The Northeast

Turkey, Iran, and Iraq (Figure 6.37) are culturally and historically distinct from one another. For example, a different language is spoken in each country: Farsi in Iran, Turkish in Turkey, and Arabic in Iraq. Yet the three countries have some similarities. At various times in the past, each was the seat of a great empire, and each was deeply influenced by Islam. Each occupies the attention of Europe and the United States because of its location, resources, or potential threats. All three countries share some common concerns, such as how to allocate scarce water and how to treat the large Kurdish population that occupies a zone overlapping all three countries (see Chapter 1). Moreover, each country has experienced a radical transformation at the hands of idealistic reformist governments, although the paths pursued have varied dramatically.

FIGURE 6.37 The Northeast subregion and the Kurds. The area of Kurdish concentration overlaps four countries. The dark green shading shows the concentration of Sunni Muslims in Iraq, which is now the center of intense resistance to the U.S. occupation.

Turkey

Over the last century, Turkey has been more closely affiliated with Europe and North America than with any country in its home region. Turkey has been a stalwart ally of NATO (see Chapter 4) ever since 1952, shortly after this mutual defense organization was created (1949) to address the perceived Cold War threat from the Soviet Union. Greece also joined at that time, and the two countries formed a strategic southern military pivot point for NATO. After this long, successful association with Europe, a strong faction in Turkey wants to join the European Union. Many Turks have spent years in Europe as guest workers, and Europe-Turkey business relations are dense and profitable.

VIGNETTE

Veli-Çetin Avci and his wife Elif are an elegant young couple, both mechanical engineers and officers in Mekanik, a family-held firm that imports computer-driven tool-making machines from the European Union (Figure 6.38). They sell to Turkish firms that produce parts used in the global automobile industry. Despite the global recession, for them business is good. When asked about Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union (discussed in Chapter 4) and to what extent membership in the EU would help or hurt Turkey, their answer had two parts. They said immediately that it would be good for Turkey to join the EU because EU requirements for membership would force higher standards in all aspects of Turkish life and would increase democratic participation. But, they hastened to add, their business would probably fail because, given EU membership requirements for open markets, their middleman position between European firms and Turkish firms would be quickly taken over by the powerful European firms from which they now buy machines. Nevertheless, these business professionals believe that being part of the EU would give them many opportunities to modify their present business in order to take advantage of freer access to European markets and to global trade networks. [Source: From the field notes of Lydia Pulsipher and Mac Goodwin, July 2009, Konya, Turkey.]

FIGURE 6.38 Elif Avci and her husband, Veli-Çetin Avci, enjoy a rare evening out with friends. Courtesy Mac Goodwin

In recent years, enthusiasm for joining the EU has begun to wane as some EU members have put up ever more challenging barriers to Turkish membership. The official reasons the EU has given for not yet accepting Turkey into the EU are that Turkey has not sufficiently marketized its economy or instituted constitutional human rights guarantees, including freedom of religion and protections for minorities such as the Kurds. Less publicly stated are European worries about absorbing a predominantly Muslim state into an at least nominally Christian Europe. Meanwhile, Turks worry that their culture will not be sufficiently respected in Europe, but more importantly, Turkey is having an increasingly influential role in its own nearby neighborhood as the implications of the Arab Spring become more discernable.

As discussed earlier, Turkey, once the core of the Ottoman Empire, was dismantled after World War I. After independence in 1923, Turkey undertook a path of radical Europeanization, led by a military officer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who is revered as the father of modern Turkey. Kemal Atatürk and his followers declared Turkey a secular state, encouraged women to discard the veil and seclusion, and modernized the bureaucracy. Atatürk also promoted state-sponsored industrialization and actively sought to establish connections with Europe. While industrialization and modernization have proceeded in western Turkey, much of eastern Turkey remains agricultural and relatively poor. Islam, long deemphasized as a matter of state policy, is nevertheless an overriding influence on daily life, and there is a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism.

Turkey straddles the Bosporus Straits, a narrow passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean that often is described (with exaggeration) as the division between Europe and Asia. This location gives Turkey potential advantages as an intermediary if it can successfully increase economic links with Europe, Caucasia, Central Asia, and the countries of Southwest Asia. Istanbul, already a booming city of more than 16 million (see the Figure 6.23 map), is now the regional headquarters for hundreds of international companies. There are more than 250 U.S.-based companies alone, virtually all of them joint ventures of one kind or another: Coca-Cola, IBM, Eastman Kodak, Kraft Foods, Levi Strauss, and Citibank, to name just a few. Of Turkey’s nearly 75 million people, 77 percent are city dwellers. Many of them once lived in rural areas of Turkey, then traveled to Europe to work in factories and on farms; they have returned eager to pursue a standard of urban living similar to what they saw in Europe. Remittances from Turkish guest workers in Europe add substantially to the country’s GDP and have financed innumerable large homes that now dot the landscape of western Turkey.

