The proposed panel aims to bring together scholars for the purpose of exploring the history of Iraq in the 1990s. It focuses on socio-cultural, religious and political processes, through which post-Gulf War Iraq, under the Baathist regime, maintained a distinct identity. In this context, we seek to explain a number of thematic issues: one of which involves the relationship between religion and politics, and how various religious groups or institutions like the Shi‘i clerical establishment based in Najaf, were affected by the regime’s attempt to be co-opt or marginalized. The panel also seeks to explore various state-society relations and how state-building processes helped shape socio-cultural, economic, ethnic, religious, and sectarian processes.
How did socio-religious and political movements, such as the Sadrists, contribute to the transformation of Iraq’s cultural and religious identity? What caused their formation in the first place? What were the main institutional processes and patronage systems through which Sunni-dominated Iraqi economy was able to operate under the U.N. regime of sanctions? How did the Baathist 1990s’ regional and foreign policy contribute to the 2003 collapse of the regime? What defined the ethnic and sectarian relations after the Gulf War? How did the Kurdish semi-autonomy contribute (if at all) to weakening of the central government? The above are some of the many questions that are inclusive to the panel.
In this view, we aim to rethink the history of Iraq in the 1990s and expand on a historical period that has been largely overlooked by the scholarly field.
Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 it has become clear that there were important social, political and economic developments in Iraq during the 1990s that were insufficiently understood by scholars and policymakers. For example, analysts knew far too little about the Sadrist movement, the changing role of tribes as the Iraqi state weakened under sanctions, and the effects of the regime's "Faith Campaign." This lack of descriptive inference contributed to post-invasion policy mistakes. This paper identifies a set of questions that, in retrospect, could (and arguably should) have been asked during the 1990s about Iraqi society and politics. The paper then examines what questions political scientists, anthropologists, and historians did ask during the 1990s and what questions they did not ask. It explores several factors that may have influenced which questions were asked and which were overlooked: disciplinary trends and priorities, the lack of access to field-sites in Iraq, resources available for studying Iraq, an over-reliance on particular Iraqi exiles for information from Iraq, and imperatives of US policy. One tentative hypothesis is that the lack of scholarly attention to important social and political developments in Iraq was partly due to political scientists' overemphasis during the 1990s on studying liberalization and purportedly nascent processes of democratization. Political scientists largely ignored seemingly stable authoritarian systems, such as Iraq, or debated the democratic bona fides of exiled opposition forces. The paper will draw lessons for scholarship on other states run by closed authoritarian systems.
The 1991 uprising in Iraq evolved from a series of spontaneous protests in the south. They began immediately after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait on February 28, 1991, and ended in April of the same year. Disenchanted Shi'a in nine provinces in the Iraqi south 'took matters into their own hands' in an attempt to topple the deteriorating regime of Saddam Hussein, but were abandoned by the international community and left to face the brutality of the regime. Hundreds of thousands were killed immediately or simply vanished in Saddam's detention facilities and tens of thousands went to exile.
This paper reports on my ongoing research project that aims at capturing the memories of those Iraqis who participated in the uprising, many of whom live in the United States. As someone, who took part in the 1991 uprising, I feel a sense of anxiety as I witness the passing of many years without any serious attempt to document such a momentous event.
The paper will explore the trends of the violent activities in the various provinces and the frame of mind that accompanied the popular uprisings. The paper will also examine the coordination, or lack thereof, among the provinces, the nature of leadership and the motivations and aspirations of those who participaterd in the uprising, and the legacy of the uprising on the Shi'a-State relations throughout the 1990s; all through firsthand accounts of the actual participants.
This paper compares the output of the Supreme Council of the Islamic revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)-affiliated Voice of Rebellious Iraq and other opposition broadcasts on the one hand, with Government of Iraq-affiliated Iraqi News Agency as well as Al Jumhuriyah; Al Qadisiyah; Al Thawrah; Babil and other newspapers. The sources used in this study are available in the holdings of the US Government's Open Source Center, formerly the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, available to non-US Government users through the World News Connection database. This survey attempts to determine how ideological distinctions between these sets of sources affected their coverage of Iraqi political events; also by surveying both sets of sources this paper aims to establish more detailed timelines of Iraqi political history between 1995 and 2003, as well as evaluating the merit of these primary sources for further development of historical narratives for late-Iraqi Ba'thist history.
