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Buoyed
by election success, an Iraqi minority aims to
expand its influence. Could it fracture the country?
Jalal Talabani knows what it's like to be a marked
man. In 1989, after Saddam Hussein's army had
ravaged the Kurdish population of northern Iraq with
chemical weapons, the dictator offered amnesty to
all Kurdish soldiers who fought against him—except
one. Saddam ordered his minions to hunt down
Talabani, a chief of the Kurdish separatist
guerrillas known as the peshmerga. If Talabani was
caught, Saddam vowed, he would put him to death.
It's a testament to Talabani's knack for survival
that he not only managed to elude Saddam's forces
but also is now poised to assume the job of his
former nemesis. A coalition of Kurdish political
parties, which Talabani helped lead, came in a
strong second in Iraq's national elections, winning
75 of the new Assembly's 275 seats. That gave the
Kurds, who make up 17% of Iraq's population, enough
clout to demand top jobs in the new government.
While the victorious Shi'ites last week tapped
Ibrahim al-Jaafari for Iraq's most powerful position
of Prime Minister, Talabani, 72, has emerged as the
most likely successor to Saddam as Iraq's President.
And though the post is intended to be largely
symbolic, Talabani plans to use the position of
titular head of state to protect Kurdish interests.
"I must have the right to participate with the
government in ruling the country," he told TIME in
an interview at his headquarters in the northern
Iraq mountain stronghold of Qala Chwala. "We want to
be partners in reshaping Iraq."
The question is, How much of the country do Talabani
and the Kurds want to reshape? The Kurds are holding
out for at least six Cabinet posts, including head
of the crucial Oil Ministry. They also say they are
owed money from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. A
U.N. spokesman told TIME that $3.7 billion in
Kurdish money was handed to the Coalition
Provisional Authority. So far the Kurds have
collected about $1.4 billion of that. They also want
assurances that the Kurdish-dominated north will
retain the autonomy it has enjoyed since the end of
the first Gulf War, when the U.S. established a
no-fly zone to protect the Kurds, and that the new
Iraqi constitution will not impose Islamic law, as
some prominent Shi'ite clerics have demanded. But
some Kurdish ambitions could trigger ethnic disputes
that would reverberate beyond Iraq's borders. The
Kurds' election success has emboldened those who
want to expand the southern boundaries of Kurdistan
to include Kirkuk, the oil-rich city that is home to
Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans. For U.S. officials, the
nightmare scenario is that the Kurds break away from
Iraq altogether—splintering the nation and inciting
restive Kurdish minorities in such neighboring
countries as Iran, Syria and especially Turkey,
which has threatened to intervene to prevent the
establishment of an independent Kurdish state.
In his interview with TIME, Talabani played down the
possibility of Kurdish secession. "If you asked the
Kurds, 'Do you want independence?' of course
everyone will say yes," he said. "But if you ask,
'Do you want independence now?' the answer would be
no." A U.S. official says Talabani, a former lawyer
with close ties to Washington, "knows how far he can
push, and he's not likely to push further than that,
even if a lot of Kurds want him to."
There's little dispute that the results of the Jan.
30 election have given Kurdish nationalism fresh
momentum. Although they are predominantly Muslim,
the Kurds of Iraq have long favored a more secular
form of government than most Shi'ites do. The
Kurdistan Referendum Movement, a grass-roots
organization of intellectuals and junior political
officials, says that of the 2 million who took part
in an informal Election Day referendum on
independence, 99% voted in favor. Kurds control
their peshmerga militia soldiers and their own
borders and are determined to preserve their
sanctuary. Officially, Kurdistan exists only north
of the "green line," the area where U.S. forces
halted the Iraqi army's advance when Saddam moved to
crush yet another Kurdish uprising in 1991. But
since the fall of Saddam in 2003, the size of
Kurdish-held territory has expanded 20%, according
to coalition officials in northern Iraq.
Kurdish leaders are pushing to gain control of
Kirkuk—known as the Jerusalem of Kurdistan—the
capital of one of Iraq's most productive oil
regions. Under Saddam, Kirkuk was subjected to a
massive demographic reordering, as Saddam moved
large numbers of Arabs into the city and tossed many
Kurds out. The interim Iraqi government headed by
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi agreed that Kirkuk should
be normalized—meaning displaced Kurds would be
allowed to return while the so-called new Arabs
would be moved out and compensated. But though some
100,000 Kurdish refugees returned to Kirkuk in time
to vote in the election, the Iraqi government has
yet to begin deporting the new Arabs.
For U.S. commanders in Iraq, an even more pressing
concern is the status of the 80,000-strong peshmerga.
In insurgent hot spots like Mosul, U.S. commanders
have praised Kurdish troops for their willingness to
stand and fight. But the peshmerga's continued
assaults on insurgents run the risk of exacerbating
tribal rivalries and sparking an anti-Kurdish
backlash by Iraq's Arabs. The U.S. hopes to defuse
the potential for conflict by folding the peshmerga
into a new, unified Iraqi army. But the Kurds have
so far refused to place their soldiers under the
command of Baghdad. "The peshmerga must remain a
force of the regional government," says Talabani, a
former peshmerga commander. "The Kurdish people need
them as protection against terrorism and to secure
the boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan." The Kurds may be
willing to cede control of their militia in exchange
for assurances that they will be given a large role
in the new government and a share of oil revenues
from the south. "The more they participate in the
central government, the less fear they'll have that
they're going to be attacked," says Phebe Marr, an
Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Some
Iraqis hope that Talabani's ascent to the presidency
will be seen as an important first step toward Kurds
and Arabs living peacefully with each other. "For
years, we've been told that Kurds are Iraqis and not
a separate people," says Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd who
is Iraq's interim Foreign Minister.
"Well, this is a chance to prove that—a chance to
show that no position in the new Iraq, not even the
presidency, is denied to a Kurd."
http://www.time.com
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