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Democracy's last stand
1.5.2007
Mark Lattimer in Erbil. Comment is free
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May 1, 2007
As 20,000 extra US troops arrived in Baghdad in
February as part of George Bush's "Baghdad security
plan", I asked a university professor there if she
thought the Americans staying would improve
security. "No," she said, "it will get worse." And
if they leave? "It will still get worse. There is no
win-win option any more. Whatever happens now, the
people of Iraq will be the losers."
With a succession of massive explosions hitting
Baghdad over the past two weeks, people in Iraq talk
less about the American troop surge than a Sunni
bombing surge. But what will probably be seen as a
military failure in fact derives from the US's most
deadly political mistake: expending its credibility
in support of a "democratic" Iraqi government now
close to collapse and from the beginning rotten to
the core.
When I was in Baghdad last June just after the
formation of the government, I noticed the optimism
inside the green zone contrasted starkly with the
fatalism expressed by Iraqis outside it. One reason
soon became clear. Statistics for violent civilian
deaths released by the UN, based on body counts in
hospitals and morgues, showed that the inauguration
of the government had coincided with a huge increase
in killings, which over the summer reached 3,000 a
month, or 100 a day.
While insurgent bombings dominated the headlines, it
was clear that most of the bodies, often found with
skulls punctured by drills, were the work of Shia
death squads. US statements about the Iraqi
government's capacity to provide security obscured
the fact that the militias mainly responsible, the
Badr brigade and Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, were
linked to the two most powerful parties in the
governing coalition. The government, supposedly
representing Iraq's democratic hopes, was the
biggest part of the problem.
This meant that the so-called hearts-and-minds
campaign was always doomed. I had an opportunity to
see the campaign in action when I came across a US
armoured convoy outside Mosul. The commanding
officer later explained to me that he was visiting
local chiefs to discuss security and build trust.
But the security of his troops prevented any
appointments being made in advance. In practice,
then, as I learned when my tea with a senior Mosul
official was dramatically interrupted, the push for
hearts and minds meant descending on important
people's homes in full battle order to ask them if
they felt safe.
Now, while Iraqi and US soldiers' lives are being
risked at checkpoints around Baghdad's Sadr City,
the greatest threat to Iraq's unity and to its
remaining hopes of democracy lies 150 miles north in
the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Under Saddam Hussein's
policy of Arabisation, tens of thousands of Kurds
and Turkmen were expelled from Kirkuk or forced to
register as Arabs, and Arabs, mainly poor Shia from
the south, were settled there. All the Kurdish
politicians I met last week expressed their
determination to implement the provisions of the new
Iraqi constitution that call for a "normalisation"
process enabling Kurds to reclaim their lands, and a
referendum on the
future of the Kirkuk area by December. With the
government in Baghdad falling apart and America's
days in Iraq numbered, the Kurds realise that unless
they act soon, their chances of bringing Kirkuk into
Iraqi Kurdistan will soon slip away.
In April the Iraqi cabinet agreed a voluntary
package giving Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk 20m
dinars (L7,500) and a plot of land in their area of
origin if they agreed to leave. Non-Kurdish
political parties reacted angrily to the plan, and
inter-communal violence has increased. In fact,
Kirkuk has become so dangerous that persuading Kurds
to return may prove a lot harder than persuading
others to go. Without a political solution soon, it
seems inevitable that the situation will become as
bad as in Baghdad or Mosul, and could threaten the
security of Kurdistan itself.
That would be a grave loss. Kurdistan is unique in
Iraq in enjoying relative security. The Kurdish
units of the Iraqi army you see at checkpoints are
disciplined, and there has been little of the
sectarian bloodletting that has stained the rest of
the country.
A sentiment heard repeatedly outside Kurdistan is
that it is worse now than under Saddam. The failure
to bring even minimal security to Iraq has rendered
the attempts to install democracy next to worthless.
Only in Kurdistan has the rule of law enabled
democratic institutions to develop. "What we have
here is the only success story in Iraq," I was told
last week by Dr Mohammed Ihsan, the Kurdish minister
responsible for negotiating on Kirkuk. "If the
Americans don't sort out the Kirkuk issue, they will
lose what they built here."
Mark Lattimer is the director of Minority Rights
Group International
guardian co.uk
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