Dynamite in the mountains and broken vows in Geneva
Is Baghdad booby trapping the contract of survival with the Kurds?
Qarman Haider Rahman
Between 1928 and 1932, the millennium silence of the valleys and towering mountains of southern Kurdistan dissipated, replaced by the thunder of dynamite explosions and the blows of steel hammers. At the same time that the New Zealand-British engineer, Archibald Hamilton, was leading an engineering epic to build a strategic road linking Erbil to the Iranian border, there was a battle of another kind being fought silently and cunningly in the corridors of the League of Nations in Geneva. Britain was struggling diplomatically with Türkiye to annex Mosul Province (northern Iraq) to the emerging Iraqi state. These two parallel stories, the engineering in the Zagros Mountains and the political in the halls of Geneva, together constitute the most important document for understanding the nature of the complex relationship between the Kurds and the Iraqi state, and they reveal the most important truth that Baghdad is trying to forget today: The Kurds’ connection with Iraq was never an absolute integration, but rather, from the first moment, it was a “conditional connection” with respect for identity and partnership.
In his famous memoir, “A Road Through Kurdistan,” Hamilton recounts the details of an engineering miracle represented in the construction of a 116-mile-long road, which required the removal and blasting of about “a million tons” of rocks in compelling climatic and geographical conditions inside the terrifying “Ali Beg” Valley. Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, and Indians worked on this project, forming an amazing crucible of coexistence. But the most important historical value in Hamilton’s diary is not in the tons of rocks removed, but rather in his fair testimony that demolishes the Iraqi and British government propaganda at the time, which always described the Kurdish tribes as “rebellion and savagery.” This testimony is evident in his detailed talk about Sheikh Ahmed Barzani.
Closed area
When it was decided to build a side road from (Khalifan) towards the (Barzan) area, apprehension and anticipation prevailed in the corridors of the government, and the prevailing belief was that Sheikh Ahmed Barzani would fiercely resist the project, as it would open his closed area and facilitate the access of government forces to it. But Hamilton explodes a historical surprise, saying: “Sheikh Ahmed did not express any opposition to the road despite his awareness of its military dimensions. Quite the contrary, his men came themselves and enthusiastically got involved in working on the project.”
Hamilton presents the strongest evidence of the peace and nobility of Sheikh Barzani, saying: “For two full years, hundreds of mules were transporting valuable goods and huge amounts of money related to government projects, passing through the depths of the lands under the Sheikh’s control. These convoys were traveling without any security guards, and despite this, not a single incident of theft or assault was recorded.”
These lines prove beyond doubt a clear historical rule: when the state advances with the language of “services, reconstruction, and partnership,” the Kurds and their leaders turn into a protective shield that protects the state’s property. But what did Baghdad do?
Carry a weapon
With regret and regret, Hamilton recounts how Baghdad’s military mentality destroyed this harmony. In 1931 and 1932, before the road was completed, Baghdad sent its army to invade the region. The tribes considered this move a treacherous “declaration of war,” and Sheikh Ahmed Barzani, who was a guard of the road and state property, was forced to take up arms to defend his presence. Hamilton writes, criticizing this foolishness: “The cost of the military operations of 1932 was enough to educate every Kurdish child. “The use of force has produced nothing but hatred.”
While the armies were marching toward the mountains to attack the Kurds, documents in the League of Nations revealed a shocking truth: that the Kurds were the ones who were credited with giving Iraq its current borders, and that annexing the Mosul Province to Baghdad was not an absolute historical right for Iraq, but rather a “conditional decision.” Britain practiced political pragmatism to deprive Turkey of Mosul, so it used the “Kurdish demographic card.” The report of the International Commission of Inquiry in 1925 proved that the Kurds were a majority, declaring frankly: “If we take the national criterion as a basis, the inevitable result is the establishment of an independent Kurdish state, for they are neither Arabs nor Turks, but an Aryan nation.” To avoid Kurdish independence, the League of Nations agreed to annex the region to Iraq, but not as a forced annexation, but rather as a “conditional contract” with strict international guarantees that include: the establishment of a Kurdish local administration, the official adoption of the Kurdish language in education and the judiciary, and the continuation of the British mandate for 25 years to ensure the protection of the Kurds. The Kurds, for their part, accepted to join Iraq as a “political contract” to protect their identity from Turkish oppression at the time. However, once Iraq gained its independence and entered the League of Nations in 1932, Baghdad shied away from its obligations and ignored the reports of the UN envoy (Monsieur Rapard).
He strongly warned of a “dark and dangerous fate” awaiting the Kurds if international guarantees are absent and the majority are isolated.
Reading Hamilton’s memoirs and League of Nations documents today is not just a reminder of the past, but rather the legal, political and moral basis on which Iraq’s contemporary reality is judged. The truth that the ruling authority in Baghdad must realize today is that the Kurds’ association with the Iraqi state, according to the decisions of the League of Nations in 1925, was a “conditional association.” This historic, conditional contract is the same one that was reproduced and formulated in the “New Iraq” constitution in 2003. The Kurds agreed to remain within a federal Iraq based on clear conditions and principles that constitute the spirit of the constitution: balance, consensus, and partnership. These principles were not cosmetic slogans for the political process, but rather they were and still are “the price for the Kurds to remain on the map of Iraq.” However, what we are witnessing today on the part of the federal authority and its institutions is a systematic marginalization of these founding principles, and a dangerous return to measures of “exclusivity in political decision-making.” Today, Baghdad uses the “numerical majority,” the tools of political centralization, judicial decisions, and economic restrictions to limit the Kurdistan region and confiscate its constitutional powers, just as it used its army in 1932 to ignore the terms of the League of Nations and fight Sheikh Ahmed Barzani. Here the most dangerous historical and legal fact emerges, which must be clear to everyone: If the authority in Baghdad continues to transgress these founding principles (balance, consensus, and partnership), and undermines the contract of conditional connection through exclusivity in political and financial decision-making, then the contract linking the Kurds to Baghdad will be considered null, politically, historically, and legally. When the contract is broken, the partnership ceases to exist, and the conditions upon which the map of Iraq was founded in the League of Nations and the 2003 Constitution are dropped, the Kurds have the right, with all historical and international legitimacy, to resort to their open options and to be unique in making another political decision that determines their fate and guarantees the future of their generations, away from a state that denies the foundations of its existence.
The trial of history tells us very clearly: the geography of nations is not preserved by force and the imposition of wills, but by respecting contracts and covenants. If Baghdad today insists on booby-trapping the “path of partnership” with the dynamite of exclusivity and exclusion, it has no right to be surprised tomorrow or cry if the Kurds choose another path to freedom that does not pass through the crisis-ridden capital that is addicted to breaking covenants.
