Peace activists dine in Sulimaniya, Iraq. HELO.
Journey | Daniel J Gerstle, Oct-Nov 2009
All names of Iraqi peace activists and workers have been changed for their security. When necessary, a character may be portrayed as a composite or noted as from a different but similar city. The names of donors, aid agencies, and local organizations have been obscured because the story is meant to be about the people doing this work and the daily challenges they faced rather than about the competing organizations. If you have any questions, contact the editors at HELO@Helo-Magazine.com.
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Pursuing peace on the local level in Iraq in 2008-9 was a daily battle. There was more to securing a country than winning a war.
Iraqi peace activists, reconciliation planners, and conflict mitigation teams debated, sometimes argued fiercely, about how best to deal with persisting tribal feuds, disputes over water systems and power sources, break downs in the rule of law, the growing power of gangs that recruited teens, and the other many tensions which could undermine political stability where it was beginning to take hold.
They were a force comprised of thousands of good-hearted, capable people who meant well, but it was never that simple conjuring peace in the shadows of armies.
The Peace Crowd…
When I first met Iraqi peace workers and activists at a US-funded conference in Sulimani, northern Iraq, the men were clapping to the beat, slapping shoulders, swinging napkins, laughing wildly, dancing in a line, and singing along with a guitarist on stage. They were in their thirties to fifties, Arab Shia and Sunni, Kurdish Sunni and Shabak, and Assyrian Christians; and they all knew the songs.
Hikmat, the soft-eyed singer backed by a keyboardist with a synthetic drumbeat, erupted into one of those wailing Tigris River bop!-bobo-bop! classics by Qasem Al Sultan which brought smiles to faces. Then he followed the tune with more Iraqi guitar sing-a-longs, saving the lachrymose ballads of Hussam Al Rassam for last.
[To feel the scene, check out Qasem Al Sultan himself, singing live at this couple’s wedding in nearby Erbil around the same time. Forgive the shaky camera work, in fact it adds a bit of realism. This is the Iraq you don’t see in the news.]
Aziz, the confident manager from Mosul; Bader, the nervous businessman from Baghdad; and Massoud, the cynical veteran from Sulimani, led the show, weaving their kick-line between dining room tables and columns.
There was also Ahmet, a college grad from Baghdad looking debonair at the head of one table, just smiling, and Khalil, the wise man of Diwaniyah, smoking and smoking and laughing and smoking some more.
The other foreign guests and I sat at one row of tables on the side pushing our forks around in our plates of rice and lamb. Without being able to imagine what Iraq south of Sulimani had been like, or would be like, without blast walls and flack-jackets, and not knowing the words to the song, we just watched the boisterous men with a sense of bewilderment.
Five years after the US-led invasion took down Saddam Hussein and the Baathist Party, violence still divided nearby Mosul and Kirkuk and peppered faraway Baghdad and Diyala with fear. What did the group have to be so happy about?
Many of the dancing and clapping men were old enough to have fought in one of the four wars their generation had faced—the long fight over the status of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and the current Iraq War. Many had lost relatives or had been traumatized. At least two of the men there that night had lost a leg in the fighting; a few more had experienced poison gas attacks. Others still may have languished in Baathist prisons, been tortured, or escaped a massacre. And yet many, if not all, of these men were able to enjoy a night together with former “enemies”, even if it was just a superficial gesture.
Although the men were the stronger presence, the former fighters, and maybe the votes required to settle an inter-tribal feud, the women were in many ways leaders in this movement.
Safiya, a passionate former medical worker from Baghdad, and Zeina, Ahmet’s assertive young wife, watched from a dinner table sipping drinks, lost in thought about the arduous time they were living in. The women beside them joined in the clapping, laughing and allowed the scene to draw them back in their minds to those little pockets of time when Iraqis simply avoided politics and religious differences and just lived.