Turkey’s future depends in part on its ability to manage its relatively abundant water resources. With its mountainous topography, Turkey receives the most rainfall of any country in the region, and the headwaters of the economically and politically important Tigris and Euphrates rivers are in the mountains of (Kurdish) southeastern Turkey. Agriculture employs 40 percent of Turkey’s workforce but accounts for only 12 percent of its GDP (mostly through exports of cotton and luxury food items). As new irrigation and power generation systems on the Euphrates come on line, agricultural production should increase dramatically. Cheap hydropower will also expand industry, which already accounts for 80 percent of Turkey’s exports. Despite insufficient electrical power, Turkey’s diversified economy manages to produce a wide range of goods, including apparel, food, textiles, transport equipment, and leather goods, all of which are exported to Europe and Asia.

Other than the civil war in Syria, just to the south, perhaps the greatest obstacle to Turkey’s stability is its ongoing conflict with its Kurdish minority (see Chapter 1, and Figure 6.28D). The Kurds are tribal peoples (some of them nomadic) who have lived in the mountain borderlands of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey (Figure 6.37) for at least 3000 years. The division of the Ottoman Empire after World War I by France and Britain divided the Kurds among lands held by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, leaving the Kurds without a state of their own. All four countries have had hostile relations with their Kurdish minorities. The conflict springs from complex disputes over control of territory and resources, but it is exacerbated by cultural and language differences as well as the Kurds’ resisting control by the state.

From time to time, the conflict escalates to the point of nearly continuous armed strife and aggression by parties on both sides. The war in Iraq and now the civil conflict in Syria have complicated the Kurds’ situation, in part because the loyalties of the transnational Kurdish community are now even more in question and also because Kurdish influence in Iraq and Syria has increased in recent years. The Kurdish struggle within Turkey seems now to be abating as the Turkish government, seeking to stabilize the borders it shares with its unpredictable neighbors, is offering to meet many long-denied Kurdish pleas for respect and autonomy.

Iran

Iran occupies a transitional geographic position in this subregion. People of Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, and Caucasian heritage occupy its western parts. Its eastern parts are occupied by people with language and ethnic roots in South Asia, especially Afghanistan and Pakistan. Because its northern flank borders the Caspian Sea, Iran shares in the debate over the future of this inland sea and its resources, especially water and oil, with Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). Iran is also close to Caucasia, with which it shares several ethnic groups, such as the Azeri. This transitional position of Iran has made it a zone of particular interest for world powers, most recently the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia).

Like Turkey, Iran has abundant natural resources and a large, educated population—it has 79 million people and is growing at a modest rate—that could make it a regional economic power. Iran’s large petroleum reserves give it influence in the global debate on energy use and pricing, but social and economic turmoil have held the country back for many years.

Iran’s recent political history and its status as a theocratic state based largely on a Shi’ite version of Islamism complicate its role in the modern world. The theocracy was formed under the leadership of the Islamic fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shi’ite spiritual leader who led a revolution in 1979 against Shah Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi’s father had seized control of the country in the 1920s and introduced secular and economic reforms patterned after those instituted by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey; he abdicated in favor of his son in 1941. In 1953, under President Eisenhower, the United States intervened in a bona fide election and forcefully removed the winner, Mohammad Mosaddeq, an opponent of Shah Reza Pahlavi. This helped the United States retain access to Iran’s oil and helped the shah retain power for 26 more years, during which Pahlavi continued his father’s efforts at Europeanization. But his emphasis on military might and on royal grandeur paid for with oil money overshadowed any genuine efforts at agricultural reform, industrialization, and social equality. Disparities in wealth and well-being between those who had connections to Pahlavi and those who didn’t grew ever wider.

With the revolution of 1979, political conditions in Iran changed rapidly and radically. Those who had hoped for a more democratic and secular Iran were crushed by the new theocratic state. Resisters were imprisoned, and many were executed. Among those most affected were women. Many upper-class women had lived emancipated lives under the shah’s reforms, studying abroad and returning to serve in important government posts. Now all women past puberty had to wear long black chadors, and they could no longer drive, travel in public alone, or work at most jobs. Yet even some highly educated women supported the return to seclusion, seeing it as a way to counter the unwelcome effects of Western influences. The turmoil of the revolution was characterized by several episodes in which Westerners were taken hostage by the government and held for many months, and by general resentment against the West, which in turn led to decades of isolation and conflict. During the 1980s, Iran engaged in a devastating war with Iraq.

Since the 1979 revolution, there have been significant social improvements in basic human well-being, but only limited economic growth and hesitant moves toward greater political freedom (see discussion of the Iranian Spring). Iran has a higher GNI per capita than many of its neighbors; it ranks in the mid-range on the UNHDI; and on gender equality, it again ranks in the mid-range (see Figure 6.24). The Iranian government had begun to work toward economic diversification and industrialization but now increasingly imports products from Asia or Europe, to the detriment of local industry. Attempts to improve the country’s out-of-date transportation system so that Iran can begin again to participate in trade with its Arab and Central Asian neighbors is moving slowly. Agriculture remains Iran’s weakest economic sector. Even though agriculture employs fully 25 percent of the population, it accounts for only 11 percent of the GDP, and Iran must import a large proportion of its food, most especially wheat.

