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Kurds robbed of their
homes show defiance
Sabria Sharif Mohammed rose at dawn and prepared for
the day that she and her family been dreaming of.
Like several hundred thousand others who voted
yesterday in this historic city of Kurds, Arabs,
Turkomans and Christians, Sabria was hoping to use
her vote to right past wrongs.
She believed that taking part in the first elections
in her life would help win back the house and land
seized from them under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Before making the three-mile walk to the polling
station with her husband and two oldest sons, Sabria
wanted to fortify them with hot sweet tea. So she
sent her youngest, Youssef, 16, to fill the urn at
the communal pump.
An ominous whirring sound was followed by a
deafening bang. Cracks appeared in Sabria's
makeshift mudbrick dwelling. Outside, Yousef lay
dead, the victim of a mortar bomb.
Sabria washed her son's body, covered it with a
white burial shroud and arranged for it to be taken
to the nearby cemetery. Then, remarkably, she went
off to vote.
Holding a Kurdish flag and wailing in grief, she
entered the polling station in the northern Shorjah
district, crying: "I will never put this flag down.
Saddam threw me out of my house and home and now
he's killed my son. Voting won't bring my Youssef
back, but it must stop Saddam from coming back."
During its Arabisation programmme, the Ba'athist
regime had systematically widened the ethnic and
sectarian fissures coursing through this oil-rich,
though woefully neglected, city of 750,000.
Thousands of Kurds and Turkomans were expelled or
murdered. Land and homes were given to Arab settlers
from the south.
With Kurds, Turkomans and Arabs vying for control of
the city and province, US and Iraqi leaders have
looked nervously to Kirkuk as a potential flashpoint
for a civil war.
Since the fall of Saddam, the displaced Kurds and
Turkomans have been demanding the right of return,
as well as the right to vote.
Meanwhile, regional neighbours such as Turkey have
warned they will not tolerate Kirkuk falling into
Kurdish hands.
The future status of the city will be one of the
toughest issues in the post-election constitutional
debate.
Election monitors described turnout in the
predominantly Kurdish and Turkoman areas of the city
as brisk. Arab districts to the south-east of the
city were reported to be less enthusiastic.
"In some Kurdish districts, they ran out of ballot
boxes, and new ones failed to arrive in time," said
one election official.
Despite the tragedy of Sabria's son, the news of
which spread quickly across Kirkuk, the mood was one
of celebration, not defiance. But the crumbling
Ottoman-era buildings are a sad reminder of the
shocking state of disrepair into which this oil-rich
city had fallen under Saddam's rule.
"The oil has been a curse on Kirkuk," said Herro
Talabani, the wife of Jalal Talabani, the leader of
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), as she
returned to vote in the city where she went to
school.
The PUK and its rival, the Kurdistan Democratic
party, want Kirkuk to be the future capital of their
federal Kurdish region. For them it is a symbol of
years of repression by Arab-dominated government in
Baghdad.
But their designs are resisted by many in the Arab
and Turkoman communities who live here.
In postwar Kirkuk, there is one thing many of the
original residents of the city agreed on yesterday:
the Kurds, the Turkomans, the Arabs and the
Christians mostly get along quite well. It is the
outsiders, they say, who are are causing the
problems.
http://www.guardian.co.uk
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