حزب مردم بلوچستان Balochistan Peoples Party بلوچستانءِ اُستمانءِ گــَل
Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look
7/4/2006 AFJ - 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 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.
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
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899