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Erbil, Iraq — OF
all the remarkable things that happened at the Iraqi
polls on Sunday, perhaps the most striking was
pulled off by the Kurdish independence movement.
With almost no advance notice, hundreds of Kurds
erected tents at official polling places in Iraq's
Kurdish areas and asked those emerging from the
ballot booths to take part in an informal referendum
on whether Kurdistan should be independent or part
of Iraq. From what I saw, almost everyone stopped to
vote in the referendum, and the tally was running 11
to 1 in favor of independence.
This news will not be welcomed by American and
British officials, who have studiously ignored the
Kurdish independence movement, pretending that the
unity of Iraq is not at issue in the country's
transition to democracy. Those who organized the
independence referendum - mostly representatives of
Kurdish nongovernmental organizations - had sought a
meeting last February with the American
administrator in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, to
show him their petition with 1.7 million signatures
asking for a vote on independence. Neither Mr.
Bremer nor his main deputies would see the group.
Thus the actual voting on Sunday caught coalition
officials by surprise - in part because Kurdistan,
strongly supportive of the American presence in
Iraq, has not been a priority for our diplomacy.
United States officials have preferred to see
Kurdistan through their own lenses. Last summer, I
heard Condoleezza Rice speak at a meeting in
Washington about how impressed she was with the
Kurdish commitment to the building a new, unified
Iraq. I know every Kurdish leader she met with, and
I know that none of them would prefer to be an Iraqi
if an independent Kurdistan were a realistic option.
Kurdish leaders, well aware of the practical
impediments to independence, repeat a mantra that
the Americans want to hear: Iraq should be
democratic, federal, pluralistic and united. But
their hearts are not in it. As Massoud Barzani,
leader of one of the two major Kurdish political
groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said at an
Election Day news conference in his mountaintop
headquarters nearby at Salaheddin, "I am certain
there will be an independent Kurdistan, and I hope
to see it in my lifetime."
While the Kurdistan Regional Government maintains
that the referendum was entirely a private
initiative, the voting was greatly facilitated by a
younger generation of officials, who believe their
elders have already made too many concessions to the
unity of Iraq. With a wink from the government,
election officials at many locations permitted the
independence movement to distribute referendum
ballots inside the polling places.
Iraq's new Assembly will face the task of preparing
a constitution for a country where a sizable part of
the population almost unanimously does not want to
be part of the whole. The representatives of the
Kurdish areas will most likely be the second-largest
bloc in the Parliament. They will not press for
independence any time soon, but they will be mindful
of the referendum vote. A second election is
scheduled for the end of this year, and it is quite
possible that the referendum movement will convert
itself into a political party by then if it feels
that the major Kurdish parties have made too many
concessions.
The Kurdish region today functions as if it were an
independent state. The Kurdistan Regional Government
carries out virtually all government functions, and
Baghdad law applies only to the extent the Kurdish
Parliament chooses to apply it. Kurdistan is
responsible for its own security (which is the main
reason it has been free of the violence wracking the
rest of Iraq) and maintains its own armed forces.
For the people of Kurdistan, the issue is not simply
a matter of keeping what they have. What drives the
move for independence is not just the love of
Kurdistan but also a widespread antipathy toward
Iraq. The Iraqi flag is a hated symbol of a brutal
regime, and it is still banned in areas controlled
by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (it does fly,
along with the Kurdistan flag, on a few public
buildings elsewhere in the region).
The Kurds do not allow Arab units of the new Iraqi
military onto their territory, nor do they permit
Baghdad ministries to open offices. They refuse to
surrender control of their international borders to
Baghdad for fear that the central government will
cut off their precious access to the outside world.
As the Assembly draws up the new constitution,
Kurdish leaders likely will settle for a deal that
preserves their region's de facto independence and
financial autonomy and gives them control over the
disputed province of Kirkuk. Especially important,
the Kurds insist on a fixed percentage of Iraq's
budget and full control over Kurdistan's petroleum,
including the right to export it.
Kurdish dreams of independence have long been
thwarted by the hostility not only of Arab Iraqis
but also of Turkey, Iran and Syria - each of which
have substantial Kurdish minorities. These neighbors
will be alarmed by the results of the independence
referendum. Wiser heads, especially in Turkey, now
see a loose Iraqi federation as by far the lesser
evil than a Kurdish state.
The United States would do well to learn the lessons
of the former Yugoslavia, where policymakers denied
the reality of breakup until it was too late to
contain the accompanying violence. Just four days
before Yugoslavia's wars began in June 1991, the
American Secretary of State, James Baker, was in
Belgrade focused on the impossible task of stopping
Slovenian and Croatian secession when he should have
been trying to prevent the shooting.
A dying Yugoslavia was a different situation than a
nascent Iraq, to be sure. But the question remains:
will Kurdistan want to stay in an Iraqi federation -
even a very loose one? As the United States learned
in Yugoslavia, it is hard in a democracy to hold
people in a country they hate. The Kurds' demand for
independence is not an immediate crisis, but it is a
coming one.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States
ambassador to Croatia, is a senior fellow at the
Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in
Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com
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