|
Can a bitterly disputed
city be given a special status—or help spark a civil
war?
IN THE rubble of the hillside village of Shwan, a
few miles north of Kirkuk, Kurdish women with
cigarettes in their mouths mix cement, while
children lug jerrycans of water and the men give
orders. At least 30 families in the village,
destroyed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 during his
ferocious Anfal (“booty”) campaign to Arabise
northern Iraq, have returned in the past year or so,
apparently enticed back by tonnes of free cement and
grants of $1,000 (some say more) per family from the
local office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),
one of the two parties that runs Iraq's Kurdish
region. Shwan is just one of dozens of Kurdish
villages razed by Mr Hussein that are re-emerging.
This alarms Iraqi Arabs. They see the Kurds forcibly
grabbing back more of northern Iraq—including the
area around Kirkuk that holds the country's richest
oilfields—and extending their domain closer to
Baghdad and the Arab heartland.
The Kurds, naturally, beg to differ. They worry that
too few of their ethnic kin have returned to the
area to reverse the demographic change (so brutally
wrought by Mr Hussein) in time to ensure that, by
giving Kurdish parties the biggest vote in this
month's election, they will be able to bring Kirkuk
province (also known as Tamim) into the embrace of a
wider Kurdish federal region. Indeed, many Kurdish
leaders want Kirkuk to be the new capital of
Kurdistan; they call it “our Jerusalem”.
As the election approaches, Kirkuk's ethnic tensions
have risen. Kidnappings, intimidation and murder of
politicians and electoral workers have increased.
Party offices have been raked with gunfire, campaign
posters torn down or defaced.
This week, the main Kurdish parties threatened to
boycott the entire election unless Kurds displaced
from Kirkuk by Mr Hussein were allowed to vote
there. The crisis was defused by the head of Iraq's
election commission in Baghdad, backed by the
Americans, who said that Kurds who can provide proof
that they had been uprooted by Mr Hussein's regime
after 1975, when his Arabisation took off, would
indeed be allowed to vote. So at least 100,000 more
Kurds (some guess 150,000) are now expected to vote
in Kirkuk.
This threatens to upset the delicate ethnic balance
that has held since Mr Hussein was overthrown nearly
two years ago. The city's diverse communities—Kurds,
Arabs, Turkomen and Assyrian Christians—have managed
to get along, only just. The Americans appointed 15
Kurds, 11 Arabs, nine Turkomen and five Assyrians to
run the provincial council: no community held an
outright majority. That may now change. With their
extra voters, the Kurds may be able to run the show
on their own. So Kirkuk's Turkomen and Arabs now
threaten to boycott the election. If it goes ahead,
violence could break out. Some even fear it could
spark a nationwide civil war.
The argument has always been about demography and
numbers. No one is certain of Kirkuk's population
figures, now or in the past. Each main
group—Kurdish, Arab or Turkomen—says that
“historically” it is the most numerous. But none can
agree on the date when history began.
The Kurds cite statistics from the Ottoman
Encyclopaedia at the end of the 19th century, which
shows they made up three-quarters of the province's
population. The Turkomen, kinsfolk of the former
Turkish rulers, look to a census some 20 years
later, by which time the Ottomans had settled many
of their ethnic brethren in Kirkuk city. And the
Arabs quote Mr Hussein's last census, in 1997, when
Arabs were said to comprise 58% of the city's
population and the Kurds only 10%, with Turkomen,
Assyrians and others making up the rest. But these
figures may reflect the fact that if Kurds refused
to identify themselves as Arabs they were liable to
lose their land.
Since Mr Hussein's fall, the Kurds have struggled to
persuade their people to leave the safety of the
undisputed Kurdish region for the turbulent
borderlands further south and west. American
commanders say about 75,000 had returned by the end
of the summer; since then, the homecoming flow has
slowed sharply. Yet Kirkuk's deputy governor, Hassib
Roshbayani, a Kurd, has stated bluntly that “300,000
Kurds must come back and 300,000 Arabs settled by
Saddam must go.” Some senior Kurds simply want to
expel the Arabs. Many, perhaps most, of the Arabs Mr
Hussein settled on Kurdish lands have fled, though
Arabs maintain a strong presence in the city. Some
senior Arabs, in return, have threatened to kick the
750,000 or so Kurds in Baghdad out of the capital.
No solution in sight
The Americans have largely washed their hands of the
Kirkuk problem. An American grant worth $100m to
fund the Kirkuk Foundation to promote ethnic harmony
remains largely undisbursed. Little of the $180m
earmarked to pay for resolving property disputes and
to compensate the displaced has been dished out. The
Iraqi Property Claims Commission, set up a year ago,
has settled only about 120 claims in Kirkuk (out of
several thousand lodged), finding it nigh-impossible
to find even-handed judges whose verdicts would be
accepted by both sides.
For now, the Kurds are on top. They already hold key
posts in Kirkuk's provincial government. The
governor is a Kurd. So are the heads of the
agricultural department (which controls the
distribution of state land) and the police.
Kurdish-led patrols go as far south as Khanaquin,
barely two hours' drive from Baghdad.
For the moment, the conundrum of Kirkuk lies
unsolved. The constitution to be written after the
election may, perhaps, give it a special status
whereby power must be shared. Whatever census is
taken (no one seems to know when) is bound to be
disputed. The peaceful adjudication of property
claims seems far away. The city and its surroundings
are a tinderbox.
http://www.economist.com
Top |
® 