with an assortment of seperatist movements, several wars, and the tensest nuclear standoff in the world.
Frankly I think the idea that every ethnicity has the sacred right to a homeland is what got us in to half the messes we are in in the first place. Yes, there was a time when we were all soverign with our own land and our own kings. That was a time when the earth had 1/10th the population it has now and there were no cities or infrastructure to fight about.
Now, there is no way to divide the earth according to ethnicities. It’s not unusual for a sinlge country to have 300 groups that each consider themselves a homeland deserving ethnicity. When colonialists created these states, they really should have paid more attention. But the damage is done. To play shifting borders now is only going to lead to war. Instead of dividing the earth, we should seek governments that protect and give freedom and equality to their various minorities.
That term too is relative. What were the alternatives? A broader civil war, leading to a similar partition, but in the meanwhile *without * defined borders for refugees to head to, and probably even more deaths? Jinnah didn’t seem likely to be appeased by anything less than an independent Pakistan, and his followers expectations for one once he’d started demagoguizing the vision may have quickly made it impossible for him to accept anything less anyway.
I’m not so sure that’s the fundamental driver of attitudes, but rather that it’s the lack of a reliable, respected central government that creates fear makes people look to other sources of security. Ethnicity is just the most obvious, most reliable thing to cling to as well as the most obvious, reliable source of fear in the first place. The creation of a homeland based on ethnicity is the most attractive way of eliminating fears and providing security.
We on the outside tend to categorize in broad terms. The Shiite-Sunni-Kurd divide is simple and makes good headlines, but it’s not adequate if one wants to understand the complexity of the situation.
Kurdistan’s fate is tied with Turkey in the sense that, given a US withdrawal, tanks will roll in from the north if the Kurds declare independence. The Turkish government has fought Kurdish separatists for decades, including countless military operations inside what is now known as Kurdistan. (recent developments)
As for the Potsdam Conference, I don’t see any parallels either, I simply point out that outside powers has done this before - as opposed to never before.
For a useful parallel, look at what happened immediately after Israel gained it’s independence. Turkey and the Kurd’s other neighbors as just as hostile to a Kurdish homeland as Israel’s neighbors were to a Jewish homeland.
