Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq

By Fazil Moradi

The Iraqi Baʿth state’s Anfāl operations (1987-1991) is one of the twentieth century’s ultimate acts of destruction of the possibility of being human. It remains the first and only crime of state in the Middle East to be tried under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code and to be recognized as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Baghdad between 2006 and 2007. Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq offers an unprecedented pathway to the study of political violence. It is a sweeping work of anthropological hospitality, returning to the Anfāl operations as the violence of political modernity only to turn to the human survivors’ hospitality and acts of translation—testimonial narratives, law, politics, archive, poetry, artworks, museums, memorials, symbolic cemeteries, and infinite pursuit of justice in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Being Human gathers together social sciences, humanities, and the arts to understand modernity's violence and its living on. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781978831711

Book preview

Being Human

MAP 1 Map of the chain of command of the Anfāl operations. In all maps, explosion symbols indicate locations subjected to chemical attacks.

Prologue

Birth, the experience of family, home, love, friendship, hospitality; the freedom to live, narrate, testify; the freedom of movement; violence, homelessness, loss, mourning, memories, pursuit of justice, and death have been parts of the human experience as far back as the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh from the early second millennium BCE. The human experience of birth, just like that of home, love, friendship, freedom, narration, death, loss, mourning, and memory, can be an experience that comes only from the foreigner, the other. We cannot experience our own birth or death. Even though we can bear witness to the death of another, still we read in the Epic of Gilgamesh (2003, 86),

No one at all sees Death,

no one at all sees the face [of Death,]

no one at all [hears] the voice of Death,

Death so savage, who hacks [hu]men down.

This is a book of what I call anthropological hospitality, a cross-disciplinary movement of being open toward the living on of the violence of political modernity that prevents natural death and has come to pass in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the land that was once Mesopotamia, and to the conditions of social, political, ethical, legal, and epistemological urgency in the afterlives of those living there. It is a turning to the survivors’ hospitality toward all that the political violence has taken away from them, to the translational practices that bring us in touch with that hospitality and that are marked by a return to the original violence only to turn away from it, which is fundamental to the survival or the living on of memories and pursuit of justice in the afterlives. It is not a book about collecting facts and using them to prove the origin and cause of a particular political violence, such as genocide or femicide, and thus the origin of particular suffering and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It does not excavate the only truth, authorize genocide or femicide as human-upon-human violence, offer a detailed cartography of lost living conditions and ecological destruction, or provide a statistical account or the exact numbers of exterminated civilians and destroyed villages. This book is not structured to give the reader a guided tour but confronts the reader as narrations of the violence and ruins of modernity, ethical shocks, interruptions, and confusion, turning them into a hospitable being—host and hostage all at once. It comes with interruptions not only of the self but also of the ethnographic or phenomenological act of seeing and knowing. The reader who is aware of the growing cross-disciplinary engagement with the violence of political modernity and its afterlives will know that this is not the first book and will certainly not be the last to engage with this both human and more than human topic. But it is the first work on anthropological hospitality toward the living of those who survived the political violence that the Iraqi Baʿth state announced as Silsilaṭoh alqiādaṭe lihamlaṭe al-Anfāl (the chain of command of the Anfāl operations) and as ʿAmeliyāt al-Anfāl (the Anfāl operations) that took place in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and lasted from 1987 to 1991 (chapter 2).

By outlawing and thus condemning the rural Kurdish population and Kurdish political organizations to nonexistence and controlling the urban populations in the then Kurdistan Autonomous Region of Iraq, the chain of command of the Anfāl also destroyed the very possibility of hospitality and the experience of being human. Following the U.S. and British conquest of Iraq in late March 2003, the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal was formed and restricted to pursue the crimes committed by the Iraqi Arab Socialist Baʿth Party in Iraq between 1968 and 2003. The Anfāl remains the first and only state crime in Iraq to be tried under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, and the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code, concluding with a verdict recognizing the Anfāl as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and instituting legal justice as punishment in the form of the death penalty and life imprisonment in Baghdād between 2006 and 2007 (chapter 4).

