|
ARBIL,
Iraq - Even at night, on a busy thoroughfare in
this Kurdish city, the sedan is an easy mark for the
Kalashnikov-toting police at the checkpoint. It has
Baghdad license plates and, more alarmingly, Arabs
in the front seat. "What are you doing here?" the
police demand, motioning the car to the side.
It was a routine exchange, but one that reveals how
far Erbil and the entire Kurdish region have drifted
from the rest of Iraq and toward an informal but
unmistakable autonomy that Kurdish leaders are
determined to preserve.
Residents in
northern Iraq already call the area
Kurdistan. The territory, stretching from Kirkuk on
the region's southern edge to the Tigris River in
the west and to Turkey and Iran in the north and
east, is patently a world apart from the rest of
Iraq.
There is a building boom, with new apartments,
hospitals and shopping centers. The gleaming
10-story Hotel Erbil, opened in October, is often
sold out, its 167 rooms renting for $68 to $193.
Markets bustle, and even the devalued dollar goes a
long way, with decent-quality Turkish-made pullovers
for $12 and a Pepsi and shwarma sandwich - the Iraqi
hot dog - for a little more than 50 cents.
While extensive areas of Iraq remain plagued by
violence, the Kurdish sector is calm, with tight
security maintained by swarms of Kurdish police
officers and militiamen. Reconstruction projects,
lagging in many parts of the country, are moving
briskly ahead.
The Kurds have veto power over most laws passed by
the central government in Baghdad and have their own
80,000-member military, the pesh merga, whose troops
are far better disciplined and skilled than most of
their new Iraqi counterparts.
In many places it is impossible to find an Iraqi
flag. But the Kurds' red, white and green standard
with a shining sun in the middle flies everywhere,
even atop an Iraqi border guard compound in far
northeastern Iraq.
Yet while the Kurdish region may appear to be, for
all practical purposes, a separate country, it can
preserve its shaky independence only by denying it,
and not just to Baghdad. Powerful neighbors,
particularly Turkey and Iran, which both have
substantial Kurdish populations, are highly
sensitive to the slightest hint of Kurdish
nationalism. And the United States rejects any idea
of independence, which has wide support among
Kurdish residents.
The Kurds' desire for autonomy promises to tear at
the unity of the new Iraq that the election planned
for late January is supposed to help build. The
voters are to choose a legislature to write a new
constitution. But some Iraqi leaders have already
expressed resentment at the most important safeguard
of Kurdish independence: the power to veto the new
constitution.
For now Kurdish officials appear unwilling to
coexist on anything but their own terms, which means
bolstering their autonomy and preventing outside
interference, whether from Baghdad or another
country.
Hamid Afandi, the minister of pesh merga for the
Kurdish regional government based in Erbil, outlined
one possible strategy: take control of Kirkuk - the
disputed oil city north of Baghdad, where Kurds are
even now wresting land from the Arabs who were
settled there by Saddam Hussein - grab a far larger
share of Kirkuk's oil revenue than the Kurds now get
and use that to triple the size of the pesh merga
force.
"We are ready to fight against all forces to control
Kirkuk," Mr. Afandi said. "Our share is very little.
We'll try to take a larger share." So far, the
Americans have blocked those ambitions, Mr. Afandi
said. "If they would permit us, we could control
Kirkuk," he said, "but it is forbidden."
Kurdish officials say they will take part in the
writing of the new constitution on the assumption
that if they do not like what emerges, they have a
veto. According to the existing temporary
constitution, the public referendum on the new
charter will be defeated if two-thirds of voters in
three provinces (the Kurdish-dominated region of
northern Iraq has three) reject it.
But other Iraqi leaders have in the past suggested
that the temporary constitution will no longer be
operative after the January election, depriving
Kurds of their veto power. Striving to avoid that
sort of outcome, the main Kurdish political parties
have joined forces to offer a unified slate of
candidates. And the Kurds finished a huge voter
registration drive in early December in hopes of
packing the new parliament with as many
representatives as possible.
But it has been a difficult process, compounded by
the region's deep mistrust and suspicion of Arabs.
Up to 90 percent of the voter registration forms in
Erbil Province contained errors, according to
Kurdish officials. "Those people in Baghdad did this
deliberately!" said Muhammad Salah Salim, an elderly
former member of the pesh merga, as he stood in a
line of more than 100 people at the Fatima Zahar
primary school here, waiting to get his registration
form corrected. "They want to trick the Kurdish by
doing this."