Among the peace crowd were competitive theorists, dreamy idealists, hardnosed go-getters, foul-mouthed clerks, chain-smoking sheikhs, bored dandies, rebellious clergy, college punks, crude jokesters, nerdy digirati, party-throwers, swollen livers, suits and ties, hot-blooded sweethearts, and cynical veterans. Some were beautiful people, others just needed a job, and yet others seemed bent on sabotage. At offices, they got lost in their laptops or laughed at some story over tea and cigarettes in blast-walled courtyards. Others just complained or gossiped. On the road, they sang along with Iraqi and Lebanese singers on the radio. They rolled their eyes at the heavily-armed but threadbare Iraqi teenagers taking over checkpoint duties from thick-necked, sometimes paranoid American giants. And on the street they were quiet, avoided stares, got their supplies and ran home to the relative safety of their living room or local mosque or church.
There were reconstructionists rallying around the UN and progressive humanitarian agencies who believed the peace crowd best stay out the way of fighting groups and focus instead on rebuilding schools and creating jobs as a means of mitigating conflict, despite the fact that rebuilding schools and creating jobs relied exclusively on having security and freedom from sabotage.
There were the civil-militarists clustering around the Pentagon and Washington think tanks who argued that the peace crowd best work with and through the winning armies, riding along on patrols, offering aid out of humvees, and securing consent among the local sheikhs by rebuilding their markets. This they argued despite the fact that their efforts infuriated those who sided with the losing armies. The winner’s success at peace in one corner sometimes inspired new rounds of attacks from another.
There were the traditionalists, perhaps the most experienced group, relying largely on Arab Sunni and Iranian Shiite funders but also on Western independents, who believed that the local peace could only be won by healing the age-old tribal dispute resolution system. This was believed despite the fact that many of the elders had long considered the practice a façade forever damaged during the Baathist period.
And last there were the doves bolstered by the global left and many human rights organizations who believed, perhaps with more commitment than the others, that the peace crowd should avoid weapons and armies, to appear impartial, that they should call for a coalition withdrawal and focus their efforts on strengthening the softer, gentler margins of the community as a means of building the future long term peace.
The doves, not ironically, were scoffed at in Iraq largely by civil-militarists who argued that the dove’s prized goals relied almost exclusively on law-bound spaces which could not be secured without a powerful authority backed by a winning army.
Not all the doves were idealists, however. Many had been out there in the war, lost friends and witnessed bloodshed. They had seen how the reconstructionists were building things only to have them destroyed again, how the civil-militarists were winning the broad peace only to turn the losers even more extreme, and how the traditionalists were paralyzed in their quixotic quest to clean tribal councils of corrupt practices. The realist doves had largely given up on current peacemaking; their aims by the last years of the conflict were to protect civilians from crossfire and build relationships to prevent the next war.
Despite their colossal differences in strategy, the Iraqi peace crowd cliques and their many opinionated personalities were bound by one thing. They didn’t want to lose another family member or friend to violence.
Safiya, Zeina, Ahmet, Aziz, Bader, and Massoud were on the frontlines of the local level peace building effort in Iraq. I was there largely to learn best how to enhance their efforts through cooperation with US-based organizations as they focused on relationships with local nonprofits within the country. But I couldn’t help but ask each of them and their peers for greater detail about how the effort was going on a personal level.
Within a couple months we would learn many of the painful truths about why peace on the local level was so tragically difficult beyond the violence and the politics. There was bureaucracy, many opposing opinions on how “peace” projects should work, the fickleness of donors, the selfish aspirations, the banal realities, the bad breath, the short-termers versus the long-termers. Sometimes the obstacles were not dramatic but banal.
Over the next few months, members of that group I met that night would create innovative projects aiming to reduce tension in communities, but many would also lose their jobs when donor interest moved elsewhere. Others had relatives killed or displaced. A few of them emigrated to the US. More than a few had children or got married. Several were injured in blasts. One lost a son. And at least one was killed.
Working in the Shadow of Armies…
When I met Safiya in Baghdad, I was coming through the same cultural-deprivation gauntlet as so many other Westerners had. For security reasons, I got the whole escort out of Baghdad International, flack-jacket, armored car, six-muscle-bound men with rifles, to a blast-wall-surrounded barracks with nothing to do but walk in circles, throw rocks at things and eat the bizarre inventions of the Sri Lankan chefs trying to cook American style.
