One of the solutions that
has been floated by the Iraq Study Group, an independent commission set up by US
Congress, is to split Iraq into three regions: Shia, Sunni and Kurdish. Cut back
to 1947.
Ethnic riots had
broken out across India, and its leaders decided the best course of action was
to divide the country. Cyril Radcliffe drew a line across a map dividing
communities that had lived together for hundreds of years.
Result: a million deaths and
14-16 million people displaced. Neither was that the end of the story. India and
Pakistan didn't stop fighting, Pakistan imploded violently into two nations, and
the mayhem still goes on in Kashmir.
But
as Anthony Cordesman of Washington's Centre for Strategic and International
Studies has pointed out, 53 per cent of Iraq's population live in four cities
and three of them are mixed. Any division of Iraq in terms of ethnic majo-rities
will be a disaster.
The Sunnis
would be losers as they would be left in possession of its central rump, barren
and with few oil wells. India's Muslim League elite might have fancied
themselves as inheritors of the Mughals, but Mughal power was ceded a long time
back.
By contrast Sunnis, who
just the other day ran all of Iraq and commanded its oil revenues, will have
lost everything in the space of a few years.
Their rage will turn their
part of the country into a base for Al-Qaida. Shia Iraq will be dominated by
Iran. Turkey and Iran will find an autonomous Kurdish region threatening, to
fend them off Kurds will invite the US in.
Just as in South Asia divided
and quarrelling nations are the perfect recipe for big power intervention. It's
only a unified, multicultural Iraq that can preserve some semblance of
independence and decency.
clipped from: timesofindia.indiatimes.com