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Kurdistan beyond Iraq
11.11.2006
By Dlawer Ala'Aldeen |
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The political pressures
in Iraq are pushing the Kurds towards independence,
says Dlawer Ala'Aldeen.
In Iraq, sectarian violence and attacks on United
States and British forces are spiralling out of
control. The effects on American domestic politics
are evident in the historic defeat of the
Republicans in the congressional elections. The
pressures on the George W Bush administration, and
Washington's political leadership more generally,
are likely only to intensify in over the next
eighteen months.
The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by the former US
secretary of state James A Baker is scheduled to
report on its recommendations in January 2007. It is
expected to propose a "three-in-one" partition of
Iraq, dividing the country into Sunni, Shi'a, and
Kurdish entities. This is likely to be endorsed by
President Bush.
Such a proposal, as long as it includes Kirkuk and
other Arabised (hence disputed) territories within
Kurdistan, will no doubt be welcomed by the Kurds -
anything less will be rejected violently. The Shi'a
response will be mixed. Mohamad Baqir al-Hakim's
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri)
will approve but only with modifications. Muqtada
al-Sadr, and likeminded Shi'a extremist groups, will
reject it out of hand. Iraqi prime minister Nouri
al-Maliki and his Da'wa party will be in a serious
dilemma, namely how to choose between principle and
real politics. As for the Sunni Arabs, who once had
the whole of Iraq and now face the prospect of being
left with the poorest federal entity, they will
protest, threaten and eventually succumb.
The proposal to divide Iraq is not new. Influential
authors, such as Peter W Galbraith, Ralph Peters,
Senator Joseph Biden, Leslie Gelb and others have
recently recommended partition as the only way to
achieve US objectives. The most elegant, logical and
convincing proposal is that of Galbraith, which is
detailed in his book The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End. He displays
the obvious and argues for a win-win outcome for
all.
The idea is, unsurprisingly, alarming to many Iraqi
Arab intellectuals. Zaid al-Ali characterises the
partition of Iraq into semi-autonomous federal
entities as a "dangerous" concept ("Saving Iraq: a
critique of Peter W Galbraith", 26 October 2006). As
a Kurd, the question I pose is: dangerous for whom,
and why?
United Iraq: myth or reality?
Iraq as a modern political entity is only
eighty-five years old. It only came into existence
in 1921. Mesopotamia, the land of two rivers
(between the Tigris and Euphrates) had been divided
by the Ottomans during their centuries of imperial
rule into the two administrative wilayets (units) of
Baghdad and Basra. The northern neighbours of the
people of these areas, living in what Kurds
designate as southern Kurdistan, were inhabited by
distinct ethnic groups and governed via a third
wilayet, in Mosul.
The British occupied Mesopotamia during the first
world war and Mosul wilayet by 1920. There were no
initial plans to merge the three wilayets; instead
the Kurds were offered the chance of going
independent. The deposed king Faisal, dethroned by
the French in Syria, was offered Mesopotamia by the
British. Faisal had never visited Mesopotamia, and
regarded it as too Shi'a for his comfort; he
therefore lobbied for it to be merged with the Sunni
Mosul wilayet. The Shi'a revolt of the 1920s and
coincidental Turkish political manoeuvres added fire
to his argument and settled the outcome.
In 1921, the British fixed a referendum to give the
result they wanted: legitimacy to Faisal as the new
king of Iraq. Meanwhile, the betrayed Kurds were
bombed into submission. The Iraqi air force - built,
trained and equipped by the British - carried on the
campaign thereafter. With time, the majority of the
Kurds eventually embraced the constitutional
semi-democratic rule of the Hashemite kingdom, and
settled for demanding their cultural rights within
an integral Iraq. However, Iraq's political
atmosphere remained unsettled in the face of the
storm of extreme Arab nationalism.
