Assyrians adopted an ‘outsider identity’ during the British mandate in Iraq (1920-1932). British, Assyrian, and Iraqi officials played an important role in the shaping and manufacturing of this new identity for the Assyrian community. Soon after their arrival to Iraq in 1919, Assyrian refugees from the Hakkari and Urmia regions were placed in the Ba’qubah refugee camp. This paper will contextualize the history of the Ba’quabh refugee camp, and place it into the larger literature that deals with the formation of the modern Iraqi state. Given that the camp remains unexamined at present, this paper hopes to shed some light on the various policies that helped to manufacture a new Assyrian identity during the period of the British mandate. This paper will argue that British colonial officials modeled the refugee camp after a ‘modern European’ city, where the Assyrians were expected to participate in labour and leisure activities introduced by colonial officials with the aim of managing the social and political lives of the population. The activities introduced by the British played an important role in the re-shaping of Assyrian societal order, and helped in the creation of a new outsider identity for the Assyrian refugees. In direct contrast to the colonial policies on labour and leisure, colonial officials also encouraged the Assyrian religious and tribal leadership to manage the internal affairs of the refugees at Ba’qubah. Officials believed that this continuation of so-called ‘traditional political management’ of the community was going to help keep the refugees organized and managed in their new environment. These policies encouraged a number of prominent Assyrians to claim that they were the rightful and sole leaders of the Assyrian people. These leadership claims helped to fuel Assyrian nationalist sentiments and political schisms that continued to play a role in Assyrian-Iraqi relations well into the mandatory period. Finally this paper will examine the struggle between Iraqi officials and Assyrian refugees at Ba’qubah. Local Iraqi politicians were reluctant to consider the Assyrians as citizens of the modern Iraqi state, these policies created hostilities between Iraqi and Assyrian residents of the newly created state, which helped to foster changes in the political and social order of the Assyrian community. The antagonistic relationship helped to reinforce the outsider identity that the Assyrians community reinforced through the period of the British mandate.

Following two coup d’états in 1968 the Ba’th consolidated its power in the political sphere and worked on luring its political opponents, the ICP and the KDP, by inviting them to join the National Patriotic Front. It also issued laws to draw members of various Iraqi communities closer to it. In the case of Assyrians, Law 251 assured them cultural and linguistic rights and permitted them to establish organizations on the basis of social, cultural, artistic and linguistic objectives in 1973. In this paper I will analyze the interactions between the state and Assyrians, and Assyrians’ inclusion/exclusion during this period. Further, using governmental policies and the Assyrian literary movement as examples, this paper will investigate the complex ways Assyrians reformulated their identity/identities. It will examine the interplay between the ethnic (Assyrian), sectarian (different Assyrian denominations), and national (Iraqi) identities, which also existed within this community. I will trace the developments of these, at times conflicting affiliations, and identify factors that have an impact on them both internally, within the Assyrian community, and externally, within Iraqi society at large. It has been argued that Law 251 was a political tactic used by the Ba’th regime to further its own agenda, but it nevertheless onset a new Assyrian literary and cultural movement. As such, I intend to analyze the role of the Assyrian Cultural Club, and its magazine Murdinn? Atur?y? (The Assyrian Literate) within this movement. This club was a prominent centre for the development of Assyrian literature, popular culture and national aspirations from the 1960s until its closure by the government in the 1980s. I will further use popular culture in the form of music and poetry in addition to written material produced by intellectuals. This will ensure that my research for intellectual production, takes into account-varied segments of the population. Music, musicians, singers, and cassette tapes were fluid and highly mobile, seeping through the borders of the nation state and allowing for the formation of a transnational Assyrian community in constant dialogue. At the same time Assyrians in the 2nd half of the 20th century also identified with the newly created nation-states, and became integrated to various degrees in Iraq. Alongside Assyrian publications, the recently available Ba’thist archives have been valuable in examining government attitudes towards Assyrians during this period.

When relations between a regime and its intellectuals, or between a regime and the country's minorities, are tense and problematic, we may expect to find this expressed in works of literature and art. This presentation will focus on the way in which such a relationship is expressed in the works of the Kurdish-Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari (1926-1996). Al-Haydari was a victim of political persecution by the Iraqi regime in the mid-twentieth century, and was forced into exile as a result. The focus will be on tensions between al-Haydari’s identity, as an Iraqi, and as a member of the Kurdish minority in Iraq - both identities are explicitly expressed in his poetry. Al-Haydari's poetry reflects three main aspects of this situation: his own personal relations with the Iraqi regime, especially the latter's attempts to wipe out the Communist opposition to which al-Haydari belonged; the balance of power between the authorities and the Kurds; and the poet's own attitude towards this minority, to which he belonged. The perspectives from which al-Haydari views these two entities, the regime and the Kurdish minority, extend from absolute antagonism, through political criticism and scorn towards the regime, to sympathy towards, and political and social criticism of the Kurds. I will examine examples of al-Haydari's poetry that present a fascinating picture of an intellectual's complex identity against the background of violence he witnessed in Iraq, his persecution and exile, as a member of an ideological opposition to the regime on the one hand, and as the son of an ethnic minority on the other. In addition, I will address the status of the Kurds under a despotic and repressive regime, as reflected in the mirror-image provided by al-Haydari.

Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘thist regime is often described as a Sunni regime which ruled over a Shi‘i majority population. Analyses of Iraq have often viewed the well-known persecution of prominent Shi‘i religious scholars and the neutering of Shi‘i institutions in an assumed context of Sunni sectarian policies. Thus, although the Shi‘a are a numerical majority, the literature often treats them as a political minority. In other words, like other minorities, the Shi‘a had to deal with the Sunni dominated state attempting to impose its hegemony over them. The recent release of the former regime’s archives has enabled a full study of this issue for the first time. These documents call for a reevaluation of this dynamic and a more nuanced view of Ba‘thist policies. In fact, little evidence of traditional Sunni sectarianism exists in the archive. This does not negate the persecution of Iraqi Shi‘a during Saddam’s presidency, or their self-identification as a political minority. It simply requires another explanation. In this paper, I argue that the persecution of Iraqi Shi‘a resulted from Ba‘thist attempts to eliminate sectarianism through the imposition of a generic Pan-Arab Islam. This generic Islam often contained certain Sunni assumptions and tendencies, but it should not be confused with Sunnism. In fact, Sunnis often protested when Saddam’s regime imposed the same Ba‘thist views of Islam on them. Nevertheless, these Ba‘thist policies, whatever their origin, led to decreased independence for Shi‘i religious institutions, the persecution of Shi‘i scholars, and the (inadvertent) increase of sectarian tensions. As these tensions developed, Iraqi Shi‘a came to view themselves a political minority defined against what they viewed as a sectarian Sunni state. Although, this sentiment did not reflect, and indeed was in direct contradiction to the intent of official Ba‘thist policies, it was, nonetheless, fundamental to the development of Shi‘i identity. The results of this dynamic (and the fact that it resulted from mutual misunderstanding) can still be felt in Iraq today.