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ERBIL,
Iraq - When he headed Iraq's Governing Council
in 2003, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani billed
himself as a statesman who could build bridges among
long-suffering Kurds, alienated Sunni Arabs, and
majority Shi'ite Arabs.
But he reserved his greatest passion for a Kurdish
issue, once brandishing an Ottoman-era map at
council colleagues to argue the Kurds' claim to the
disputed city of Kirkuk and announcing it as a
non-negotiable Kurdish demand. Immortalized on
mural-size pictures displayed across northern Iraq,
Talabani's gesture has become a powerful symbol of
Kurdish nationalist aspirations.
Now, with Talabani in line to become Iraq's
president, that bellicose image belies the one that
he and an alliance of other Kurdish leaders want to
project as they assume the role of kingmakers after
finishing second in the national elections behind an
alliance of Shi'ite parties.
''We can play this role of reconciliation," Talabani
told Reuters shortly after the Kurdish Alliance won
25 percent of the seats in the Transitional National
Assembly, giving Kurds effective veto power over the
formation of any new government. He cited the Kurds'
''good relations" with Arab nationalist movements,
Sunni groups, and tribal chiefs.
Although the presidency is a largely ceremonial
post, the prospect of a Kurd filling the post would
have seemed unthinkable until recently. Talabani and
the other major Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, as
well as their predecessors, have been locked in
successive wars for independence with Baghdad since
they were relegated to inferior status in an
Arab-dominated Iraq in the 1920s.
In 1988, Saddam Hussein's government tried to
exterminate and displace the Kurdish population in
the Anfal campaign, which killed at least 100,000,
according to the group Human Rights Watch. The
killings are certain to figure in the trials of
Hussein and other Ba'athists like General Ali Hassan
al-Majid, known among Iraqis as ''Chemical Ali" for
launching gas attacks against Kurds.
Despite pledges from Kurdish leaders that they will
stress inclusion, the Kurdish demands about Kirkuk,
autonomy, and the sharing of Iraq's oil wealth,
quietly dictated since the election results, have
provoked anxiety among the country's former ruling
class, Sunni Arabs.
''For the first time in Iraqi history, the
leadership positions will leave the hands of the
Sunni Arabs. It will foster a kind of paranoia,"
said Sharif Ali, head of the Constitutional Monarchy
Party and claimant to the throne of Iraq. Ali has
spent the past year trying to forge a unified front
among disaffected Sunni groups who dislike Iraq's
transitional government, insurgents, and tribal
leaders.
An emboldened Kurdish minority, acting in tandem
with the majority Shi'ite Arabs, could overreach and
drive the nation to civil war, Ali said.
''One side is so swept over and is all gung ho, and
it's increased the fears of the Sunni minority," he
said. ''If we get a crummy constitution, people
eventually will start shooting each other."
For the Kurds, however, victory on key issues has
never felt closer. A team of four senior Kurdish
officials from Talabani's Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan and Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party
are negotiating furiously in Baghdad.
Any political party that wants support from the
Kurdish blocs' 25 percent share of the National
Assembly must agree with the Kurds' principal
demands, its leaders say.
Talabani, 72, used to serve as an aide to Barzani's
father. In 1974, he split from the KDP, and the two
Kurdish parties have had an uneasy relationship ever
since, regularly interrupting decades of struggle
against Hussein to turn their guns against each
other over political or territorial disputes. The
two parties agreed to form a common front just two
months before the Jan. 30 election.
Since results were released, Talabani has mostly
stayed out of the spotlight, but Barzani has pressed
the case of the united Kurdish bloc, meeting with a
stream of leaders from Baghdad. Speaking for the
Kurdish alliance, Barzani declared in an interview
that the presidency was naturally ''our right" as
second-place finishers. He then rattled off further
demands.
''For us, the red-line issues are the identity of
Iraq: federal, democratic, and pluralistic. Second,
the character of the Kurdistan region must be
protected and maintained. Third is for Kirkuk and
other areas to be part of Kurdistan. Fourth is the
Peshmerga issue," he said, referring to the
independent Kurdish militias in the north that fall
outside the control of Baghdad's Ministry of Defense.
Each of those issues promises to open what Ali, in
Baghdad, described as ''the whole can of worms."
The biggest struggle could come over regional
control of oil wealth. If the Kurds incorporate
Kirkuk and its oil fields into their autonomous
region, Barzani said, the regional government -- not
Baghdad -- would have primary control over natural
resources in its area.
''The ownership belongs to the people of the federal
region," he said.
Such talk terrifies Iraq's Sunni Arabs. If regional
governments controlled oil resources, the Arabs of
the so-called Sunni triangle -- which has no major
oil field -- would be the big losers. Shi'ite Arabs
in the south would control the country's best oil
fields, in the south near the Kuwaiti border, and
Kurds would have Kirkuk.
''That's the end of the country," said Adnan
Pachachi, a Sunni Arab and former diplomat who
almost was named interim president of Iraq last May.
Now out of power, Pachachi is trying to represent
moderate, secular Sunni Arabs who boycotted the
national election, believing that it was designed to
disenfranchise them.
If Kurds seek regional control over part of Iraq's
oil, Pachachi said, ''it will be the fragmentation
of the country. It will be totally unacceptable."
For the Kurds, having one of their own as president
would be an inspiring symbol of their thirst for
equal rights inside Iraq.
''Are the Kurds equal to others? If so, they must
have the chance to get a top position in
government," said Fuad Hussein, an independent
Kurdish political activist who served as labor
minister in the interim Iraqi government until last
June.
Arabs, who make up 75 percent to 80 percent of the
Iraqi population, often refer to Iraq as an Arab
country, ignoring its Kurdish minority that makes up
about 20 percent of the population.
''It is time for Arabs to learn that if they live in
this country they have to accept others," Hussein
said. ''It will be a shock to the Arabs, but
sometimes shock therapy is good for some people and
some groups."
About 4 million Kurds live in three northern
provinces that are part of the officially recognized
Kurdish region, and as many as 2 million more live
sprinkled throughout the rest of Iraq. The Kurdish
leadership has claimed a strip of towns and cities
contiguous with Kurdistan, including Kirkuk, and
wants referendums allowing neighboring provinces and
cities to choose whether to join Kurdistan.
Kurdish nationalist feeling is running high,
especially among younger Kurds who have come of age
in an enclave where Baghdad had little influence.
Some 99 percent of those Kurds who voted Jan. 30
also endorsed independence in an unofficial parallel
referendum.
Nizar Mohammed Ameen, 28, was one of them. A
computer-science student who grew up in Baghdad,
Ameen and his family were forced to flee north in
1991, when the Ba'ath regime tightened the vise on
Kurds and Shi'ites because of dual uprisings against
Hussein's rule.
Ameen lost the use of his legs after a freezing-cold
passage on foot across the mountainous border to
Turkey, but eight years and several operations later
he can walk again.
''I hardly see a connection between myself and
Baghdad," said Ameen, who has worked to forget most
of his Arabic and now speaks only Kurdish. ''We are
proud Talabani will be president. But it will never
be enough to keep the Arabs at bay. That's why I
want independence for Kurdistan."
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
http://www.boston.com
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