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As Iraqis vie for Kirkuk's oil, Kurds become pawns

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
NY Times/Int'l Herald Trib - Dec 9, 2007
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8653536


As Iraqis vie for Kirkuk's oil, Kurds become pawns

By Stephen Farrell

KIRKUK, Iraq: Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions
are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a
startling sight.

On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq's most lucrative oil
reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren
playing field.

There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have
converted the dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of
cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for
President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

These homeless Kurds are here not for soccer but for politics. They are
reluctant players in a future referendum to decide whether oil-rich
Tamim Province in the north and its capital, Kirkuk, will become part
of the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government or remain under
administration by Baghdad.

Under the Iraqi Constitution the referendum is due before Dec. 31. But
in a nation with a famously slow political clock, one of the few things
on which Kirkuk's Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities agree is that
yet another political deadline is about to be missed.

This unstable city can ill afford much more delay and uncertainty. The
fusion of oil, politics and ethnic tensions make Kirkuk one of the most
potentially explosive places in the country, and its fate is seen as a
crucial issue by all sides in the debate about whether Iraq will
eventually be partitioned among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.

What rankles the stadium's impoverished Kurds most is that while they
remain in a foul-smelling limbo, on the other side of town some of the
Arabs who were forcibly moved here by Saddam Hussein still live in
comfortable suburbs, a legacy of the dictator's notorious 1980s Anfal
campaign to depopulate Kurdish areas and "Arabize" Tamim.

Moreover, some of the squatting Kurds complain that it is their own
leaders who forced them to move to Kirkuk, to pack the city with
Kurdish votes before the referendum.

Hajji Walid Muhammad, 67, a taxi driver here, grumbled that after the
2003 invasion, the Kurdish authorities told a gathering of Kirkuk-born
Kurds living nearby in Chamchamal, "Even if you own a small tent you
have to go back to your own homeland."

When asked what would have happened if he had refused, Muhammad said:
"By God's name, they would cut off our food basket and not pay us our
salary and give us nothing else and force us to go back. They ordered
us to go back."

Najat Jaseem Muhammad also said that the authorities "encouraged" him
to leave Chamchamal, where he had lived since 1997. He said he was
happy to be back in the town of his birth, but not to be living in such
conditions, without enough money to escape.

"They said: 'If you do not return, we will lose Kirkuk. You are Kurdish
and Kirkuk must return to the arms of Kurdistan,'" he said, standing in
front of political graffiti on a stadium pillar.

"It was not a matter of being forced, but if anyone stayed over there
they would not have been supplied with anything and they would have
been oppressed," he added. "They would have stopped my work."

In a province where the population balance has been distorted by
decades of gerrymandering and forced settlement, the Iraqi Constitution
spells out a three-stage process to resolve the issue. First a process
of "normalization" to restore the city's population balance to what it
was before Hussein's decrees, then a census, then the referendum.

But even that first stage is incomplete. American and international
officials who have pushed for progress on the issue are conceding that
the Dec. 31 date is unfeasible.

The inevitable delay frustrates the Kurds, who are confident of victory
and suspect delaying tactics by opponents intent on keeping the land,
and the oil.

In contrast, the delay is welcomed with ill-concealed delight by
Kirkuk's Arabs.

"I believe the main error was to set a holy date for the referendum,"
said Tahsin Kahya, an Arab member of Kirkuk Provincial Council.

"A problem created over 35 years cannot be fixed in seven or eight
months," he added, ticking off with the ease of frequent practice the
constitutional, logistic, legal, parliamentary, boundary, property and
financial hurdles he believed should delay a referendum for "years, of
course."

In a volatile city where Sunni insurgent violence has been reduced
significantly in recent months but not eliminated, how the Kurds react
to the missed deadline will be crucial.

The issue is further complicated by Turkey's desire to safeguard
Kirkuk's Turkmen minority and its hostility to the notion of the Kurds
gaining control of Kirkuk's oil fields. Istanbul fears this could
embolden the Kurds to declare their own state, thereby encouraging
Kurdish separatists in northeastern Turkey.