Getting out of the International Zone was a pain, and costly. Although driving around with white, buzz-cut men with guns attracted a great many stares from Iraqi men on the street, and likely could attract a bomb, the escorts were designed to prevent kidnappings, which not only ruin your life but would cost agencies and donors a lot of money.
Out of the International Zone, the convoy immediately got stuck in Baghdad traffic. Five Iraqi police checkpoints later and all I had seen were a few kabob restaurants, hotels, and palm tree-lined streets before entering the compound in the Karrada neighborhood where Safiya and her colleagues worked. With her help, I met as many of team as I could, found out where they were from and what they thought of the peace work.
Safiya invited me to the office kitchen for tea so that we could discuss how best to negotiate the many obstacles her team faced. She and her colleagues had no trouble conducting a nationwide effort in eighteen governorates, building relationships with local officials and communities despite the political tension. To many in the peace crowd, 2008 was a dramatic improvement over 2007 in terms of access.
Instead, Safiya was troubled by theoretical debates among the team, the Western management, and the donors. Every morning, she arrived to the office to hear many of the staff arguing for reconstruction rather than conflict resolution workshops.
Field teams like two rough-edged southern Iraqis I talked to were arriving to rural sites like Numaniyah, a mixed town near the Iranian border in Wassit, telling officials and tribal leaders that they would have a call for proposals from the community for projects mitigating conflict between groups.
“You want to fix Al-Kut or Numaniyah?” The residents would reply to them. “Fix the water system! Correct the power distribution! Create jobs!” But Safiya followed the program design and urged the two men instead to do conflict resolution workshops or reconcile two upset groups, as the donor and managers preferred.
“What?” The locals respond to the duo. “With a few thousand you’re going to ask us to get between the militias? No way. Fix the water system! That’s the least you can do.”
Often they set up a successful conflict mitigation training. Other times what resulted was a workshop in which locals spent the time discussing how to find money to fix the water system, rather than discussing how to reduce violence. Safiya, however, had tremendous faith in her team to find the right path.
Zeina and Ahmet, I was told, were two of the best researchers working on conflict mitigation in Baghdad. They had met in training and had recently gotten married. Ahmet was always well-dressed, eager to shake hands and make a good impression. When I got to talk to Zeina, I found that she was not afraid to tell her side with blistering honesty. She was on the verge of quitting, not over risking her life, but because of the bureaucracy.
She told me how she and her partners drove through checkpoints into neighborhoods where just two years before dozens of people of her faith were abducted and then found in ditches. Bravely, she had gone into these opposing communities, introduced herself as a peace researcher, not mentioning that funding came from the US government, and asked people – officials, social directors, and regular people – about what kinds of tension the neighborhood faced.
“Why were boys joining militias here? What would keep them from joining militias? What about support for widows? Where are they getting support fom outside the family?” Typically the interviewees assumed she was spying for the US-led Coalition and either gave false answers or pestered her about the purpose of her visit.
She was proud that she dug out of this risky quest a new perspective on what made these neighborhoods tick, why they had devolved into feuds the previous years. Now it would be the project design which came into question. Zeina’s peers would propose multi-faith libraries, workshops, and sewing circles, but the people she met demanded jobs to keep the young men occupied.
There were others in the group like Adnan and Mahir, young Western-leaning Iraqis who cautiously agreed to Washington’s civil-military strategy. They made remarkable short-term progress, ditching the dove’s concerns for their safety then brokering meetings among the Coalition allies in the neighborhoods. Once gathered, the residents would be taught conflict resolution skills and encouraged to address an issue right then and there.
Despite the fact that the extremists were infuriated by the willingness of so many community leaders to meet under an American flag, the projects were rally cries. Adnan surprised everyone by arranging an event like this in Sadr City just as the Mahdi Army had been firing on the US Army. The gathered community decided to create a youth group to discourage kids from joining criminal gangs. It was a big start.
