NEWS

Questions about northern Iraq may be troublesome after war

By DAVID WILLIAMSON
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Among troubling questions the war with Iraq has raised is what will happen in the north following Saddam Hussein’s ouster, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian says. Right now, no one knows, but problems there could grow and involve fighting between Turks and Kurds. What the United States’ proper role should be also remains unclear.

Oilfields in the region are among the richest in the world.

"Mosul was the northernmost of the three Ottoman provinces that became Iraq following World War I and included the cities of Kirkuk, Takrit and Mosul," said Dr. Sarah D. Shields, associate professor of history at UNC and one of the nation’s leading experts on Iraq. "Much of the province is included in what the British and U.S. have called the ‘northern no fly zone.’ That region is now the second front."

Years ago, animosity did not always exist between Kurds and Turks and Arabs, Shields said. Before the end of World War I, they had common interests, chiefly strong economic ties.

"But the big relevance for today is the awkwardness between Turkey, the Kurds and the U.S.," she said. "The Turkish government hasn't really given up their claims to the Mosul region, and the Turks are very worried that the Kurds will attain some sort of autonomy in Iraq. Their fear is that that would re-ignite the demands of the Kurds within Turkey for their own autonomy, a situation comparable to the Basques seeking independence from Spain."

U.S. forces currently are working with and fighting alongside the Kurds on the northern front, Shields said.

"This makes the Turks nervous," she said. "Kurds promise that they will not tolerate a Turkish invasion. Turks promise they will not tolerate Kurds taking over northern Iraq."

At a conference on "The Making of Modern Iraq" at Columbia University in New York this week, Shields presented a paper about the history of Mosul before and after the League of Nations decided the area should be part of northern Iraq instead of remaining attached to Turkey.

"During the last century of Ottoman rule, Mosul was part of a broad region within which goods, people, ideas and currencies were exchanged," Shields wrote. "That broad region included cities and towns now part of Iran, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. That Mosul would become part of Iraq was not at all clear during the late Ottoman period."

More than any other region discussed during the conference, Mosul illustrated the massive transformation that accompanied the creation of the new nation-state system, she said. Earlier, many of today’s nations were not independent countries at all. The borders of the countries of the Middle East were created by Europeans after World War I.

While Mosul had benefited enormously from the regional trade made possible by the Ottoman Empire, when the empire disappeared after World War I, it was forced to change its economic base radically, eventually coming to rely on oil when it was discovered there in such massive quantities.

"When the League of Nations was called in to decide to which state Mosul should belong, its commission anticipated that group identities would be the central factor in Wilsonian self-determination," Shields said. "In the end, it was forced to confront its own inaccurate assumptions and assigned the area to Iraq for a very different collection of reasons."

The new border affected Mosul’s trade severely, transforming Mosul’s "merchants into smugglers, her products into contraband and her laborers into refugees," she said.

During the debate over which country would get the region, Turkey and Great Britain, which had a mandate to administer Iraq, argued over nearly everything from geography and history to census figures and prior promises to the Assyrian community.

"Perhaps a poster child for multi-culturalism, the area’s topography led it to an extremely diverse population," Shields said. "Jews and Yezidis shared the territory with Muslims and various Christians. Speakers of Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian could be heard in the markets."

The League of Nations, she said, assumed that one’s ethnic identify would determine one’s politics, but that was often not the case, she said.

"Being a Turk was well and good, but if a Mosuli opposed secularism, he refused to consider connection with Ataturk’s new regime (in Turkey)," the historian said. "Similarly, Arab nationalists often preferred Turkey to an Iraq controlled by a foreign army."

The new European ideas about borders and nations "insisted that the population of Mosul could have one and only one identity, that nation and state boundaries should coincide and that states must be mutually independent, she said.

"It is that set of assumptions that constituted Mosul as a problem," Shields said. "And once the problem was ‘resolved,’ it was that set of assumptions that destroyed Mosul’s economy and left it open to the new oil economy waiting in the wings."

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Note: Shields can be reached at (919) 260-4310.

Contact: David Williamson, (919) 962-8596