Yaniv Voller, The Kurdish Liberation Movement in Iraq: From Insurgency to Statehood, Oxon: Routledge, 2014, 190 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-415-70724-4).
This book is a welcome overview of the transformation of the Kurdish question in Iraq between 1990 and 2013. The author calls this transformation a change from “national insurgency and guerrilla struggle” to tactics of “state building”. This transformation, according to the author, is a new stage in the Kurdish struggle of liberation. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq is the major factor in this transformation.
In the Introduction and the first chapter of The Kurdish Liberation Movement in Iraq, Yaniv Voller outlines the theoretical approach of the book. The main theoretical assumption is that the KRG is a de facto state and it works, thinks and approaches the outside world as a de facto state. This new reality has changed the nature of the Kurdish struggle dramatically and brought a new kind of interaction between the Kurdish liberation movement and the international community. Accordingly, this interaction changes the behaviour and policies of the KRG as a de facto state. The author argues that: “the status, or reality, of de facto statehood is essential for understanding the development, conduct and policies of KRG, at both the foreign and the domestic levels” (p. 3). As for the facto state, the book defines it as “a political entity whose leadership has wide autonomy in both its domestic and foreign policies, has established government institutions, and which perceives itself as deserving full legal and institutional independence” (p. 4). According to the author, the KRG has all the features: a defined territory; symbols of sovereignty, such as a flag, anthem, security forces and a functional government. This de facto state lacks international recognition, but this lack does not impede the KRG’s efforts to act as a state.
The international context in which the KRG acts stimulates this kind of behaviour. The author sees this context as a composition of “Post-Cold War developments”, “the environment that emerged from the attacks of September 11” and “the War on Terror” in which “normative shifts” have taken place. Prior to these new developments Kurdish secessionist aspirations were seen as “potential causes of instability” and perceived by the “international community with antipathy and even hostility” (p. 20). But the new context has changed the international norms and practices of recognition. Something like a “Kosovo and Montenegro effect” has emerged, which encouraged de facto states, including the KRG, to claim legitimacy.
The second chapter tells a short history of the Kurdish liberation movement in Iraq and its development towards statehood. The liberation struggle starts with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Kurds as minority within the newly established states of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The rise of nationalist aspirations and the struggle for self-determination has since then been the red line that goes through this history. The years 1990 and 1991 are important in this history, since in 1990 Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and his defeat in the war that followed opened new opportunities for the Iraqi Kurds. During the uprisings of 1991 Iraqi Kurds brought considerable Kurdish areas under their control. The counter attacks of the Saddam Hussein regime and the defeat of the uprising led to the formation of the “no fly zone” in Kurdish regions to protect Kurdish refugees from Saddam’s army. Subsequently, the Iraqi state withdrew its institutions from the Kurdish provinces, opening up the path of the gradual integration of Iraqi Kurds as a de facto state in the international system.
The third, fourth and fifth chapters are the most important chapters of this book. In these chapters the author studies different aspects of the development of the KRG’s statehood. Chapter three deals with the KRG’s practices of statehood from 1991 to 2001. According to the author, in this period the first steps towards liberalisation and democratisation took place and the Kurdish leadership saw these democratisation steps as “the key to express, and thus guarantee and expand, its earned sovereignty in the region” (p. 68). The Kurdish political parties, especially the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by Massoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani took on greater leadership roles. The Kurdish diaspora soon joined the parties in the formation of this new political experience. According to the author, the formation of the KRG has huge consequences on different levels, especially as it has changed the nature of the conflict with Baghdad as the KRG started to act as a sovereign state and developed its independent institutions. It has also changed Kurdish interaction with international and transnational actors (p. 68). The development towards statehood was seriously interrupted in 1994 when the civil war started between the two leading parties, the KDP and PUK. The regional states started to intervene actively in the Kurdish region by siding with either of the parties. Iran and Syria supported the PUK and Iraq and Turkey backed the KDP. The internal war lasted for four years and stopped officially in 1998. As a result of the civil war the KRG was divided into two separate entities each under the control of one of the two dominant parties. According to the author, the civil war and the division of the KRG between the two parties did not stop the process of state-building; towards the end of the nineties and the beginning of 2000s, when the process of reunification started, the process of state-building “was back on track” (p. 89).
Chapters four and five of the book are reserved for the details of the KRG’s “successful” story of consolidating a real de facto state in the context of September 11 and the War on Terror. In this context Iraq became one of the main targets of America’s global War on Terror and the consequences were immense: the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein, the creation of a new Iraqi constitution in which the regional autonomy of the KRG was legalised, the reunification of the KRG administration in 2005 and the intensification of the KRG’s regional and internal contacts. For example, chapter four sheds light on the KRG’s foreign policy in which the KRG developed new strategies for its claim of sovereignty. Besides emphasising democratisation and liberalisation, the KRG underlined also economic viability, law and order, and the ability to contribute to regional stability and security (p. 94). The KRG’s public diplomacy changed from focusing on the “democratic experiment” of the 1990s to talking about “the other Iraq” (p. 105), which was represented as prosper, stable and safe.