Iraqi unity and Arab nationalism
The post-1945 cold-war order brought a new wind of
pro-Soviet and anti-western Arab nationalist
sentiments to the region. Gamal Abdel Nasser of
Egypt initiated an epidemic of military-led coup
d'čtats, which arrived in Iraq in 1958. The
overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy marked a turning
point: Britain lost influence over Iraq, and the
fate of the Kurds fell into the hands of a series of
undemocratic Arab nationalists who ruled Iraq for a
decade until, in 1968, Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party
seized power.
Saddam's extremism was neither a surprise nor an
alien phenomenon in the middle east. After 1945, the
belligerent superpowers had inaugurated brutal
regimes throughout the middle east, to secure
military, economic and political influences. Saddam
was a product of the era and Iraq's bloody history;
his regime was ultra- ruthless, rich, shrewd and
organised.
Under the complacent view of the superpowers and the
Arab League, Saddam pushed all limits. His
totalitarian leadership encouraged Iraq's ethnic and
religious diversities to become irreconcilable, and
deepened the gulf between the ruling Sunni elite and
the rest. He maximised Iraq's potential for
disintegration, turning it into a bomb primed to
explode at the slightest trigger.
Iraq's unity in democracy
After Iraq's regime change in April 2003, the
Coalition Provisional Authority's Paul Bremer was
given an impossible mandate to keep the country
united, ethnically integrated and constitutionally
democratic. In his short year, he achieved the
opposite and abandoned ship. His policies formalised
the ethnic divisions within the country's political
institutions, rendering Iraq ungovernable. In the
process he alienated the former Iraqi opposition
parties who were eager to share power and
responsibility.
Throughout their time in opposition, the mutually
distrustful Kurdish, Shi'a and Sunni Arab political
parties had little in common in terms of
aspirations, strategies or alliances. Not
unexpectedly, integration was not on their agenda,
before or after regime change. In this period, the
best of the mechanisms proposed for preserving Iraq
as a unified state was the constitution adopted in
the referendum of 15 October 2005.
In essence, the constitution would divide Iraq into
federal units (de facto states) with irreversible
decentralisation of power. This is designed to
prevent the return of dictatorships - a situation to
which, as far as the Kurds and the majority Shi'a
are concerned, there is no going back. The downside
of this devolutionary constitution is that it yields
weak governments in Baghdad, invariably composed of
a coalition of unwilling and distrusting parties.
The pre-constitution interim government of Iyad
Allawi (June 2004 - April 2005) has been the
strongest of the post -regime-change period. He
shared power with his partners and won their trust.
In contrast, his successor as prime minister Ibrahim
Jaafari provided a good example of how not to rule.
He failed to implement the interim constitution,
alienated his governing partners and forged unlikely
alliances with extremist Shi'a militias.
The Sunnis and most Shi'a (including Hakim's Sciri)
were grateful for the strong Kurdish veto wielded by
Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, which prevented
Jaafari's re-election. His own successor and the
current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, promised to
be different. His government, however, is crippled
by the lack of control of the army, police or
intelligence services; essentially, it is now
confined to the boundaries of Baghdad's Green Zone
and helpless in the face of insensate violence and
escalating civil war.
The Kurds' ambitions
Kurdish political leaders in the post-Saddam era,
having just about recovered from the genocidal rule
of an extreme Arab nationalist, displayed their
preference for a democratic Iraq to an isolated and
vulnerable Kurdistan. They have manifested this by
contributing significantly to the professional
conduct of the government in Baghdad and have won
respect for their focus, professionalism and
statesmanship.
The Kurds freely supported the new constitution and
the government in the hope that their aspirations
and prosperity will be realised within a democratic
Iraq. But a number of factors - Jaafari's hesitation
in implementing the constitution, extremist (and
anti-Kurdish) Arab rhetoric and incipient communal
violence - all began to ring alarm-bells. Masoud
Barzani, president of the Kurdistan autonomous
region, made it clear that the Kurds would review
their choice of remaining within Iraq if the agreed
constitution was not implemented, or if civil war
rages out of control.
The first condition will be tested in a referendum
(scheduled for December 2007) on whether the city of
Kirkuk should join the Kurdistan autonomous region.