The Anfāl operations as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity as well as the narrations of the Anfāl in the afterlives point us to how the violence of political modernity or modern state target shirāzahy zhiyān (the order of life). The entanglement of the modern state with advanced technologies in the destruction of women, a human collective, knowledge, and ecology is, obviously, hardly new (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Dussel 1995; Deloria 1998; Woolford, Benvenuto, and Hinton 2014; Appadurai 2006; Fanon 2004; Wa Thiong’o 2005; Grosfoguel 2013; Hinton 2002; Satia 2018; Lindqvist 1992, 1999; Moradi, Buchenhorst, and Six-Hohenbalken 2017; Moradi 2022a; Moses 2008; Sanford 2004; Sanford, Stefatos, and Salvi 2016; Swedenburg 1995; Tas 2021; Üngör 2020). No understanding of violence by the modern state holds without a consideration of political modernity, not as a fixed origin of political history but as a shift in annihilatory violence. Critical inquiries into how political modernity or the modern state reaching back to 1492 has been predicated on conquest of land, destruction of peoples and life-forms, enslavement, slaughter or mass extermination, plunder, rape, and sexual enslavement abound (Mamdani 2020; Lindsay 2012; Trask 1999). The arrival of Christopher Columbus on an island in Bahamas in early October 1492 meant conquest, slavery, and destruction of the Arawak, the inhabitants of the Island, and their hospitality as both a life-form and political organization of care and sharing (Zinn 2001; Ward 1994, 28–33). In other words, genocide and inhospitality are at the heart of political modernity or the modern state.

This confirms a critical understanding: without modernity, no Auschwitz (Adorno 2007; Bauman 1989), and without modernity, no Bālīsān valley and no Halabja (chapter 7); but it also stretches the hegemony of law: without law and legal punishment of identifiable individuals, no justice for genocide. To turn to the law to identify the individual perpetrator is, then, to erase the role of political modernity (Mamdani 2020; Clarke 2019). The law fails on two separated and yet entwined accounts: on the one hand, it is always at work denying its failure to account for the role of modern state; and, on the other hand, it fails as a translation of the untranslatable abyss of modernity’s violence of the chemical industry and industrial capital (Das 1996, 137–173; Fortun 2011, 153, 163), which physiological disquiet bears witness to (chapter 7), that is, casts open to the world at large.

Political violence has taken various forms in human history but has shifted radically with the advance of modernity’s chemical warfare agents and their use during the imperial wars (World War I and II) or the age of extremes (Hobsbawm 1996), Britain against the Bolsheviks in North Russia and in Mesopotamia in 1920s, Spain in Morocco in 1921, Italy in Ethiopia in 1935–1936, Japan in China in 1937–1943, the Nazi state during the Holocaust in the 1940s, the United States in Vietnam in 1965–1975, Iran and Iraq in their war in 1980–1988 (Coleman 2005; see also Zierler 2011).¹ The imperial agent/warrior, Winston Churchill, who equated the use of chemical weapons with lively terror and had said I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes [Arabs, Kurds in Mesopotamia and Afghans] in the early twentieth century, explained chemical weapons as the application of Western science to modern warfare (Chomsky 1997; see also Ali 2022). This historic shift in political modernity took a turn with the atomic bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, which lived on as physiological disquiet in the body of Sumiteru Taniguchi, one of the hibakusha (survivors) of Nagasaki, until his death in 2017 (Taniguchi 2020). Atomic bombs continued to destroy the ecological life on the Marshall Islands in early July 1946 and have not lost any of their political weight (Scarry 2016; Jasanoff and Kim 2009). The dropping of atomic bombs went hand in hand with the deployment of chemical warfare agents as well as the Bhopal chemical disaster in India (1984), the nuclear plant disaster in Chernobyl (1986), the nuclear disaster in Fukushima (2011). In After Fukushima, Jean-Luc Nancy writes, Nuclear catastrophe—all differences military or civilian kept in mind—remains the one potentially irremediable catastrophe, whose effects spread through generations, through the layers of the earth; these effects have an impact on all living things (Nancy 2015, 3).

Just as certain corporations, such as the Dessauer Werke, the Kaliwerke at Kolin, or I. G. Farben, were relied on to produce, advance, and deliver Zyklon B and other chemical weapons to the imperial Nazi state in the 1940s (Hilberg 2003, 951–957), similar global corporations of chemical warfare agents played a fundamental role in allowing the Iraqi Baʿth state to turn into a manufacturer of chemical warfare agents in the 1980s (Kelly 2013, 375–380). It used chemical warfare agents both during its war with Iran (1980–1988) and in its chain of command of the Anfāl operations in 1987 and 1988. As an anthropologist, I had come to learn about the living on, the survival of the violence of the chain of command of the Anfāl operations in the afterlives, more than two decades after it happened, without realizing that it is not a vanished past. I traveled in the areas that had been declared outlawed during the Anfāl—between survivors, untranslatable instances of human encounter, bodily suffering, memories of sexual violence, torture and massacre, infinite mourning, testimonies of loss and homelessness, homes and villages in ruins, districts, towns, cities, photographic exhibitions, museums, commemorations, political speeches, and drawings based on survivors’ testimonies. Every personal encounter with those who had come to survive and each formal and informal conversation or narration was marked, simultaneously, by untranslatability and the ethical call to be listened to and heard.

