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Two
years after the US stormed into Iraq to bring down
Saddam Hussein and seven weeks after 8m Iraqis
overcame the fear of incipient civil war to wrest
back control of their future at the polls, Iraq is
locked in a potentially dangerous political
stalemate.
The constituent assembly elected on January 30 has
been sworn in, but the two largest blocs within it -
the victorious "Shia list" and the Kurds - have so
far been unable to agree on the formation of a
provisional government. The main reason for that is
Kirkuk, a microcosm of nearly all the ethnic,
religious, tribal and resource-linked tensions that
threaten to combine and combust to wreck Iraq's
future.
Kirkuk, the capital of an oil-rich province on the
fringe of autonomous Kurdistan, is a time-bomb that
must be defused. The Kurds were ethnically cleansed
from this mixed Arab, Kurdish, Assyrian Christian
and Turcoman city when Mr Hussein "Arabised" it to
consolidate Ba'athist control and erect a buffer
between the Kurdish mountains and the Sunni plains.
Now, the Kurdish parties want Kirkuk as their
capital, the "Jerusalem" of their self-governing
region within a federal Iraq. They also want more
revenue from the province's oil-fields and to keep
their peshmerga forces as sole military power in
Kurdistan, but Kirkuk is the nub of the question.
The proto-constitution or transitional
administrative law (TAL) drawn up a year ago under
the occupation authorities sought to defer a
solution to Kirkuk. The careful drafting of the TAL
looked even at the time to be too clever by half. It
also set the high bar of a two-thirds majority for a
provisional government. This was to foster
coalition-building but instead it has led to
stalemate. The Kurds, with about one-fifth of Iraq's
population and over a quarter of the seats from the
January elections, know this is their moment of
maximum leverage before the assembly gets down to
writing the new constitution. The Shia bloc, even
though it has an overall majority, needs the Kurdish
votes to clear the two-thirds hurdle.
Yet the Kurds and their allies should realise that
this is dangerous brinksmanship. There can be no
pre-emptive allocations of territory or resources if
an already fragmenting Iraq is to have any hope of
holding together. Turkey, already paranoid about the
exemplary effect a largely independent Kurdistan in
north Iraq will have on its own restive Kurdish
population in south-east Anatolia, has threatened to
intervene if the Kurds press their ambitions as far
as Kirkuk. Nor can the Kurds, their hopes for
freedom so often betrayed by western allies, rely on
open-ended US support.
The Kirkuk question needs to be put in the
politico-diplomatic freezer until Iraq stabilises.
One way to do it, suggested by the International
Crisis Group, the conflict-prevention think-tank, is
to put the city and possibly the province under
United Nations stewardship. That would not be easy
but, given the stakes, it is worth exploring.
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