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Kurdish lessons leave Iraqi Arabs cold
By Husam al-Saray in Baghdad
BAGHDAD - Baghdad teenager Amir Muayyad returned from a holiday in northern
Iraq with a couple of words of Kurdish to share with his friends. "I was
passing through an area and heard its name by chance - Swara Tukah," said the
17-year-old.
Over a game of pool in central Baghdad, Amir's friends repeat the exotic
Kurdish words. "Come on, don't play the Kurd on us Baghdadis," they teased, to
which he responded, defensively, that his knowledge of Kurdish is barely better
than theirs.
Neither Amir nor his friends is aware of the historic significance of Swara
Tukah, an area between the Kurdish towns of Amedi and Dohuk that was the center
of a major uprising against British colonial rule. The revolt is the Kurdish
equivalent of the so-called
Revolution of 1920 - a date taught in schools across Iraq as a landmark in the
struggle against British rule.
Though they share the same country, Arabs and Kurds know little of each other's
history and even less of each other's languages.
Their shared legacy of revolts against colonial Britain lies long forgotten
amid a simmering internal conflict over land and resources.
Decades of dominance
Since 1991, the Kurds have governed a semi-autonomous region in the north.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wants to check Kurdish ambitions to cement
their autonomy and expand their territory. With United States troops preparing
to withdraw, many fear the dispute could turn bloody.
Language and ethnicity set Arabs and Kurds apart. Iraq's constitution accords
both groups equal rights as citizens and says both languages must be taught in
all Iraqi schools.
In reality, however, few young Kurds speak Arabic and even fewer young Arabs
learn Kurdish.
According to Dhia al-Shakarchi, an independent politician, the language gap
reflects the political rift between Kurds and Arabs, and both sides are to
blame.
"It is a pity there is hardly any desire among Iraqi Arabs to learn Kurdish,"
he said. "This is a result of the erroneous policies of both the federal
government and the local Kurdish authorities."
Members of the larger ethnic group, the Arabs, ought to have "taken the
initiative in reassuring Kurds of their status as true and equal partners in
the new Iraq", Shakarchi said.
On the other hand, he said, Kurds in the semi-autonomous region have also been
reluctant to learn Arabic. They now take more pride in their own language to
counter "their erstwhile status as second-class citizens", he said.
Iraq's majority Arabs have traditionally dominated its politics. The Kurds, who
form between one-fifth and one-quarter of the population, rebelled against
Baghdad several times in the latter half of the last century, provoking a
repressive, sometimes genocidal, response.
The last such rebellion - in 1991 - led to the creation of the semi-autonomous
Kurdistan region and the Kurdish language replaced Arabic as the new medium in
schools.
Commercial impulses
While Kurdish students no longer pay the same attention to Arabic, young Arabs
in Baghdad continue their neglect of Kurdish. Amir, the teenager, said plenty
of his peers take extra lessons in English or Arabic - but he knows of no one
studying Kurdish.
Salam Abd al-Wahid, a teacher of Arabic in Baghdad's Shaab district, said
Kurdish language classes are not viewed as important because ministry
examinations in them are not compulsory.
"We barely have any rapport with our colleagues who teach Kurdish because they
have far fewer classes and are rarely around," he said.
However, the government insists it takes seriously the task of teaching Arab
students Kurdish.
Hussein Jaff, the director general of the Iraqi Education Ministry's department
of Kurdish and other minority languages, said Kurdish is currently taught to
16- and 17-year-olds.
"It remains as binding a subject as chemistry or physics," he said. He added
that Kurdish teaching would be extended to 18-year-olds from the academic year
starting in 2010.
Jaff said the government in Baghdad had no reservations about teaching the
language, "More and more Kurdish language teachers are being appointed in high
schools in Baghdad and the provinces."
Historically, say analysts, Arabs have only learnt Kurdish when living in
proximity with Kurds.
