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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
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