Reversing Baghdad's Ethnic Cleansing, Or Not?

In recent months ordinary Sunnis and, to a lesser extent, Shia have fallen victim to a form of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. Traditionally mixed neighbourhoods were uprooted as militias from the local, majority sect gave minorities their marching papers. Usually those papers read, "leave or die." What began to emerge were largely homogenous areas, primarily Shia with a few Sunni enclaves.

The New York Times reports that now the Maliki government appears intent on taking advantage of the Bush "surge" to undo the damage:

"The Iraqi government on Tuesday ordered tens of thousands of Baghdad residents to leave homes they are occupying illegally, in a surprising and highly challenging effort to reverse the tide of sectarian cleansing that has left the capital bloodied and Balkanized.

"In a televised speech, Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, who is leading the new crackdown ...said the government would break into homes and cars it deemed dangerous, open mail and eavesdrop on phone calls.

"Since the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra a year ago, the sectarian map of Baghdad has been almost completely redrawn, as Shiites pushed Sunnis from neighborhood after neighborhood.

"At least 10 formerly mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad are now almost entirely Shiite. East Baghdad, vulnerable to attack from Shiites in the Sadr City stronghold, is almost entirely under Shiite control. West Baghdad, where there are still fierce sectarian clashes, is a war zone of divided neighborhoods, where crossing from a Shiite enclave to a Sunni enclave without the right identification, or the other way around, can mean death.

"The Iraqi cabinet proposed a plan last year to create space in West Baghdad for some 3,000 Sunni families who had been displaced, but nothing came of it.

"It is impossible to know exactly how many people have been forced from their homes, but estimates by Iraqi and American officials range from tens of thousands to as high as 200,000.

"Samantha Power, a public policy professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, who has written widely on genocide, described the plan as either a public relations ploy that would never be enforced, or worse, a prelude to more sectarian cleansing and catastrophe.

“'To do this in the middle of a war when tempers have been inflamed and militarization is ubiquitous seems to be putting the cart before the horse,' she said. 'You haven’t stopped the willingness to ethnically cleanse, but you’re imposing the moral hazard of ethnic cleansing on the cleansee? Unless you create security first, you are paving the way for a potential massacre of returnees.'”

If there's anything that's been learned since the American conquest of Iraq it must be that almost nothing is ever as it seems.