The fifth and the last chapter analyses the effects of the successful foreign policy of KRG on its domestic policies and evolution. The author analyses the manner with which the KRG deals with its natural resources, especially oil, as an important instrument to enhance its sovereignty, especially vis-à-vis Baghdad, and also to build a better relationship with the regional powers, especially Turkey. This chapter also deals with some domestic issues, among them organising elections, campaigns for democratic reforms, the granting of freedom of the media, protecting women and combating gender related violence against them, the KRG’s engagement with its critics and being approachable to international organisations such as Amnesty International and human rights and UN organisations. In short, this chapter shows the transition of the KRG “from being a government dominated by warlords with no democratic transitions, into a more democratic government, willing to engage in a dialogue about its socio-political policies and amend at least some of its domestic policies” (p. 130).
Two major weaknesses in the book should be mentioned. The first one concerns the simple assumption regarding the reunification of the KRG’s administration. The author takes the official discourse of the KRG on reunification too seriously and does not pay enough attention to the serious internal antagonism and fragmentation of the KRG and Kurdish politics in Iraq and the region. It is remarkable also how the author downplays the serious effects of the internal division of the region through citing some Kurdish experts who claim that the civil war and the internal division of the KRG even had “important positive effects”. For example, the author cites Stansfield, who says that this catastrophic division of the KRG “had some advantages for the process of state-building. In spite of its demoralizing effect, the division provided the Kurdish leadership with an opportunity for reorganizing their governance and re-stabilizing the parts under their control” (p. 84). This argument dismisses the serious structural damages the internal divisions have created in Kurdish politics and society. It is not the “demoralising effect” of the division which is most fundamental, but the institutionalisation of the division to the extent that it impedes the development of a basic national framework in the military, police apparatus, and security forces, not to mention the economy, bureaucracy and media.
It is of course true that by the end of 2005 most ministries were officially unified, but the region is in fact still deeply divided between the two dominant parties. Behind the mask of an artificial unity lay still huge and deep structural fragmentations. In Iraqi Kurdistan Massoud Barzani, as the president of the region, does not have any power in the PUK area and nor do PUK officials in the KDP zones. The power-sharing arrangement in the KRG still follows the logic of feudal fiefdoms instead of a unified state. The major institutions of army, security and media are still in the hands of the parties or in the hands of rival wings within the party and the ruling families, and each party has its own foreign relations policies. The fragmentations are so widely present that even small political disputes can lead to a hot media war between different parties in the same language and style of the earlier civil war in Kurdistan. In the last few years these divisions have become even more dangerous as the KDP has aligned with Turkey and the PUK with Iran. Further, the division created a hugely corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucratic system that was based on loyalty to one of the two parties or even to the different members of the politburo of the parties or to the specific individuals within the ruling family. This massive machine of almost one million “bureaucrats” out of a population of only about 4 million not only costs the lion’s share of the KRG’s budget, but also hinders the KRG from functioning as a unified state.
The second and more serious weakness of the book is the author’s dismissal of the authoritarian structures of the KRG. Not only is political, security and military power under the control of small numbers of individuals and families, but the same families and their cronies also dominate the KRG’s economy. As in other authoritarian experiments in the region or elsewhere, in the KRG it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between the political elite who rules the country and the economic elite who runs the economy. Both forms of power are concentrated in the hands of the same individuals. Further, the rentier character of the KRG economy strengthens this dangerous link between politics and the economy. Moreover, both parties run most of the media and control the judiciary. Important sectors of Kurdish civil-society organisations are dominated by the parties and a small number of the members of the ruling elite. There are of course some undeniable democratic elements in the Kurdistan region, there are elections, small segments of independent media and a multi-party political system, but those elements function within wider and more powerful authoritarian structures. The theoretical literature on authoritarianism in the Arab World, especially the “authoritarian upgrading” theses, can offer extra tools to see the deeper authoritarian structures of the KRG, beyond what the KRG officials claim.
Despite these two points of criticism this book is worth reading; it gives detailed and valuable information about different aspects of the development of the KRG from the beginning of the 1990s, especially how the KRG presents its image to the outside world. This book can serve students of social science and humanities in general, but it is especially useful to the students of the Middle Eastern and Kurdish studies. The book services also a general public who is interested in the further developments of the Kurdish question in the Middle East.