From there, Adnan and Mahir alongside other organizations helped to remove a wall that had divided a neighborhood on another side of Baghdad after two years of bloody feuding and animosity. The event was combined with a huge holiday dinner in the street. The Pentagon, the press, and the donors loved it, a textbook photo op. But when pics appeared of local Arab leaders standing alongside US soldiers, some feared the locals would be targeted by extremists.
Before I left Baghdad, Adnan told me he was aiming for an even more ambitious project. This one would comprise of a series of meetings meant to forge an agreement on returns for a minority which had been forcibly-expelled by gunmen from one Baghdad neighborhood two years earlier. The gunmen had cleared the minority families away from the mosque of a powerful leader. Now Adnan wanted to repair the neighborhood.
There was also Rashad with his thick mustache who told me about repairing the old tribal dispute resolution system in Najaf. Since the early nomad days in the Middle East, families had learned to settle fights over grazing areas and water sources through a practice of having elders among them meet to discuss how to share or compensate losses.
True, so often, particularly under the Baathists, powerful authorities would back certain tribal authorities who could then make unfair judgments. But with patient negotiation, Rashad told me, the system could be salvaged and play a major role in mitigating conflict in the rural areas. In fact, the conservative sheikhs and religious leaders preferred this strategy over the others.
He told me how that past month he and a few others had gone to nearby Diwaniyah to settle a tribal feud over a water source. The water treatment plant was located in one tribe’s neighborhood and at some point during or even before the war the neighboring tribe and minority groups had lost access to it.
One group had clean water. The other was taking water from the filthy river and suffering higher rates of water-borne illness. For a while, the handicapped tribe threatened the powerful group, which then refused to share out of spite. Rashad and a few others brokered a meeting of the elders. They carved out an agreement that worked.
The Western strategists either did not understand how powerful the tribal system could be, or believed that it was corrupted by power-hungry individuals and Iran-backed political parties. Rashad and others argued that this was exaggerated, that the tribal system was the key to reducing tension. Over time, the Iraq government did convince the US-led Coalition to work with tribal leaders to build consent for the rule of the central government, but not so much in terms of handling ceasefire terms over to them.
Up in Sulimani, I met Aziz. He had grown up in Mosul. All eyes were on the city which was not only a cosmopolitan town made up of many different ethnic groups, but was also resting beside rich oil reserves. Joining the Kurdish north with the Arab central regions, Mosul was seen as the final fault-line in Iraq. As Aziz and the others met to discuss issues of local peace in nearby Sulimani, militias in Mosul had gone on a killing spree murdering Assyrian Christians. Few could guess which fighting group was doing it, so all assumed it was the extremists of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The peace crowd was ready to act on a personal level, but the complex methodology bound the funds in a lengthy process meant to do no harm. Here, they ran into the ultimate irony in peace building. To approach the community, perfectly, to include the right representation among participants and fair prep to address the right issues in the right way required patience. I had seen numerous examples in other countries of how not doing this caused the project to backfire. So if a sudden local conflict erupted, the local teams were unable to respond quickly except to deliver relief. This infuriated some, including the donors.
Eventually, Washington think tanks began larger inter-faith dialogue sessions, which helped moderate the moderates. But there was little anyone could do, quickly, however, to reduce the power of the extremists. This led to the final front, and what will remain the final front, in the local peace effort.
The winning authority and its militaries would create an area where rule of law could be improved. Indeed, even virulent anti-Americanism among Sunni insurgents and Shiite Sadrists fell to a trickle once the sides were exhausted. And the US agreed to leave. But the extremists were holding on, using tactics which did not seem strategic but the work of nihilists who did not think about what the post-war would look like if they were to win any territory. It was this group that frightened all sides a must. And the peace crowd could do little on this front. Extremists, it was believed, would never show up to a “conference” or “multi-faith” session. They were committed. The doves argued that local peace workers should pour effort into youth projects, to deter youth from joining gangs or loitering and being vulnerable to recruitment.
The most harrowing moments for Safiya’s team came when the local staff in the provinces had to drive into neighborhoods, parts of Baqubah, for example, where at the time Al Qaeda was not only active but employing unsuspecting people to carry bombs to checkpoints. Everyone was at risk.
