Seeker Blog

One of the things people miss with insurgencies is that behind every insurgent is a family structure, and especially in the Middle East you are talking about extended families.

I’ve not read Henri Barkey before, however his views on amnesty in this CFR interview seem sensible to me.

Henri Barkey, a Middle East expert and head of the international relations department at Lehigh University, says Iraqi plans for an amnesty can seriously undercut the Iraqi insurgency by creating a rift between homegrown Iraqi insurgents, who are entitled to amnesty, and members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are not.

Even though many Americans oppose an amnesty if given to Iraqis involved in killing American troops, Barkey supports such an offer because “if we want Iraq to succeed, we need to figure out a way for them to have national reconciliation, and we should not stand in the way.”
You had an interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times a few days ago in which you advocated that the Iraqis offer an amnesty to the Iraqi insurgents, even if responsible for the death of American soldiers. What got you thinking about amnesties in Iraq?

I’ve been following the Iraq situation for a while, but I’ve also been following the situation in Turkey, and I’ve been convinced that in the case of Turkey, the Turks are really an amnesty away from resolving their problems [with their Kurdish minorities]. That said, of course the devil is in the details. It depends on the amnesty, it depends on the terms, and it depends obviously on other circumstances and the kind of deals you make with neighboring states.

Amnesties are important for one reason apart from national reconciliation. One of the things people miss with insurgencies is that behind every insurgent is a family structure, and especially in the Middle East you are talking about extended families. So for every person who is part of the insurgency there is an automatic support group. Even if the families don’t like what their son is doing, they will tend to support him. They will tend to provide him safe haven. They will tend to provide food and shelter, and God knows what else. And when you think about the close relations that exist in the Middle East, where your cousin’s cousin is seen as part of your family, insurgencies create their own natural support basis within the population.

And these extended families extend to tribes as well in Iraq, I guess.

Right. But the converse also works. When you offer an amnesty, pressure now arises. Many families don’t necessarily want to be involved in the insurgency business because there are costs to them. Their house may be raided, their kids may get killed. So the moment you give an incentive of an amnesty, then you’re putting pressure on the insurgent to take advantage of it not because he wants or he likes the amnesty but because now his mother, his father, his grandfather, his uncles, his nieces, everybody probably will try to say “Look, this is a good deal here, it’s time for you to come home.”

Obviously, al-Qaeda-type people and foreigners should not be given that incentive, in part because the family structure that I just discussed doesn’t work in that case. Secondly, when you talk about giving an amnesty to insurgents in Iraq, it should even include insurgents who may have killed Americans. In the end, we are going to want to leave Iraq, hopefully the sooner the better. But insurgents who are Iraqi will remain in Iraq. They have no other place to go. And if we want Iraq to succeed, we need to figure out a way for them to have national reconciliation, and we should not stand in the way. It is critical they create the institutions and the basis for a future, peaceful Iraq.

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