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Oil and "gasolina" in Kurdistan
21.3.2006
By Spencer Ackerman |
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In one part of Iraq, the daily
struggle for survival is waged against a pulsating
Spanish-Jamaican musical beat celebrating the joys
of – well, what, exactly? Spencer Ackerman reports
from Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.
There isn't any doubt who runs these streets among
the teenage vendors of black-market gasoline in
Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. On a cold
morning, the word goes out along 60th Street, the
thoroughfare that rings through Erbil, that the
police are about to crack down. That means today
isn't like most days.
On most days, the sidewalk would be crowded with
plastic twenty-litre jerrycans of the precious
commodity, stacked up like they were meant to offer
protection from an explosion, enticing any driver
looking for relief from the Kurdistan Democratic
Party's imposed limit of thirty litres per week.
Just as soon as such a driver pulls to the kerb, a
14-year-old in a faded Sergio Valente jean-jacket
and a hint of a moustache would compete with a
half-dozen others for the privilege of leaning into
the passenger-side window and the promise of
hustling a little cash.
Today, though, the threat of a crackdown has thinned
the crowd. From the gas-hustlers' perspective, the
cops can do almost anything they want to enforce the
rationing. Since most cars in Erbil fill up through
the black market, the security forces frequently
look the other way. But when they need to
demonstrate who's in charge, it's all heavy manners.
"The second time I was arrested, I got a million-dinar
fine", says one half-awake vendor. A million dinars
is about $7,000, which he obviously couldn't afford,
given that a day's take is typically in the
neighborhood of $15.
More often, the security forces will just confiscate
their gas. Either option represents a serious
setback for gas-hustlers, so the few kids on the
street today nervously look over their shoulders as
they use cut-off soda-bottlers to fill their
customer's tanks. "The cops tell us today on the
street that we can't sell", another teenager says
stoically. "But there is no other work." The
security forces aren't really concerned. These are
their streets, and they're the safest in Iraq.
The gas-hustlers have a comfort, though – chilly as
it may be in the face of a security crackdown.
Wafting through the airwaves and onto the streets of
Erbil is an unlikely palliative speaking directly to
the Kurdish imagination in this current moment of
netherworldly nationhood: reggaetón. At precisely
the right moment of national confusion, this hybrid
confection of Jamaican dancehall reggae and Latin
lyrical thuggishness is musing to northern Iraq
about the liberating possibilities of gasolina. In a
bizarre but tangible sense, the peshmergas' status
as Erbil street bosses has competition from a San
Juan rapper named Daddy Yankee.
Gasolina is Daddy Yankee's anthem, the track that
earned him his crown as king of reggaetón and a
5,000-word profile in the New York Times Magazine.
It's possible to hear the song three times a day
over the radio in Erbil, probably more often than it
appeared on the New York City FM dial at the height
of its stateside ubiquity in 2005.
That's thanks largely to Radio Sawa, the
much-derided brainchild of the United States
broadcasting board of governors that mixes American
pop and agitprop, which mainlines Gasolina directly
to Erbil.
The song is so popular in the city that a trip to
the Happy Times restaurant and shisha lounge in the
middle-class neighbourhood of Ainkawa is an
invitation to a reggaetón barrage. On a typical
evening, the restaurant's massive projector screen
shows Daddy Yankee merrily waxing down a woman's
shapely and barely-concealed derričre while patrons
nod their heads and chew pizza.
Bemused incredulity over the popularity of reggaetón
in Kurdistan is among the most telling indications
of a first-time visitor.
It would be a stretch to say that the enthusiasm for
Gasolina has to do with its subject matter,
especially when considering its aggressive rhythm
and near-pornographic video. But Daddy Yankee's
signature track is a sexually-explicit ode to what
gasolina can provide – and here "gasoline" can mean,
as Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, speed, rum,
semen or gasoline – and that, of course, is
unadulterated pleasure. And at the moment, as Iraq
disintegrates, the Kurds are betting quite heavily
on what gasoline can do for them.
Near the reggaetón parlor of Happy Times is the
Erbil office of a Norwegian company called DNO. With
the exception of Halliburton, DNO is the most
controversial corporation in Iraq. In November 2005,
DNO arrived in the Kurdish city of Zakho, 160
kilometres (100 miles) northwest of Erbil on the
Turkish border, to begin work on an oilfield. Less
than a month before, Iraqis had approved a new
constitution that contains an ill-defined mechanism
for controlling and distributing oil revenue from
"current fields" – a controversial provision that
contributed to a sectarian split over the document,
with Shi'a and Kurds approving it and Sunnis
rejecting it.
But Zakho isn't a "current field"; it's a new one.
And over newly-developed fields, the Kurdish
position is that the constitution allows them to
tithe not a single petrodollar to Baghdad. When DNO
struck oil at Zakho's Tawke-1 well on 22 December,
it was like a national holiday, eliciting a feeling
of ecstasy as primordial and pure as that of Daddy
Yankee's female interlocutor, who begs him for more
gasoline. While she might consider the pleasure of
gasoline as an end in itself, the Kurds, thinking
strategically, believe their oil wealth will
eventually purchase them nationhood.
The gas-hustlers don't have any such grand plans.
Their preoccupation is to avoid police harassment
and make money, something the streets of San Juan
can understand and reflect through reggaetón.
Every morning at 7 a.m. the hustlers queue up at a
nearby black market called Mahmoud so the oil trucks
– probably from the massive refinery at Baiji, which
is effectively controlled by Sunni insurgents – can
sell them blue 200-litre barrels. "It's expensive",
says a 15-year-old businessman in a red ski jacket.
"But it's good gas."
With Gasolina providing a national anthem for
Kurdistan, it's impossible to imagine any other
kind.
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