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Kirkuk: Refugees in their own homeland
26.12.2007
By Mark Mackinnon
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December
26, 2007
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- It's been a long time since anyone played
an organized game of soccer at the stadium in the
Iraqi Kurdish city of Kirkuk.
For the past 41/2 years, the fading green pitch has
been the site of a squalid tent city that's home to
some 2,200 people.
Laundry festoons the bleachers where the fans once
sat, and open sewage flows through shallow ditches
dug in the dirt outside. The parking lot is filled
with simple cinderblock houses, some with
electricity and satellite dishes,www.ekurd.net
that attest to how
long some families have called the stadium and its
environs home.
The residents are Kurds, refugees in what was once
their own city, who were driven from their homes
during Saddam Hussein's notorious Anfal campaign to
“Arabize” Iraq's fourth-largest city during the
1980s. They returned to Kirkuk – which many Kurds
consider the “Kurdish Jerusalem,” the historic heart
of their homeland – in the wake of the U.S.-led
invasion in 2003. |
Over 500 Kurdish families have set up camp at a
dilapidated soccer stadium, awaiting government
approval to move back into the city. |
But they found their old
homes occupied by Sunni and Shia Arabs who weren't
at all keen on moving out, despite being offered a
$16,000 government compensation package to do so.
Whether the refugees will finally return to their
old homes will likely be decided in a referendum
that looms in early 2008.
Residents are to decide whether Kirkuk and
surrounding Tamim province will join the autonomous
Kurdistan area in the north of the country or remain
under Baghdad's control. It's a vote that many fear
could plunge the last stable corner of Iraq into
chaos and violence.
That the refugees are still in the soccer stadium
almost five years after the U.S. invasion is a
testament to how high the stakes are as Arabs and
Kurds continue to wrestle for control of the
oil-rich city. The central government in Baghdad
doesn't want to see the refugees return to their old
homes, fearing that Kirkuk and the oil reserves that
surround it in Tamim province will fall further
outside its control.
As much as 40 per cent of Iraq's production comes
from Tamim province, and some estimates suggest that
as many as 10 billion barrels of oil may lie beneath
its soil. The region also sits astride a key oil
pipeline that takes Iraqi crude to market via the
Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Viewing Kirkuk as the key to an economically viable
independent state, the Kurdish regional government
has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Kurds to
move back to Kirkuk in the past few years, and now
won't let them return to their former exile in the
north, threatening to cut off government handouts if
they do. With nowhere else to go, the refugees have
hunkered down for another cold winter in the soccer
stadium.
Kurdish leaders are eager to bring about the
referendum, but both the central Iraqi government
and the occupying U.S. army have pushed for its
delay, fearing it will spark new violence. In the
worst-case scenario, the Kirkuk issue could be the
one that finally drags the Kurds into the Sunni-Shia
fighting that has ripped apart the rest of the
country, setting Iraq, perhaps irrevocably, on the
course to being torn into three pieces.
“The situation in the entire country will become
much more dangerous if the referendum is held
without being very, very well-prepared,” said Majoob
Zweiri, a specialist in regional politics at the
Centre for Strategic Studies in neighbouring Jordan.
“Right now, the Iraqi government and the U.S. are
speaking about reducing tensions, the decreasing
number of casualties.
They want to say that everything's going well. They
don't want to create a new zone of instability in
Iraq. There's a lot of concern about the
consequences of the referendum.”
The vote was supposed to have taken place on Nov.
15, but it was postponed over fears that it would
provoke more violence. But it can't be put off
indefinitely. A controversial clause, known as
Article 140, in Iraq's 2005 constitution calls for a
referendum in Kirkuk “to determine the will of the
citizens” by the end of 2007. Earlier this month,
Kurdish leaders agreed to a six-month extension of
that deadline, but no longer.
“The population of this area has been oppressed,
deported, killed and Arabized. Do we need to say
what this is? [The referendum] is about trying to
repair the injustice that was done,” said Fouad
Hussein, an aide to Massoud Barzani,www.ekurd.net
the President
of Kurdistan Regional Government that runs 'northern
Iraq'. He said many non-Kurds might also vote to
join the Kurdistan region, which, protected by its
own peshmerga Kurdistan forces, has been an oasis of
relative calm and stability in Iraq.
Mr. Hussein complained that the Nov. 15 vote was
postponed partly to appease some of Iraq's
neighbours –namely Turkey, Syria and Iran – which
fear that more independence for Iraq's Kurds could
lead to calls for similar autonomy among their own
sizable Kurdish populations.
Turkey, in particular, has made clear its opposition
to Mr. Barzani's government gaining control of
Kirkuk, claiming a right to protect the city's
Turkmen population. A 1957 census found the Turkmen
were then the city's largest ethnic group, though
the surrounding province was mostly Kurdish. The
current breakdown is hotly disputed, though most
experts believe that as a result of the Kurdish
government's efforts to convince Kurds to move back
to Kirkuk, amid allegations of a parallel campaign
to force Arabs to leave, Kurds now make up a clear
majority both in and around Kirkuk.
Turkey launched air strikes and a brief ground
incursion by several hundred soldiers into Kurdistan
region 'northern Iraq' earlier this month,
ostensibly to root out fighters from the Turkey's
Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group fighting
for independence for Turkey's own Kurds.
But some believe the raids had a secondary purpose
of discouraging a quick referendum on Kirkuk. The
decision to defer the Kirkuk vote for six months was
taken on Dec. 17, one day after Turkish warplanes
bombed 10 villages in Kurdistan region 'northern
Iraq'. Back in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion
and the fall of Baghdad, Turkey went so far as to
threaten direct military action if Iraq's Kurds
moved to seize Kirkuk.
Once one of the calmer cities in the
violence-scorched country, as the initial date for
the referendum on the city's future drew closer,
Kirkuk also saw escalating inter-Iraqi violence.
According to the Iraqi Body Count website, which
provides some of the most conservative estimates of
the number of casualties in Iraq since the war began
more than four years ago, at least 606 people have
died violently in and around Kirkuk so far in 2007.
The gory details of the killings make clear that
Kirkuk is now experiencing the sort of violence
previously reserved only for places like Baghdad and
Mosul: car bombs that kill people by the dozens; the
kidnapping and murder of local imams and
politicians; people killed in their homes by
Katyusha rockets; bodies found tortured and beheaded
by the roadside.
It could be only a taste of what's to come. The
struggle for control of Kirkuk's streets, some
observers say, was postponed with the referendum.
Once the new voting date is set, the violence could
reach even higher levels, threatening Iraq's last
stable region.
“The ethnic conflict has not happened because the
referendum didn't happen,” said Joost Hiltermann, an
Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group.
“It will happen if the referendum goes ahead,
because the other communities will fight tooth and
nail to prevent it.”
theglobeandmail com
Kirkuk city is a
Kurdish city
and it lies just south border of the Kurdistan
autonomous region, the population is a mix of
majority Kurds and minority of Arabs, Christians and
Turkmen. lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced
over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their
homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city
and the region's oil industry.
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