There are many names circulating through Kurdistan for those who have survived the violence of the Anfāl. One is pāshmāwe (leftover or waste), used by politicians, activists, the local media, and the urban population. Less common are rezgārbou (liberated) and darbāzbou (saved by chance). These are used by only few of the survivors and activists. Pāshmāwe is also used in the plural, pāshmāwekāny anfāl, to denote the leftovers of the Anfāl. Both the singular and the plural mark a distinction between the Anfālized—the victims of, or those sacrificed to, the Anfāl—and the survivors. This name, the Anfālized, was created in a bureaucratic process and has slowly become significant to how survivors comprehend their own lives and how they present themselves to, and speak in, the world (chapter 3).

Those who lost family members have come to inherit names that define their world and speak to their everyday concerns: dāhīky Anfāl (mother of the Anfāl), menāly Anfāl (children of the Anfāl), zheny Anfāl (woman of the Anfāl), biwazheny Anfāl (the Anfāl widow), bāwky Anfāl (father of the Anfāl), khūshky Anfāl (sister of the Anfāl), berāy Anfāl (brother of the Anfāl), kas-o kāry Anfāl (family or relative of the Anfāl), tāqāney Anfāl (the single survivor in a family), khāwan Anfāl (owner of the Anfāl). The Anfāl is also extended to cover the previously outlawed areas and villages: gūndy anfālkrāw (the Anfālized village), nāwche anfālkrāwakān (the Anfālized areas). It is also carved into the edges of towns and cities as Anfālekān, neighborhoods designated for Anfāls—the survivors and families of the Anfālized—or as shouīny Anfālekān (the place of the Anfāls). While the term Anfālized commonly refers to those annihilated and disappeared, Anfāls is unambiguously iterated as a proper name to refer to people who survived multiple losses and lost their place of habitation. The name reflects a shift that eternalizes memories of the Anfāl, defying closure and legal framing. Not only does it supplant a person’s first name and family name, and their pre- and post-Anfāl locations, but it also reiterates in the present tense that Anfāl is an immediate annihilation, Anfāl margasāteh, and that Anfāl is a grave catastrophe, Anfāl kārasātīky zour gawreye. Moreover, the Anfāl is commonly narrated like a chirouk, a verbal and graphic story, which survivors and families call chirouky anfāl (the story of the Anfāl). As the following chapters show, the term is also inscribed on entrances of museums, cemeteries, and photographic exhibitions—the Anfāl Monument, the Anfāl Cemetery, the Anfāl gallery, the Anfāl Hall. The Arabic word al-Anfāl, which is worshipped as a divine word because it forms the title of the eighth chapter of the Qurʾān, is kept to testify to memories of the loss of the human, of home, family, community, village, and ecological life, and of survival.

Therefore, encounters and listening tied me to human memories, experiences, and living conditions that came to me as absolute shockwaves. To be a survivor is to know that there is no escape from genocide or femicide, the Anfāl. Listening put me in touch with the possibility of being human in the face of the lasting effects of the modern state’s acts of destruction and annihilation, including deployment of chemical warfare agents, that have forever shifted the human existential condition of those who have survived and continue to live with the difficulty to breathe, everyday coughing, and uncontrollable bodily pain, what I call physiological disquiet (chapter 7). They slowly grew in me as interruptive shocks that eliminated all possibilities of learning, knowing, and escape. I started inhabiting human worlds as infinitely tangled with the violence and ruins of modernity that I had never imagined before and cannot imagine in the year 2023, that is, eleven years after I first arrived in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in March 2012.

Early on, the interruptive shocks forced me to forget the ethnographic calculation that populates ethnography with the ethnographer-anthropologist dressed in their identifiable modus, carrying all possible technologies that are necessary for doing proper fieldwork in the field where they need to travel in order to look carefully or be a participant observer, that is, a specter that is both present among the target population (native subjects), and absent, recording the observation in memory only to be inscribed, or transcribed, later on paper as notes or as prose in a diary. The interruptive shocks, as we shall see, come with the survivors’ narrations or testimonies that also tell of how human is a social crowd and how political violence lives on, as they do of displacements in the social sciences and humanities.

