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Խմբագրականներ
Blood borders
How a better Middle East would look By Ralph Peters
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 Mediterraneanoriented
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.
• • •
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 , Pakistan , Qatar , Saudi Arabia , Syria ,
Turkey , United Arab Emirates , West Bank
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Ralph Peters is the author of the new book "Never Quit the Fight," to be published on July 4th.
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