Moves toward political reform have been constrained by the conservative Islamic clerics who wield immense power through a wide range of governmental bodies. For example, Iran’s Council of Guardians, a 12-member body of Islamic clerics, decides who can stand for election and how elections are run; it can veto any law passed by the Majlis (Iran’s equivalent to the U.S. Congress). In 1997, the Majlis allowed a reformer named Mohammad Khatami to be elected president. He set about liberalizing many of Iran’s internal policies, including women’s rights, and announced an end to its active nuclear armament program. Punitive economic sanctions that had been imposed by the United States and Europe in response to Iran’s suspected funding of global terrorism were eased for a while. Then in 2004, the Council of Guardians rejected more than 8000 would-be candidates and propelled an Islamist, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, to the presidency. Under his openly bellicose direction, Iran returned to developing a nuclear program, at times depicting it as merely aimed at power generation, and at times as an effort to develop nuclear weapons.

In early 2013, Iran was again aggressively posing as a potential nuclear power and was a major funder of President Assad’s efforts to destroy the Syrian uprising; but actually, the brutally suppressed 2009 elections, which were a precursor to the Arab Spring in 2010, turned out to be a harbinger of change in Iran as well. They showed that Iran had a well-informed and sophisticated Internet-savvy electorate, skilled at international social networking (Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr). The election protests also highlighted major internal divisions among the ruling clergy and showcased the Iranian government’s willingness to ruthlessly repress its people, many of whom were jailed or even killed during the protests.

In June of 2013, a centrist, Hassan Rouhani, was elected to the presidency by a wide margin. Over time he is expected to modify many of the reactionary domestic policies and belligerent international stances of Iran under former President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. 141. IRANIAN REVOLUTION STILL RESONATES 28 YEARS AFTER SHAH’S FALL

Iraq

Iraq, home to one of the earliest farming societies on earth and to the Babylonian Empire of Biblical times, was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Most of Iraq’s 34 million people live in the area of productive farmland in the country’s eastern half, on the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Although the present chaos in Iraq makes it difficult to obtain accurate information about population numbers and distributions, generally speaking, Sunni Arabs (about 9 million people) reside in the northern two-thirds of the plains around the capital of Baghdad. About 7 million ethnic Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, live mostly in the northern mountains in the regions bordering Turkey, Syria, and Iran. The southern third of the country is occupied by at least 16 million Shi’ite Muslims concentrated around Al Basrah at the head of the Persian Gulf. Iraq’s main oil fields are also in the south. Minority pockets of Shi’ite Muslims and other groups live throughout the country. These groups lived in more ethnically integrated neighborhoods and districts before the Iraq war was launched in 2003 by the United States.

Foreign activity in Iraq is not new. In the aftermath of World War I, Iraq was taken over by the British until 1932, when it became an independent monarchy. Although more than half of the Iraqi people are Shi’ite Muslims, since 1932 a powerful minority of (non-Kurdish) Sunni Muslims has controlled the government and most of the wealth. Following independence, the Iraqi monarchy, like many governments in the region, maintained strong alliances with Britain and the United States and gradually lost touch with its people. A tiny minority monopolized the wealth that was generated by increasing oil production, but they did not invest in social or economic development. The Shi’ites living in the south, where the oil is located, and the Kurds in the north benefited little from oil earnings.

In 1958, a group of young military officers, including Saddam Hussein, overthrew the monarchy and created a secular socialist republic that prospered over the next 20 years despite occasional political disruptions. Hussein founded Iraq’s secret police and then assumed leadership of the Baath Party and eventually the presidency of Iraq. Large proven oil reserves (second in size only to those of Saudi Arabia) became the basis of a very profitable state-owned oil industry, and the profits from oil financed a growing industrial base. Agriculture on the ancient farmlands of the Tigris and Euphrates floodplain also prospered, though environmental problems mounted. The proceeds from oil and agriculture produced a decent standard of living for most Iraqis, who also benefited from excellent government-sponsored education and health-care systems, but corruption and political repression were ever present. Friction between Sunnis and Shi’ites was particularly strong under Saddam Hussein, and since his ousting, strife over political power and access to water and petroleum resources has drastically increased Sunni-Shi’ite hostilities.

Like several other countries in the region, Iraq has been in a state of war and crisis for several decades. Two major events—the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1990–1991), precipitated by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—and the 10 years of severe economic sanctions that followed crippled the country’s economy. By 2000, European countries were lifting their sanctions, and Iraq was tacitly allowed to sell some oil to buy necessities, but U.S. sanctions remained in place. Then, in 2003, the United States launched a war against Iraq (discussed further) based on accusations made after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Although the war has concluded, a few thousand U.S. troops from the United States remain in several bases in Iraq. Iraq held its first truly democratic elections in 2010, with more than 60 percent of the population casting ballots. Meanwhile, an insurgency against the now-elected Iraqi government continues, with numerous armed groups in opposition. Despite ongoing violence, Iraqis seem to be hopeful that they can solve their problems as foreign troops withdraw.