In 2012, at issue were the living on of the violence of the modern state and the possibility of being human, one that unsettles the possibility of knowing how to formulate the problem that the ethnographer wants to pursue, how to have a close observation of people as object of study, or how to insist on what the ethnographer wants to argue. This allows the ethnographer to assume an imperial position in relation to knowledge, power, and domination. This is at issue when the ethnography of violence ethnologizes political violence by attributing it to a particular human collective, eliminating the possibility of the understanding that violence is not peculiar to a given people or culture; violence is far more ubiquitous and universally human (Valentine 1996, 9), or that violence is present (as a capability) in each human being, as is its opposite—the rejection of violence (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 2). As aforementioned and becomes clearer below and throughout this book, in the context of political violence the anthropologist cannot return to the living sources of [her or] his knowledge, to what operates within [her or] him as a means of understanding the forms of culture most remote from [her or] him, which would then be a practice of philosophy spontaneously, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed (1964, 110). Indeed, if the ethnography parochializes political violence, anthropocentrism loses its legitimacy in the face of the modern state administration of mass destruction and murder that is both in the realm of more than human or political modernity and in that of being modern, human.

As this book shows, the chain of command of the Anfāl is difficult to understand as an Iraqi-Kurdish matter or only human-upon-human violence. The violence of political modernity that ties the imperial-colonial acts of destruction and annihilation with those in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is not reducible to cultural differences nor to a specific group of people that could be defined and known as intrinsically genocidal. Although the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention both defines and creates political violence in terms of nation, race, ethnos, and religious identity (chapter 4), political violence as examined in this book is not the work of a particular human collective or ethnos but that of the modern state and political modernity’s technologies of destruction. The book unsettles any pluralizing attempt that would explain and place genocide within a we identity by showing how the Anfāl is tangled with the rise of the Iraqi Arab Socialist Baʿth Party following the formation of the modern Iraqi state during post-Ottoman British colonial rule in Iraq (chapter 2). How the chain of command of the Anfāl is achieved through the modern state infrastructure of destruction and annihilation, involving more than human and more than a single sovereign state (chapter 4), runs parallel to what remains of the human who has survived, and is surviving, the lasting effects of that violence. It dwells on how modern bureaucracy and technologies such as weapons transform the state into violence of destruction and annihilation, rather than asking whether the human is at the origin of genocide or femicide. Alongside a critical examination of genocide as an international legal translation, the chapters in this book open up to the narrations of bodily experiences and memories of women and men survivors, hosting and being with others who are no longer in the world. The afterlives of political violence carry me and anthropology to a human world where the political act of consigning the memory of the Anfāl as the Kurdish genocide to the past, while insisting on an unknown future, ties Kurdistan to a global political calculation and human conditions. Other yet similar cases include erasing the memory of the genocide in Guatemala by telling Maya survivors to shut their mouth (Sanford 2009) or Desmond Tutu’s dictum of social harmony is for us [in South Africa] … the greatest good (quoted in Wilson 2003, 370) or translating the memory of the Holocaust into further acts of political violence to become an exclusively Jewish event that the Jews in Israel must remember forever (Levy and Sznaider 2006; Sivan 2013). At the same time, each encounter with those who witnessed and survived—and not those who were annihilated or whose whereabouts are yet to be known—is a call for hospitality and translation that transform what is known as ethnography of violence or anthropology of genocide into anthropological hospitality.

Like the word or noun survivor, the words that human survivors narrate are always evocations of an unimaginable condition of being human that is unable to be fully recounted through linguistic translation or the ethnographer’s diligent eyes and the ethnographic participant observation as fundamental to understanding unfamiliar forms of life (Asad 2020, 404). Participant observation, as an anthropological attempt, Talal Asad writes, is not merely the distinctive method of a particular academic discipline but the essence of all learning, as well as the ability to grasp and to live a distinctive form of life (404). At issue in this book is rather how political violence destroys the possibility of all forms of life or of being human, and how the violence survives not only in memory but as ineffaceable bodily suffering or physiological disquiet that is not available to participant observation. This is an inevitable human condition in the afterlives of the violence of political modernity: But the war goes on. And for many years to come we shall be bandaging the countless and sometimes indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonialist onslaught (Fanon 2004, 181).

The works of anthropological hospitality unveil memories of political violence as both a human and more than human condition because "there is no ‘observation’ when people are at war and you [the anthropologist happen to] arrive asking them about it. You are, whether you wish to be or not, a participant. When terror weaves its way through a community, words are no longer mere information (Theidon 2013, 12). Observation becomes an impossible act when the desperation of survival are the sensations invoked in encounters with survivors following the taking of testimony" (Sanford 2009, 46). Ethnographic lessons on phenomenological looking and note taking as a linguistic act, which the anthropologist is taught as a method to apply in the field to people and their social and ecological life, do not care that, before arriving and being invited to come in, the listener cannot know the complete terror [that lies] in wait … with each testimony of political violence and survival as living on of violence and an endless quest for justice (Diop 2004, 118; see also Tadjo