Boston Globe Editorial - Iraq's intolerance

Boston Globe Editorial - Iraq's intolerance
Copyright by The Boston Globe
Published: August 16, 2007


The truck bombings on Tuesday that killed more than 250 members of the religious sect known as Yazidi in northern Iraq appear to reflect local, parochial enmities. Still, this atrocity casts light on a more diffuse phenomenon in Iraq that U.S. policymakers have failed to comprehend and that cosmopolitan Iraqis have long ignored or denied - a ruthless intolerance of the Other.

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidi hold themselves apart from their Muslim or Christian neighbors. Those neighbors tend to view the Yazidi as heretics, because their religion draws on certain elements of those two creeds but contradicts crucial doctrines of each. The Yazidi, who do not accept converts and must be born into their religion, are said to disbelieve in evil; they worship a figure whom Christians and Muslims identify with Satan but whom the Yazidi regard as a chief angel who repented of his rebellion and was pardoned by the deity.

Like the predominantly Sunni Muslim Kurds living around them, or Christian sects, or Shiites, or Iraqi Jews, the Yazidi have had times when they could live their separate lives in peace and other times when they were persecuted for being different.

The chain of events leading up to the four huge bomb blasts Tuesday in three villages near the Syrian border apparently began months ago, when a 17-year-old Yazidi girl eloped with a Sunni and converted to Islam.

As punishment for what her community considered a violation of a religious taboo, she was stoned to death. A cellphone video of the stoning was circulated on the Internet, and seems to have incited attacks against members of the sect, including the murder of 23 Yazidi factory workers in April. The police said they were taken off a bus by killers from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The desolating reality illuminated in the truck bombings and each of the incidents preceding it is a collective refusal to accept differences, whether of one individual from a community or of one group from another.

Indeed, this is the billowing nightmare that has descended on all the people of Iraq.

Beyond the obvious struggles for power and resources, old sectarian and ethnic animosities - some from as far back as the 7th century - are being revived. Long-dormant vendettas between Shiites and Sunni Arabs, between Kurds and Turkmen, or between Islamists and secular Iraqis have been let loose.

Acknowledging this reality need not mean giving up all hope that Iraqis may eventually find ways to live in peace.

Still, for American policymakers, the lesson is that an invading power cannot destroy the administrative and security structures of a fragile society and expect to harvest a pluralist democracy. The lesson for the disparate Iraqi communities is that if they don't find a way to live together, they will go on killing one another.