According to Abd al-Munim al-Asam, a political analyst, many Arabs speak the
language of their Kurdish and Turkoman neighbors in and around the ethnically
mixed city of Kirkuk. "These languages are essential for doing business," he
said.
Arabs with a smattering of Kurdish can also be found in districts of Baghdad
such as Sadriyah, where many Kurds settled.
Najah Salman, a resident of Sadriyah, said some Arabs learnt a few words of
Kurdish "to show their friendliness towards their neighbors and to make them
feel welcome in Baghdad".
However, most Kurds living in Baghdad speak good Arabic and younger Arabs tend
to communicate with their Kurdish peers in Arabic alone.
Nazdar Muhammad, a Kurdish woman from Kirkuk who moved to Baghdad with her Arab
husband 25 years ago, said she only uses Kurdish when speaking to her mother.
Neither of her two children has learnt the language.
"I see no justification for teaching my children a language that none of their
peers will use at school or anywhere else," she said.
Signs of trouble
Most Iraqis are only troubled by their lack of Kurdish when they come to
Kurdistan as tourists. Thousands of Arabs annually visit the region's mountain
resorts for relief from searing summer heat and, in some cases, for a respite
from sectarian strife.
Many complain of their difficulty in communicating with a new generation of
Kurds that does not speak Arabic. "Kak, Arabi nazanim," is a common
response from the locals they meet, roughly translated as, "Sorry mate, I don't
speak Arabic."
The difficulties Arabs face in Kurdistan are akin to those that may confront a
Kurd visiting Baghdad. The signs on roads and official buildings in each region
tend to be either in Arabic or in Kurdish, rarely both. If a second language is
used, it is usually English.
Narmin Othman, Iraq's environment minister and one of several high-ranking
Kurds in the Baghdad government, said she was sad to see Kurdish-language signs
limited to Kurdistan.
"If I found such a sign [in Baghdad], I would really feel that I am not a
second-class citizen," she said.
Othman said cabinet colleagues occasionally correct her use of Arabic grammar.
Her response, she said, usually elicits hearty laughter, "How would I prove my
Kurdish identity if I did not make such mistakes in Arabic?"
Iraqi Arab leaders can currently communicate with Kurdish counterparts who were
schooled in an era when Arabic was the only dominant language in Iraq. It may
not be so easy dealing with another generation of Kurds less fluent in Arabic.
Dangerous incomprehension
Ali Abd al-Sada, a journalist from Baghdad, said Arab neglect of the Kurds'
language is compounded by an ignorance of Kurdish culture. Sada learnt Kurdish
during a two-year stay in Kurdistan and encourages others to do the same.
"To learn Kurdish is to make Iraq's cultural diversity more than a mere slogan,
to make it a living experience," he said.
With Kurds and Baghdad threatening to use force to further their political
aims, some are alarmed by the prospect of having no common language in which to
communicate.
"Mutual linguistic ignorance can seriously undercut any effort to build sound
relations between the two ethnic groups," said Mufid al-Jezairy, an Iraqi Arab
member of parliament and chairman of a parliamentary committee on culture and
tourism.
"But by learning to speak each other's language, Arabs and Kurds can improve
their relations," he said.
Political analyst Saad Sallum is not optimistic. He said even scholarly Arabs
are unlikely to favor learning Kurdish, given that the works of the best-known
Kurdish thinkers have already been translated into Arabic.
He warns that the Arab-Kurdish divide can only be healed when both sides learn
each others' languages. Political solutions that stop short of tackling the
language gap are mere "cultural decoration", he said, and are doomed to fail.
A shop-owner in Baghdad's famed Muttanabi book market said there is little
appetite for books about Kurdish culture.
"Educated Arabs are not allergic to learning about Kurdish culture," he said,
"but they would want to read about it in Arabic."
Husam al-Saray is an IWPR-trained journalist in Baghdad.
(This article originally appeared in Institute for
War and Peace Reporting. Used with permission.)
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