"No Iraqi government could 'give' Kirkuk to the Kurds and hope to
survive, in view of broad popular opposition in Arab Iraq," said the
International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that seeks to
prevent or resolve deadly conflicts. "The Kirkuk question could,
therefore, trigger total deadlock, breakdown and violent conflict, just
when the Bush administration hopes its security plan for Baghdad will
yield political dividends."

All sides decline to give exact figures of their population, but the
Kurds, who won 26 of 41 council seats in the last provincial elections,
appear to believe they make up more than half of the province's 1.2
million population.

"Since no statistical process has been done, if we announce any kind of
number it will cause a political conflict." said Rebwar Fa'aq
al-Talabany, a Kurd who is deputy chairman of Kirkuk Provincial Council.

Talabany rejected accusations that the Kurds were forcing their own
people to move.

"In Kirkuk you find deaths and explosions, so how could you persuade
someone to come and live here? I myself would tell families not to come
to Kirkuk, because Kirkuk's condition is not good," he said during an
interview.

He also ruled out seizing Kirkuk by arms. "If we can't have it with a
referendum or a legal way, we are not going to use force. It will be a
peaceful solution between the communities," he said.

To restore the ethnic balance before Arabization, a compensation deal
has been reached by all parties and built into Iraq's Constitution,
paying the former dictator's Arab "Wafidin," or newcomers, to leave the
city. Each family would receive 20 million dinars, or about $16,000,
and some land, on condition that they transfer their ration cards,
residency papers and identification documents from Kirkuk to the cities
where they move.

In suburbs of Kirkuk that were once nearly 100 percent Arab, many have
already gone and others are preparing to leave, complaining of
intimidation by Kurdish pesh merga fighters and unwarranted roundups by
Kurdish intelligence forces.

Arab residents point to empty Arab houses with the Kurdish word
"Gyrawa," or reserved, written on the wall, ready for their new Kurdish
occupants. Buildings abandoned by senior commanders from the Hussein
government have "terrorist" scrawled on them in Kurdish.

Outside the provincial council offices, crowds gather daily to
scrutinize lists posted high on the blast walls that contain the names
of 15,000 whose relocation cases have been resolved. Some admit that
they actually left the city months ago " the Shiites heading mainly
south and Sunnis north or west " and now just visit Kirkuk every few
days to see if they can still get the money.

As political battle lines are drawn over who controls the oil below the
land and the people above it, the city has at least one consolation:
Most Arabs agree there is less underlying tension here between Sunnis
and Shiites because they are united against the prospect of a Kurdish
Kirkuk.

As time passes, the balance of the town is changing. A short drive from
where the departing Arabs peer at the lists, residents of the once-Arab
suburb known as Officer District say it has been renamed Nawroz, or New
Days, the Kurdish word for the New Year spring festival.

Wafaq Aziz al-Obaidi, an Air Force brigadier general under Hussein's
rule, said he and all of his neighbors had fled the district; he just
returns occasionally to check his old property.

"I left the house, like thousands of Arabs have done, to protect myself
from the hatred and aggression of the pesh merga, who are so aggressive
against Arabs," he said. "I went back to Kirkuk 20 days later and found
my house had been seized, all my furniture stolen, and there was
Kurdish writing in my house. Later on guards wearing Kurdish uniforms
came to me and told me, 'Save yourself and leave the house
immediately,' so I was forced to leave it."

In his office in the provincial council, Talabany pointed to the
compensation package and said the Arab exodus was "voluntary, not
enforced."

Yet the strength of Kurdish sentiment about their entitlement is as
strong in the council's air-conditioned offices as it is in the soccer
stadium.

"The Kurdish people have seen genocide, Arabization and Baathism in
Kirkuk, and they have had all their property taken away," Talabany
said, with feeling. "All these are the rights of Kurds. The Arabic
people have not had such troubles, and if the Turkmen have, they have
had less of it." He added that in his family alone, 19 people had been
killed by Hussein's government.

"All these rights must be given back to them, and this process is
called normalization," he said. "When normalization has happened, let
Kirkuk be added to Sudan " I have no problem with that. But let the
people decide."

(c) 2007 The International Herald Tribune


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