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BLOOD BORDERS: HOW A BETTER MIDDLE EAST WOULD LOOK
By Ralph Peters
Kurdish Media, UK
July 4 2006
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of
injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or
separate makes an enormous difference - often the difference between
freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and
terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa
and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had
sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders
continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But
the unjust borders in the Middle East - to borrow from Churchill -
generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders
alone - from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality
to deadly religious extremism - the greatest taboo in striving to
understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the
awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our
own diplomats.
Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make
every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic
and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried.
Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as
joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected
in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by
the most significant "cheated" population groups, such as the Kurds,
Baluch and Arab Shia, but still fail to account adequately for Middle
Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another
numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be
redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against
the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.
Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave
unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never
see a more peaceful Middle East.
Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served
to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still
imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosporus
and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never
developed effective tools - short of war - for readjusting faulty
borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East's "organic" frontiers
nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face
and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made
deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until
they are corrected.
As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable," declaring that
boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that
boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders
have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo
to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special
representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).
Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history:
Ethnic cleansing works.
Begin with the border issue most sensitive to American readers:
For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its
neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders - with
essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But
the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained
with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our
lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate
tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed
for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single
overstudied issue and turn to those that are studiously ignored.
The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the
Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent
Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living
in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise
because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the
population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds
the world's largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse,
Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills
and mountains where they've lived since Xenophon's day.
The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin
to correct this injustice after Baghdad's fall. A Frankenstein's
monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should
have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from
cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq's Kurds into supporting the
new Iraqi government - which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for
our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake:
Nearly 100 percent of Iraq's Kurds would vote for independence.
As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades
of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to "mountain
Turks" in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish
plight at Ankara's hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the
repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey
should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and
Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they
could. The refusal by the world's legitimate democracies to champion
Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse
than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our
media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir
through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria
and Japan.
A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq's three Sunni-majority
provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify
with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented
Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would
form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian
Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward
expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of
Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.
A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi
royal family's treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With
Islam's holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the
world's most bigoted and oppressive regimes - a regime that commands
vast, unearned oil wealth - the Saudis have been able to project
their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond
their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently,
influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as
a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen
to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.
While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the control of Islam's
holy cities, imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might become
were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council representative of
the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred
State - a sort of Muslim super-Vatican - where the future of a great
faith might be debated rather than merely decreed. True justice -
which we might not like - would also give Saudi Arabia's coastal
oil fields to the Shia Arabs who populate that subregion, while a
southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi
Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud
would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.
Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of
territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State
and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat
in today's Afghanistan - a region with a historical and linguistic
affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian
state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not
it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab
Shia State.
What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in
the east, as Pakistan's Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited
with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to
draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would
prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose
its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining "natural"
Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward
spur near Karachi.
The city-states of the United Arab Emirates would have a mixed fate
- as they probably will in reality. Some might be incorporated in
the Arab Shia State ringing much of the Persian Gulf (a state more
likely to evolve as a counterbalance to, rather than an ally of,
Persian Iran). Since all puritanical cultures are hypocritical, Dubai,
of necessity, would be allowed to retain its playground status for
rich debauchees. Kuwait would remain within its current borders,
as would Oman.
In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic
affinities and religious communalism - in some cases, both. Of course,
if we could wave a magic wand and amend the borders under discussion,
we would certainly prefer to do so selectively. Yet, studying the
revised map, in contrast to the map illustrating today's boundaries,
offers some sense of the great wrongs borders drawn by Frenchmen and
Englishmen in the 20th century did to a region struggling to emerge
from the humiliations and defeats of the 19th century.
Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may be
impossible. For now. But given time - and the inevitable attendant
bloodshed - new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen
more than once.
Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform will continue to fight for
security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy and for access
to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself. The
current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and Karachi,
taken together with the region's self-inflicted woes, form as perfect
a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of blame and the
recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design. Where men and women
look ruefully at their borders, they look enthusiastically for enemies.
>>From the world's oversupply of terrorists to its paucity of energy
supplies, the current deformations of the Middle East promise a
worsening, not an improving, situation. In a region where only
the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold and where the most
debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate a disappointed faith,
the U.S., its allies and, above all, our armed forces can look for
crises without end. While Iraq may provide a counterexample of hope -
if we do not quit its soil prematurely - the rest of this vast region
offers worsening problems on almost every front.
If the borders of the greater Middle East cannot be amended to reflect
the natural ties of blood and faith, we may take it as an article of
faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to
be our own.