Officials with the party that controls the western
and northern Kurdish areas, the Kurdistan Democratic
Party, say they are concerned about whether the
rolls will be corrected and whether the mistakes
were in fact deliberate.
The top official in Erbil Province for the
Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, Kamal
Hussein Khambar, said in an interview that similar
mistakes had been made throughout Iraq, but
acknowledged that the errors were worse in the
Kurdish areas. He said the problem with the voter
lists was being remedied and predicted that 750,000
people would vote in Erbil Province alone.
There is no doubting the Kurds' intense interest. In
her neat white smock and shined black shoes, an art
teacher at the Fatima Zahar school, Nawal
Abdul-Karem, who is doing double duty as an election
coordinator, sums up what many hope to achieve.
"There should be federalism," she said, using the
code word for regional autonomy from Baghdad. "And
we should have Kirkuk."
Kirkuk is a flash point city of Kurds, Arabs and
Turkmens. Kurds who were evicted by the Hussein
government are now returning by the thousands,
living in tents and shanties and pushing for
permission to enter the city and reclaim what
Kurdish leaders say are properties that were stolen
from them.
Privately, the leaders have admitted in the past
that some Kurds are simply grabbing property,
evicting Arabs - many of whom were themselves
forcibly relocated to the Kurdish areas - from their
homes of 20 or more years. The Arabs have complained
of vicious treatment by returning Kurds, including
some killings.
As many as 100,000 Arabs have fled the area,
American officials have said, and many are now
living in refugee camps scattered across central
Iraq. Kurdish leaders have threatened to boycott the
provincial elections in January unless the Arabs are
quickly resettled.
Oil is a crucial subtext to the struggle for Kirkuk,
and Kurdish leaders see the control of oil revenue
as a way to further bolster their autonomy.
Kurds have been pressing the central government to
raise their share of Iraqi oil money, arguing that
they have long been shortchanged. And they have
angered leaders in Baghdad by embarking on deals
with foreign companies to develop the oil fields
they already control. The central government holds
what it considers a sovereign right to all of Iraq's
oil and has warned companies about making
development deals with anyone other than an official
government representative.
Even without the oil money, the region's economy
appears to be far outpacing that of the rest of
Iraq. A recent United Nations bulletin warned that
imports into Iraq fell sharply in August and
September, largely because of security concerns.
"The reduced levels of trade, coupled with the very
low levels of legitimate non-oil exports from Iraq,
does not bode well for the country's short-term
level of prosperity," the bulletin warned.
But in Erbil, signs of prosperity abound. Most of
the investment is from Erbil natives or friends and
relatives in Europe and the United States, said
Gilbert Jabre, general manager of the hotel. He also
credits Kurdish officials, who work hard to attract
foreign investment, and the security situation. "In
all of Iraq, it is the only safe place," he said.
Security is ubiquitous and highly effective in the
Kurdish zone, where racial profiling of Arabs is the
norm. "Not all Arabs are bad," said a pesh merga
soldier, Janger Kanabi. "But if they do bad things,
then we are compelled to do the same to them."
Kurdish forces, including those in the Iraqi
National Guard and border patrol, are easily
distinguished from most of their troubled
counterparts in other regions of Iraq, whose
manifold discipline and loyalty problems are a
continuing headache for American commanders.
The Kurds hold their guns down, dress neatly and
appear ever alert. Except for a devastating pair of
suicide bomb attacks on Feb. 1 that killed more than
60 people, the Kurdish region has been largely free
of the nightmare of beheadings, kidnappings and car
bombings.
The embrace of security may soon give a further
economic lift to the Kurdish zone. In recent weeks
several directors general of provincial agencies in
Mosul have refused to sign agreements totaling
almost $25 million to receive Congressionally
appropriated money for new health clinics, school
renovations, courthouse refurbishments and other
projects, said an American official in Mosul who is
helping to coordinate American reconstruction
spending.
As a result, the official said, more reconstruction
money may flow to the Kurdish region, where it is
welcomed. Officials in other parts of Iraq, fearing
assassination by insurgents, "are scared to death,"
he said. "They don't want to be associated with us."
http://www.nytimes.com
Top |
® 