While I was in Sulimani just before Obama won the election, one of the big stories was one captured on Iraqi television and run on the satellite networks of a girl who surrendered herself to Iraqi police in Baqubah.
The footage showed her realizing that her vest was full of explosives. Several policemen risked everything to save her, when many would have advocated just shooting her and detonating the device from afar. In her interrogation, she explained how someone had paid her family so that she would simply wear the vest to another part of town. She wasn’t completely innocent, but also hadn’t really thought about the consequences; she was just too young.
As sad as the tale was, it offered an example of the target beneficiary of constructive peace projects. Girls and boys like her were lost and confused in the fog of war and poverty. Whoever tricked her may have been an incorrigible, well-resourced murderer, but the new generation of recruits succumbing to the extremist’s woo were not necessarily so intransigent that killing them was the least bad option.
Meanwhile, as the US and coalition began withdrawal, turning over much of the security effort over to the Iraqi government, Washington’s push for new, blended reconciliation conferences increased. Local tribal leaders were bravely reassembling with government officials. All over the country this became the new norm. The peace crowd began shifting from US and EU-funded efforts to either Iraqi government efforts or pure reconstruction aid.
The extremists, however, adapted. They began targeting reconciliation conferences with suicide bombs. As I write this continues to happen. On October 11th, 2009, Al Qaeda in Iraq apparently detonated several bombs outside of a vital reconciliation meeting in Ramadi, the capitol of the western Anbar province, killing 23. The attack targeted Sunni tribal leaders who had joined Al Qaeda in fighting the US-led Coalition in the early days only to defect to the Sunni Awakening councils which were now loyal to the central government.
Then a few days later on October 16th, a guy brought a rifle and bomb under his coat into a mosque in the troubled town of Tal Afar, outside Mosul. He shot the imam to death then blew himself up, killing 14. The imam was well known for having once been sympathetic to the Sunni insurgency but was until his death actively encouraging people to consent to joining the central government.
The End Not Yet in Sight…
As US forces pull out, Iran may pour more influence into the country. The Pentagon and conservative politicians in Washington warned that Iran could alter the political landscape across Iraq rather quickly. But the Obama Administration has put a great deal of faith in the belief that the combined war and peace efforts have set the Iraqi government on the road to stability with great momentum.
In her book, On Violence, Hannah Arendt wrote that, “power always stands in need of numbers whereas violence up to a point can manage without them because it relies on implements.” In other words, the collective effort to consolidate power over Iraq into one (or two, if Kurdish secessionists pursue a vote) government may be succeeding and reducing chaos. But violence can persist if just one small coterie or a well-resourced individual continues to despise the wielders of power.
The Bush Administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki believed that the civil-military strategy for peace both on the national and local levels would surely consolidate power under the central government. To tackle the final fronts, Malaki would secure the loyalty of Kurdish leaders through the American relationship, would sit on Mosul and neighboring Kirkuk and limit the movement of arms in the hope that ongoing inter-faith and tribal dialogue sessions can reduce tension there. As for extremists like Al Qaeda in Iraq, “wild cards” of violence who do not respond to political persuasion, the Iraqi security forces would have to take over from the Coalition a strategy of hunting them down and killing them.
From the local peace crowd’s point of view, it wasn’t that simple. Inside the local level peace efforts, particularly when people like Adnan were planning reconciliation gatherings, the absolute worst thing to happen aside from getting bombed was for the coalition to kill people in the neighborhood “bad guy,” was relative. An Al Qaeda jihadist slapping sock bombs onto cars in traffic, had a mother, wife, kids, uncles, cousins, tribal elders, and high school buddies.
Chances were one of them would reject the premise that the people killed in the US strike had anything to do with an attack and tell others at the meeting that the US was committing genocide or something. With luck, the event would still take place but only with people who were already on board with the effort. At worst, the spoiler could convince his tribe or party to walk out of the whole effort for the region and instead re-join the fight.
