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KIRKUK,
Kurdistan-Iraq — Surrounded by half-built housing
developments, crowded tenements and congested roads,
the tiny storefront office of Zakariya Real Estate
is booming with business.
Maps of subdivisions hang like gridded wallpaper.
Shelves display tile samples and colorful pictures
of modular homes, priced to fit a range of budgets.
"Seventy percent of our clients are Kurds who were
displaced by Saddam Hussein," proprietor Zakariya
Tahir Ali said in a recent interview. "Now they are
coming back."
As Kurds with means construct new houses, thousands
of others who have returned to Kirkuk are demanding
that their old houses be vacated by Arabs who moved
there under Hussein's ethnic policies, heightening
tensions in one of Iraq's most diverse cities.
The former Iraqi president forced about 250,000
Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in
the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city and the region's
oil industry. U.S. and Iraqi officials estimate that
nearly all those Kurds have returned to Kirkuk,
capital of Al Tamim province, along with as many as
100,000 newcomers.
Kirkuk, with a population of about 1 million, has
long been home to a mix of Kurds, Turkmens and
Arabs, both Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and a
smattering of Christians.
Last week, Turkmen leaders held discussions with
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential
Shiite leader, to push for greater representation in
Kirkuk's government. But it is the majority Kurds
who have taken the strongest action to claim the
city as their own.
Iraq's constitution outlines a process by which
those who were illegally displaced by the Hussein
regime would be compensated for confiscated property
or resettled in their old homes. Under the plan,
Arabs who relinquish Kurdish properties would also
receive relocation funds. The resettlement programs
would take place before a citywide census and 2007
referendum that will decide whether the oil-rich
province should be annexed to the semiautonomous
Kurdish region in Iraq's north.
Kurdish families have filed thousands of claims with
the Iraq Property Claims Commission, created to
redress unjust land grabs by Hussein's regime.
One-third of 131,937 land claims filed since 2003
nationwide were filed in Kirkuk, according to
commission figures.
Of those, about 2,500 claims have been settled, but
there is still no effective legal mechanism to
execute eviction orders on Arab occupants.
Thousands of Kurds have moved to Kirkuk to await
adjudication of their claims, settling in bombed-out
military facilities, squalid government office
buildings and squatter camps throughout the city.
About half a mile from Ali's real estate office is
Kirkuk's soccer stadium, home to one of the city's
largest displaced communities. During a recent
visit, two families could be seen holding a slapdash
wedding ceremony in the parking lot. Hundreds of
others huddled in broken-down storage and changing
rooms. Children scampered along the rafters.
The garbage-strewn stadium lacks running water and
electricity and has occasionally been targeted by
insurgents' rockets. During the winter, families
forage for scrap wood and other refuse, which serve
as cooking and heating fuel.
"My family was driven out of Kirkuk during the
former regime because we are Kurds," said Ahmed Nori,
29, a refugee who said he was born in Kirkuk. "We
returned to Kirkuk after the regime fell and have
lived here since then. Nobody cares about displaced
people…. We've been living like this for three
years. We are asking for lands and loans. Kurds have
suffered enough, and they are still suffering."
Ali opened his real estate office three years ago
and says he has been doing brisk business. He says
he has sold two-thirds of the 1,850 land parcels he
started out with and is looking for more land to
develop — but real estate inside the city has become
increasingly scarce. Ali says he competes with more
than 500 real estate offices in Kirkuk.
"Some of the folks are coming back on their own, and
some are being given some money by the Kurdish
political parties to help them rebuild their homes,"
said U.S. Army Col. David Gray, commander of the 1st
Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, which operates in
the Kirkuk area. "There is also the charge that
there is some squatting on government lands."
Some beneficiaries of Hussein's Arabization plan say
Kurdish settlers are pressuring them to leave Kirkuk.
But after as many as 30 years in the northern city,
many Arab families have no place to go.
"We have been here for the last 17 years," said
Shakir Mohammed, 28, an Arab merchant who lives with
his family in one of several apartment complexes
that were built for Arab settlers. Mohammed said
that several Arab families at a group of apartment
buildings that residents still called "Saddam's
Complex" had been threatened by Kurdish residents.
"That's why a number of families were obliged to
leave Kirkuk and go back to Baghdad and other
southern provinces," he said. "Saddam is the only
one to blame for his own personal conduct. What is
the guilt of the Arabs who came here just to have
the benefit of a better house and a job?"
Mohammed Khalil Nasif, an Arab member of the
provincial governorate council, said that Kurdish
leaders had manipulated the refugee situation in the
northern city.
"The Kurds are bringing people in who have never
lived here before," he said. "And they stay in camps
and government offices and say, 'We are oppressed.'
"
Kurdish leaders say they are willing to negotiate
resettlement costs for Kirkuk's Arab residents, but
insist that most of them must leave. "Kurds must
return back to their homes, and Arabs must leave and
go back to where they originally came from," said
Adnan Mufti, speaker of Kurdistan's parliament.
Kurdish politicians regard Kirkuk as key to their
sustained autonomy; to more militant Kurds, the city
is a cornerstone of a future Kurdistan nation.
Al Tamim is one of Iraq's most strategically
important regions, producing 40% of the country's
oil and 70% of its natural gas. Kurds have already
demonstrated their impatience with Baghdad and the
U.S.-led reconstruction effort by independently
approving at least two oil exploration deals in
Kurdistan.
"The oil infrastructure up here is very, very
important, not only to this region, but to Iraq
itself," Gray said during a recent media
teleconference from Kirkuk. "And so the tensions
over that, control of that and control of Kirkuk
itself — it has great symbolism and meaning to every
one of the ethnic groups here."
This month, a coalition of Arabs on Al Tamim's
governorate council, on which Kurds have a majority,
announced that they were suspending their
membership, "because of the continuous neglect of
our people's rights and its failure to respond to
our official requests."
The announcement came amid continuing allegations by
Arab and Turkmen leaders that Kurdish forces were
conducting a campaign of intimidation and illegal
arrests to clear the city for Kurdish refugees.
"We know that people are being arrested by Asayish,
but we don't know where they take them," said Tahsin
Kahya, a Turkmen who is chair of the governorate
council, referring to the Kurdish security agency.
There have also been a number of retaliatory
assassinations and kidnappings, U.S. officials said.
"Are there ethnically motivated killings? Yes,
certainly those are happening across Kirkuk," said
an American official. "But determining how
widespread these killings are is a difficult thing,
and trying to figure out exactly who's doing the
killings is, at times, problematic."
Kurdish, Turkmen, Arab and U.S. officials in Kirkuk
have recently formed a body called the Committee for
the Missing to identify, locate and secure the
release of wrongful arrest victims.
Members of the committee have compiled a list of
more than 100 "disappeared" people who are believed
to have been arrested by Kurdish and U.S. forces.
Most of those on the list appear to have Sunni Arab
names.
A former Kurdish government official who said he had
toured three secret prisons in Kurdistan over the
last two years described rows of solitary
confinement cells where prisoners are held behind
iron doors without light or toilets. The former
official, who asked not to be identified for fear of
government reprisals, also described torture tactics
used by interrogators.
"They interrogate by torturing, using things like
shocking prisoners with electricity or burning them
with hot irons, sodomizing them with bottles," the
former official said. "Or they oblige them to stay
in the sun for a whole day and in the cold they
expose them to the elements."
LA Times.com
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