Social Science Research Council

"Eden Again?: The Technologies of Nostalgia and Reconstruction in Iraq’s Marshes"

Restoring the southern marshlands is “the sexy project” of Iraq’s reconstruction (Alwash 8/11/05). The United Nations, a host of NGOs, engineering firms, and several states—the United States., the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Japan—are working tirelessly on this initiative, devoting millions of dollars to the project. The preamble to the new Iraqi Constitution references the marshes as a reminder of prior brutality and as a rallying cry for a new, more democratic and thus more humane, form of governance. Saddam stands trial for seven crimes, one among them the destruction of the marshes following mass executions after the 1991 Uprising. When called before Congress to give his official reasons for going to war, Bush declared that the destruction of the Iraqi marshes and the genocide of Marsh Arabs was a call to arms. The marshes have become the aesthetic proof of Iraq’s liberation and photos of happy Marsh Arabs are often cited as evidence that Iraq truly is a better place in a post-Saddam era. In my research, I will explore how the project of marsh restoration is seen as vital to nation-building in Iraq. I will investigate the principal question, “How is the restoration of the marshes instrumental to crafting a new democratic order in Iraq?”

Previously, I found that elite Iraqi exiles who never lived in the area directed marsh restoration. For them, restoring the area is the act of healing a wound opened when, following the 1991 Shi’a Uprising, Saddam ordered mass executions of Shi’a at the same time that he drained the marshes. Many of these exiles returned to Iraq to assume political positions in the government or to form humanitarian organizations after the fall of Saddam. Their imprint on Iraqi policy is unmistakable and the marshes have become the shorthand for a new political era in Iraq. This moment affords a unique opportunity to think critically about how exiles are “deeply implicated both ideologically and materially in nationalist projects of their homelands” (Werbner 2000: 5). Key here is that in restoring the marshes, exiles are not just deeply implicated in this nationalist project; they are in fact setting the nationalist agenda.