The second condition is already ripe. Sectarian
killings have increased slowly but exponentially
since early 2005 and have gathered greater momentum
since the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006.
As a consequence, increasing numbers of Iraqis are
fleeing their homes: from 30,000 people by the end
of March 2006 to 138,000 by mid-August.
The displaced are families from areas of mixed
Sunni-Shi'a communities escaping to parts of the
country dominated by their own ethnic or religious
group. Joseph Biden has argued in a Washington Post
article (24 August 2006) that violence between
Shi'as and Sunni is now the main security threat in
Iraq, surpassing even the insurgency and the
presence of foreign terrorists in the country.
After Iraq
Is an independent Kurdistan viable? The answer is,
most certainly, yes. Kurdistan is economically
self-sufficient, more so than many member-states of
the United Nations. The international climate is
also more favourable. In the past, Turkey, Iran,
Syria and other Arab countries have acted against
progress in Kurdistan, and they were greatly aided
by the fact that the United States found it in its
interest to support a stronger (and anti-Iranian)
Iraq at the expense of the Kurds and Shi'as. This
circumstance has changed since the start of the war
on terror.
Moreover, the people of Iraq no longer dispute the
right of Kurdish self-determination. Privately and
publicly, senior politicians in charge of
government, parliament or the partisan media, treat
the de facto state of Kurdistan as a reality and
would accept a democratically managed separation
programme. A minority of Iraqi Arabs would even
prefer to have the Kurds out of the Iraqi equation,
just as there are a minority of Kurds who would
genuinely prefer to remain within the greater Iraq.
In response to the argument that Kurdish
independence or the division of Iraq into federal
entities is a dangerous proposal, it can be said
that "united" Iraq has never been truly united and
has always itself been dangerous to its people and
its neighbours. The more important question is: what
are the least dangerous alternatives?
The obvious options, which
will have been considered by the Baker commission on
Iraq, include:
- allowing the current situation to evolve
naturally: a high risk strategy with no end to a
civil war
- suspending the constitution and parliament,
allowing a dictatorial minority rule for an
unlimited period (this may temporarily put a lid on
the civil war and postpone the break-up of Iraq
- changing the constitution to centralise power in
Baghdad, allowing majority (Shi'a) domination of
Iraq (in this case civil war will continue and
Kurdistan will go it alone)
- dividing Iraq into several federal entities,
capable of self-governing but loosely united within
Iraqi boundaries (consistent with the adopted
constitution)
- dismember Iraq.
To end the spiralling civil war, secure democracy,
contribute to a stable middle east and, crucially,
protect American and British interests, the only
viable two options available to the Bush
administration are the last two. If the fourth were
not orchestrated tactfully, the fifth is inevitable,
with or without American help. The Biden-Gleb plan
to "hold Iraq together" is indeed another way of
achieving the fourth.
It is most unlikely that the US will be able to
contain violence in Iraq without the help of Iraqis.
This can only be accomplished by implementing the
constitution, allowing local authorities within each
province (federal unit) to fortify their boundaries
and take control of their security and day-to-day
affairs. Therefore, in reality, the Baker committee
has little option but to recommend the least popular
but most natural choice. This would involve
supporting the Iraqi government to implement the
current constitution, dividing Iraq accordingly into
small federal units, securing a lasting peace and
conducting a programmed withdrawal of coalition
troops.
Iraq has never been truly united and never will be.
Kurdistan is an independent state in-waiting. Its
birth was delayed, not by Turkey, Iran or the Arab
world, but by the cold-war world order. Things have
changed in the post- 9/11 world order. Preserving
Iraq's territorial integrity, at the expense of the
Kurds, is no longer an option. The only way to slow
down or prevent Kurdistan's total devolution is by
creating a democratic haven within Iraq and
implementing the agreed constitution. If this does
not happen, Kurdistan by 2008 is likely to become
(after Kosovo?) the 194th member-state of the United
Nations.
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