~U ~U ~U
WHO WINS, WHO LOSES
Winners -
Afghanistan
Arab Shia State
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Free Baluchistan
Free Kurdistan
Iran
Islamic Sacred State
Jordan
Lebanon
Yemen
Losers -
Afghanistan
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Kuwait
Pakist an
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkey
United Arab Emirates
West Bank
For maps: http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=12770
By Ralph Peters
Kurdish Media, UK
July 4 2006
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of
injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or
separate makes an enormous difference - often the difference between
freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and
terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa
and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had
sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders
continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But
the unjust borders in the Middle East - to borrow from Churchill -
generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders
alone - from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality
to deadly religious extremism - the greatest taboo in striving to
understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the
awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our
own diplomats.
Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make
every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic
and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried.
Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as
joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected
in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by
the most significant "cheated" population groups, such as the Kurds,
Baluch and Arab Shia, but still fail to account adequately for Middle
Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another
numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be
redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against
the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.
Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave
unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never
see a more peaceful Middle East.
Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well-served
to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still
imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosporus
and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never
developed effective tools - short of war - for readjusting faulty
borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East's "organic" frontiers
nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face
and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made
deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until
they are corrected.
As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable," declaring that
boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that
boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders
have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo
to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special
representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).
Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history:
Ethnic cleansing works.
Begin with the border issue most sensitive to American readers:
For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its
neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders - with
essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But
the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained
with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our
lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate
tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed
for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single
overstudied issue and turn to those that are studiously ignored.
The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the
Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent
Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living
in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise
because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the
population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds
the world's largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse,
Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills
and mountains where they've lived since Xenophon's day.
The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin
to correct this injustice after Baghdad's fall. A Frankenstein's
monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should
have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from
cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq's Kurds into supporting the
new Iraqi government - which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for
our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake:
Nearly 100 percent of Iraq's Kurds would vote for independence.
As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades
of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to "mountain
Turks" in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish
plight at Ankara's hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the
repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey
should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and
Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they
could. The refusal by the world's legitimate democracies to champion
Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse
than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our
media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir
through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria
and Japan.
A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq's three Sunni-majority
provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify
with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented
Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would
form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian
Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward
expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of
Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.
A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi
royal family's treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With
Islam's holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the
world's most bigoted and oppressive regimes - a regime that commands
vast, unearned oil wealth - the Saudis have been able to project
their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond
their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently,
influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as
a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen
to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.
While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the control of Islam's
holy cities, imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might become
were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council representative of
the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred
State - a sort of Muslim super-Vatican - where the future of a great
faith might be debated rather than merely decreed. True justice -
which we might not like - would also give Saudi Arabia's coastal
oil fields to the Shia Arabs who populate that subregion, while a
southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi
Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud
would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.
Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of
territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State
and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat
in today's Afghanistan - a region with a historical and linguistic
affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian
state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not
it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab
Shia State.
What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in
the east, as Pakistan's Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited
with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to
draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would
prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose
its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining "natural"
Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward
spur near Karachi.
The city-states of the United Arab Emirates would have a mixed fate
- as they probably will in reality. Some might be incorporated in
the Arab Shia State ringing much of the Persian Gulf (a state more
likely to evolve as a counterbalance to, rather than an ally of,
Persian Iran). Since all puritanical cultures are hypocritical, Dubai,
of necessity, would be allowed to retain its playground status for
rich debauchees. Kuwait would remain within its current borders,
as would Oman.
In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic
affinities and religious communalism - in some cases, both. Of course,
if we could wave a magic wand and amend the borders under discussion,
we would certainly prefer to do so selectively. Yet, studying the
revised map, in contrast to the map illustrating today's boundaries,
offers some sense of the great wrongs borders drawn by Frenchmen and
Englishmen in the 20th century did to a region struggling to emerge
from the humiliations and defeats of the 19th century.
Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may be
impossible. For now. But given time - and the inevitable attendant
bloodshed - new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen
more than once.
Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform will continue to fight for
security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy and for access
to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself. The
current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and Karachi,
taken together with the region's self-inflicted woes, form as perfect
a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of blame and the
recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design. Where men and women
look ruefully at their borders, they look enthusiastically for enemies.
>>From the world's oversupply of terrorists to its paucity of energy
supplies, the current deformations of the Middle East promise a
worsening, not an improving, situation. In a region where only
the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold and where the most
debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate a disappointed faith,
the U.S., its allies and, above all, our armed forces can look for
crises without end. While Iraq may provide a counterexample of hope -
if we do not quit its soil prematurely - the rest of this vast region
offers worsening problems on almost every front.
If the borders of the greater Middle East cannot be amended to reflect
the natural ties of blood and faith, we may take it as an article of
faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to
be our own.
~U ~U ~U
WHO WINS, WHO LOSES
Winners -
Afghanistan
Arab Shia State
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Free Baluchistan
Free Kurdistan
Iran
Islamic Sacred State
Jordan
Lebanon
Yemen
Losers -
Afghanistan
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Kuwait
Pakist an
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkey
United Arab Emirates
West Bank
For maps: http://www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=12770