Printed in Workers Vanguard, 11 January 1985
Kurdish Workers in the Iraqi Revolution of 1958-59 by Reuben
Samuels
1 November 1984 To the editor:
The Spartacist greetings to a recent Kurdish conference in Central
Europe ("For a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan," Workers Vanguard
No. 362, 14 September 1984) state: "While there are many Kurdish workers,
most are working outside of the geographical regions with a predominantly
Kurdish national identity"; and "the Kurdish proletariat exists primarily in
the diaspora." This may well be true today due to the policy of "Arabization"
of Kurdistan conducted by lraqs Baathist regime. According to the
book People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (1980), edited by
Gerard Chaliand, more than 200,000 Kurds have been removed from the strategic
oil region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Historically this was not always the case,
however. Communist-led Kurdish workers concentrated in these oil fields played
a vital, if contradictory, role in the revolutionary period following the
overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.
Iraq, like most of the states of the Near East, is an artificial
creation of the post-World War I imperialist partition of the Ottoman Empire.
Under the Ottomans Iraqi Kurdistan was the vilayet (administrative
division) of Mosul. Victorious Britain incorporated Mosul into a common state
with the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra both to gain control of this
petroleum-rich region and to give its newly created Iraqi protectorate
something resembling a viable economy. Until recently Kirkuk province in the
heart of Iraqi Kurdistan supplied 90 percent of Iraqs oil production.
Even with the development of the Basra fields in the south, during the late
1970s Kirkuk continued to supply more than 70 percent of the countrys
petroleum output.
Around the oil fields of Kirkuk there developed a militant,
Communist-led proletariat that was in its majority Kurdish. As Uriel Dann wrote
in Iraq Under Qassem (1969): "The thousands of workers at the oil
installations, the majority of whom were Kurds, had nurtured a local communist
branch with a fighting record unrivalled in Iraq." However, this Kurdish
working class was recruited directly from the agrarian and nomadic mountain
people who were (and still are) governed by feudal and tribal rulers and
custom. Although militant, the class consciousness of this proletariat was
rudimentary. As the July 1959 Kirkuk massacre demonstrated, membership in the
Iraqi Communist Party, which was at best equivocal about Kurdish
self-determination, did little to break Kurds from nationalism.
The ICP was not only the most proletarian of the Stalinist parties
in the Near East, it always had a large number of members from national and
ethnic minorities who played an important and often leading role in the life of
the party. In the period up to the 1958 revolution, Kurdish Communists
spearheaded the revival of a party decimated and driven underground by the
savage repression of the 1940s. Hanna Batatu, in her exhaustive study, The
Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978), notes
that during 1949-55 every general secretary of the ICP was Kurdish, as was
nearly one third of its central committee, and the party was run from Kurdistan
rather than Baghdad.
This period was marked by a significant rise of class and national
struggle, fueled by the infamous U.S.-backed, anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact between
Britain, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. While resented by all sections of the
regions oppressed, for uniting the principal enemies of the Kurds it was
particularly hated by them. On the other hand, the Soviet Unions generous
treatment of its own small Kurdish minority and its support of the short-lived
Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in Iran after World War II gave it enormous
prestige in Kurdistan, so that in the 1950s even Kurdish nationalist parties
claimed to be "Marxist-Leninist."
Thus the entire Kurdish nation and especially its urban working
class enthusiastically welcomed the 1958 revolution, which was made as much
against the Baghdad Pact as against the corrupt, decrepit and repressive
British-backed monarchy. The unstable bonapartist regime of General Qassem,
leader of the 1958 revolution, sought at first to consolidate its rule by
relying on the ICP, which though small was the unchallenged leader of the Iraqi
working class, both Arab and Kurdish. Instead of pursuing this rich opportunity
for proletarian revolution. the ICP subordinated itself to Qassem through the
"United National Front" with three bourgeois parties (soon joined by the
Kurdish nationalists). The betrayal of the Iraqi revolution was ordered
directly from the Kremlin, in the name of cementing the "Spirit of Camp David"
with Eisenhower (whose answer to the 1958 revolution was to land 10,000 Marines
on the coast of Lebanon). Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher noted at the
time:
"Khrushchev refused to countenance a communist upheaval
in Baghdad, afraid that this would provoke renewed Western intervention in the
Eastern Mediterranean, set the Middle East aflame, and wreck his policy of
peaceful coexistence." --reprinted in Deutscher, Russia, China and the
West ( 1970)
The contradictory role of the Communist-led Kurdish proletariat in
this period was demonstrated by the events in Mosul of March 1959 and the
Kirkuk massacre in July of that year. At the beginning of 1959, Qassems
rejection of "pan-Arab" unity with Nasser and his modest land reform program
created an unholy alliance between the old reactionary classes and the
Nasserites, who plotted a right-wing coup. The coup was to begin with an army
revolt in Mosul. Anticipating this revolt, the ICP called a mass rally: from
all over Iraq 250,000 youth, many armed, flocked to Mosul. The ICP was able to
unite Kurd and Arab soldiers against their officers; the poor laborers of the
Muslim Arab quarter were augmented by Kurdish tribesmen and Armenian peasants
who swept in from the countryside. The coup was suppressed, and the popularity
and revolutionary opportunity of the ICP grew to its height.
This makes the Kirkuk massacre of July 1959 all the more tragic.
In the aftermath of the 1958 revolution the ICP concentrated in its hands
control of many local governments, militias and even army garrisons. The
largely Kurdish ICP branch in Kirkuk used this control to escalate a squabble
over the celebration of the first anniversary of the revolution into an
intercommunal bloodbath, particularly directed against the Turkomans who made
up much of the citys commercial and middle classes. One month later in a
central committee plenum called to deal with the consequences of the Kirkuk
massacre, the ICP in referring to its own membership was forced to condemn "the
dragging of bodies, torture of detainees, looting and trespassing on the rights
and liberties of citizens."
The Kirkuk massacre was a tragic turning point for the ICP and the
Iraqi working class. It generated an enormous erosion of support for the ICP
and Qassem used it as a pretext to repress the Communists. The revolutionary
opportunity was squandered, and with it the opportunity to forge a
class-conscious Kurdish proletariat. Leadership of the oppressed Kurdish
toilers reverted to sheiks, khans and mullahs, as the subsequent Kurdish
national revolt demonstrated. For that revolt, led by mullah Mustafa Barazani,
was as much in defense of feudal relations in the countryside as it was against
the Arab chauvinism of Baghdad. In 1958-59, the proletariat of this divided
nation, carved up by four oppressive capitalist states, lost a unique
opportunity to be the vanguard of social emancipation, not only for the rest of
Kurdistan, but for the entire Near East.
Comradely, Reuben Samuels |