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[US
News] Two years after he started the Iraq war,
President George W. Bush seems ready to once again
declare victory, this time in the cause of
democratisation. But the course of self-rule in Iraq
is as complicated and fraught with pitfalls as the
war itself.
The actors in Iraq are driven by agendas that have
little do with the rhetoric in Washington. And they
are certain to try American patience in the months
ahead.
The intense negotiations to form a new government
exposed the fissures between the two victors that
emerged from the January parliamentary elections --
the Shia Arabs and the Kurds.
The other major player, the Sunni Arabs, boycotted
the vote and still fuel the insurgency, though there
are efforts to bring them into the political tent.
Shia Arabs and Kurds, a non-Arab minority,
were united in their hatred for the Baathist rule of
Saddam Hussein. On Wednesday, the Kurds marked the
17th anniversary of the Baathists' chemical weapons
attack on Halabjah, when roughly 5,000 Kurds were
slaughtered.
Beyond their mutual celebration of freedom from
Baathist rule, the Kurds and Shias do not share a
vision of Iraq's future, however. Kurds strongly
oppose the Shia desire to have an Islamic state,
governed solely by Islamic law.
That may be easier to paper over than the
longstanding Kurdish aspirations for statehood. For
more than a decade, since the US established a
military umbrella over the Kurdish region after the
Persian Gulf War, they have been an independent
nation in all but name.
In Kurdistan, as the Kurds call it, the Iraqi flag
does not fly. The Kurds are defended by their own
100,000-strong militia -- the peshmerga -- called on
by American commanders when the Iraqi army and
police flee the battlefield.
The border crossing from Turkey into Kurdistan is
controlled by Kurds. An American visiting Iraq needs
a visa, but not when entering Kurdistan.
Some 97 percent of the Kurds who voted in January
for the National Assembly also favoured independence
in an advisory referendum.
"Kurds do not want to have any Iraqi control in
Kurdistan," said Peter Galbraith, a former Clinton
administration diplomat with a long and close
association with the Kurds.
Thanks to their bloc voting for a unified Kurdish
state, and to American insistence that a new
government must be backed by two-thirds majority in
the new assembly, the Kurds are now at their moment
of maximum leverage.
The new government cannot be formed without Kurdish
participation. And a new constitution, to be drafted
by August and voted on in October, cannot be
approved without the Kurds.
The Kurds set a high price for their support: the
constitution must recognise the current level of
autonomy; Kurdistan must receive a set share of the
Iraqi budget; Iraqi army units will not be allowed
in without Kurdish assent; and Kurds want control of
the oil-rich bordering province of Kirkuk, where
they claim Saddam engaged in ethnic cleansing of
Kurds.
These demands, particularly the last, stalled the
negotiations.
"Iraq is one country," Amar Mohammad, who works in a
Shia religious library, told the Christian Science
Monitor. "If we give them Kirkuk, it will start the
process of dividing Iraq into parts."
The Shias "think of themselves in trans-national
terms", said Brown University Islamic expert William
Beeman. "The idea of a Kurdish state smacks of a
nationalism that is outside of Islamic unity."
The US has wisely stayed outside these talks.
Washington has close ties to the Kurds and has
relied on them as allies within Iraq. But it won't
back Kurdish independence, fearing it would trigger
conflict with Turkey, which has a large and restive
Kurdish minority of its own.
The divisions within Iraq were suppressed by
Saddam's brutal rule.
The war lifted that artificial cap on the passions
of Kurds and Shias. So far, Iraqis are trying to
reconcile their divergent visions within the arena
of political dialogue, and there are reasons to hope
that will continue.
The need to draft a constitution will bring this to
a head. Failure to find consensus raises the danger
of Kurdish secession.
"If you're going to have a democracy, you can't make
people live in a country that they hate," said
Galbraith, who recently returned from Kurdistan.
"The Kurds hate Iraq. In every way, they wish to be
separate."
(Daniel Sneider is foreign-affairs writer for the
San Jose Mercury News. He can be reached at dsneider@mercurynews.com)
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