A GREAT IRAQI: KANAN MAKIYA IS HIS NATION'S CONSCIENCE
by David Pryce-Jones
National Review
May 14, 2004

Kanan Makiya is a remarkable man. If all Iraqis were like him, the country would be a flourishing democracy. His is the voice of reason and reasonableness. Humanist intellectuals of his quality are in short supply, and generally speaking they have little or no political influence wherever they happen to live. But wait: Makiya is the author of The Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence, published in 1989 and 1993 respectively.

At that time, Saddam Hussein was depicting himself as a nationalist uniting all Arabs and standing up to the United States and the West, and many Arabs believed it, or pretended to. The truth was very different : Saddam was only devising excuses for tyranny. These two ground-breaking books exposed the suffering of Iraqis
and the moral degradation of those who apologised for it. Here were open political challenges around which a formal opposition - and public opinion in the West - could muster. Makiya has been called the Iraqi Solzhenitsyn, and the compliment does not seem so extravagant.

Now in his mid-fifties, he left Baghdad in 1968 to study architecture at MIT. His father, a retired architect, lives in London, and his mother is English, daughter of a headmaster, which explains Makiya's soft-spoken Oxford accent. Staying on in the States, he has become a professor at Brandeis where he gives courses on totalitarianism in the Arab context. Had he himself ever been tortured or victimised in person, he says, he could never have written his books.

A whole new field of research opened up for him after the 1991 Gulf war. Several million Baath Party documents were seized in liberated Kuwait and in Iraqi Kurdistan, and these revealed the inner workings of an Arab police state in all its fascist ugliness. Makiya's brain-wave has been to gather the documentation together and preserve it as the Iraq Memory Foundation, an IMF easily distinguished from another body with those initials. Publication on the widest scale is envisaged, probably in collaboration with Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies.

Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress turned to Makiya to present the case for Iraqi liberation. Both men are secular Shiites who aim to speak for all Iraqis. They have been central participants in the lobbying and turf wars so damagingly waged up and down the corridors of power in Washington. Makiya is too discreet to complain about the systematic attempts by the State Department to denigrate and marginalise him, Chalabi and the INC. More a thinker than a politician by nature, he was the man called on to draft a constitution with the clear goal of sharing power equitably between the Shiite majority and the Sunni and Kurdish and other minorities. Common-sense –as well as justice - dictates that the only viable outcome for Iraq is some form of federalism along these lines.

In the days immediately after Saddam's overthrow, Makiya hurried to Iraq full of patriotic enthusiasm, and gratitude to be in a free country. In one of the more elegant districts of Baghdad is the house which his father had designed for the family, and where he himself grew up. Twelve American lieutenant colonels were inhabiting it. He wrote a letter to L. Paul Bremer, who saw to it that the house was turned over to him to be the Constitutional Research Office, and now it is evolving into the headquarters of the Memorial Foundation. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million documents will eventually complete the collection. The intention is to preserve the record on the lines of the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Gauck Commission in Berlin which houses the dossiers of the Stasi, (the secret police of Communist East Germany). The shame of the past also serves as a warning for the future.

In Communist days, dissidents set themselves a task of a seemingly impossible magnitude, yet they displayed the energy, the purpose and the good humour that comes from the confident pursuit of truth and justice. Makiya is in that same mould. Passing through London, he's staying in the tranquil Bloomsbury apartment of his family. He fetches a lap-top and takes me through what he has stored on it. Images of shelving, heaped box files catalogued by subject, folders piled in vaults from floor to ceiling. So thorough were the Ba'athist police that they even recorded rumours. The evidence here will provide the basis of the trials of Saddam and his clique. Salam Chalabi, nephew of Ahmad, and a London-trained lawyer, has the responsibility for preparing the legal commission overseeing the trials, and he is married to a Makiya.

Right in the heart of Baghdad is the Zawra Park complex, a huge expanse that Saddam dedicated to himself, marking its eastern and western limits with bronze casts of his fore-arms, each brandishing a sword to form colossal arches that rise slightly higher than Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe in Paris. This example of dictator's kitsch and megalomania is the subject of another of Makiya's books, The Monument (1991). Nobody has yet decided what to do about these arches, but the entire Zawra Park is being given over to the Memorial Foundation. Makiya hopes to hold a competition for a future layout, including a building for the archives. The United Nations retains about 100 million dollars skimmed one way or another off its administration of the Oil-for-Food program that allowed Saddam effectively to nullify sanctions through the ‘90s. The journalist Claudia Rosett has been the first to propose that the U.N. makes amends by endowing the Memorial Foundation with at least some of these ill-gotten funds.

Arab political culture is "infected," as Makiya puts it, and is now at its lowest ebb ever. He speculates that defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 was so painful that Arabs are in denial about their society. For him it is crucial that no more generations are brought up on "the cruelties of Arab nationalism." We are now "at a turning-point," he says, "The West could engage with the Arab world without supporting dictatorships." Democracy is "doable," in a favorite word of his. All the same, current violence has obliged him to postpone his return to Baghdad. "I'm on all sorts of death lists: Ex-Baathists, foreign Arab insurgents, and so on would like to kill me."

The violence in Fallujah, as he sees it, was essentially a local issue involving small numbers of Iraqis and non-Iraqis. Events in Najaf, in contrast, can jeopardise the country's future. Makiya unhesitatingly calls the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr a thug. "Moqtada is totally the product of the Baathist system and its criminal elements, he's using the only methods he knows, and he can't be allowed to get away with it. Otherwise he'll go on to represent the remnants of the old regime among the Shiites, and reproduce it." Moqtada's henchmen murdered the rival and moderate Ayatollah al-Khoie – one of the killers is in American custody – and this has to be a matter for the courts. The Shiites must resolve the confrontation with Moqtada for themselves, "in-house," to use another favorite word of Makiya's. "You can't expect the Sunnis to participate, and the Kurds have a specific agenda. The burden of the country lies with wise and responsible Shiite leadership." He's not going to criticise American policy except to say, "Lack of reliance on Iraqis is the problem."

The programme he originally sketched out for Chalabi and the INC still stands, he hopes: expand and re-jig the Governing Council after June 30, choose a prime minister, find a cabinet, devise tripartite power-sharing between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, hold elections next year for a Constituent Assembly – that's the really critical step – appoint a committee out of it to approve the constitution, and then have a referendum to legitimise what's been done. It's doable.

Oughtn't he to be the prime minister crucial to the transition to democracy ? Taken aback by the question, he shakes his head. "I want to write something personal, a self-critical examination of where we went wrong." Besides, the setting up of his Memorial Foundation will require five to ten years. Yes, that's doable too.

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