The doves believe that the US civil-military approach of wooing moderate insurgents and killing the extremists was divisive not only for extremists, but for all the people who question the degree to which those killed were “enemies.” Instead, the doves, admitting sometimes that a large alliance had to quell chaos before such actions could even be pursued. Believe that to truly win peace, a longer term approach was needed. The psychotic killers did need police take downs, but many of the extremists could be wooed if they did not have targets on their foreheads. The belief the doves hold is that largely it is the feeling of being on the run and losing loved ones which perpetuates rebellion.
There were indeed many ultra-conservative Salafists living in step with US relations in Saudi Arabia, if not in Anbar. But for the US, Iraq, or any other powerful participant to stop “killing” and targeting the extremists this giving them breathing space to consider the benefits of compromise, would take not only a continued rate of casualties from extremists attacks but also a colossal leap of faith.
To Washington conservatives and moderates this was an absurd theory; they believed killing extremists, despite blow back, was the way to go. Even progressives in organizations like the US Institute of Peace who understood the dove’s recommendations believed it to be like going “all in” on the great and bloody game of battlefield poker.
And so while the Western doves launched protests, demanded an American withdrawal and engaged in conflict resolution trainings on the ground, Iraqi doves realized their cause was facing a mountain. Most fell back on innocuous activities like building multi-faith centers, libraries, or internet cafes, training women on vocational skills and so on. The most daring among them joined the traditionalist and civil-military efforts as rebels within, working hard, then petitioning to keep rifles out of the reconciliation meetings.
Bitter Fate
Now consider Ahmet, a flesh and blood, considerate Iraqi Arab man, newly-married to Zeina, in Baghdad. By December 2008, in the last years of the war, Ahmet felt it was safe enough to drive alone out to Anbar to tend to personal business. Part way out, he stopped in a jam of rusty cars on the desert highway.
They were bunched up, frozen at a military checkpoint as an Iraqi VIP convoy soared around them. Ahmet and other men climbed out for a smoke while women and kids roasted in the cars. Then a driver still in his car abruptly pulled out of the jam, accelerated beside the VIP convoy and pulled a triggering-mechanism on an explosive. Twisted metal and detritus blasted through the vehicles, lacerating several of the men standing on the curb. Ahmet collapsed.
Around the same time, Yahya, the generous son of Massoud and brother of Fatima, one of Ahmet and Zeina’s Kurdish co-workers, stopped at a well-known restaurant outside of Kirkuk, in the north of the country. Just as he started on his meal, a man barged through the place toward a back room where a reconciliation conference was being held and detonated his charge.
And still the same period of time, Bader and Daud, who also worked with Ahmet, Zeina and Fatima, stopped at a market in Baghdad to pick up supplies when a bomb went off sending metal shards through their windshield.
After the long grind of summer and the patient winds of fall, winter had brought horrific violence back to Iraq.
Reading the Western narrative of the Iraq war led one to uncover profound truths about human co-existence. It has largely been a story of heroes responding to threats, responding to violence, and cleaning up a political mess. But deep in the shadows behind armies there is an alternative narrative, one of peaceful people living relatively normal existences, stifled not by checkpoints, but by the job search, the daily grind or the banalities of life. It is a narrative in which professionals, academics, clerics, artists, students, conservative businessmen, tribal leaders, and even political leaders do not see the country divided between Arab and Kurd or Shia and Sunni.
In this parallel universe flowing in the shadows of the blast walls, people felt they could do something to improve their neighborhoods other than just survive or rely on Western guidance. The pursuit of peace on the local level was a complex endeavor requiring a great deal of patience and realism. It is a new science, but it has evolved.
When I first traveled to Iraq, I expected to find virulent anti-Americanism, a rain of bullets and deep cynicism among Iraqis. But after meeting dozens of professionals, academics, tribal elders, activists, aid workers, peaceniks, students, musicians, and market clerks, I found that although many in the country were indeed partisan actors in ongoing violence that there were also thousands of people with realistic means and goals for ending violence. And, win or lose, they held the future of Iraq in their hands.
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Baghdad parade ground. HELO.Journey | Michael Otterman & Richard Hil with Paul Wilson, Quoted text by Nuha al-Radi, HELO Magazine, July-August 2010
