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Iraq's Kurds deserve better neighbours
28.2.2008
By Gary Kent
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February 28, 2008
There is obvious fellow feeling between Kurds in
Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, but the PKK's actions
do the Kurds no favours
"The PKK is the result of and not the reason for
Turkish actions," was the curt message from the
president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG),
Massoud Barzani, when a British parliamentary
delegation visited him shortly before Turkish troops
crossed into Iraq late on Thursday 21 February. For
decades,www.ekurd.net
Turkish governments have
denied the rights of the country's Kurds. This more
than anything has fuelled the Turkey's Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK).
Addressing that issue would surely be better than
infringing the sovereignty of the most successful
part of Iraq. Besides, the PKK is based mainly
inside Turkey, which has failed to deal with the
problem for more than 24 years. Some PKK guerrillas
are perched in the largely inaccessible Qandil
mountains on the border between the two countries
but have proved impossible to dislodge. Barzani
should know: he co-operated several times with the
Turks to try to do just that. Some fear al-Qaeda
could take over Qandil.
In fact, the Kurdistan Regional Government strongly
opposes the PKK. There is obvious fellow feeling
between Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, but
the PKK's actions do the Kurds no favours. KRG
ministers believe Turkey is using the PKK as a
pretext to constrain Iraqi Kurdistan.
Fears for the future of the region centre on Kirkuk,
the Iraqi Kurds' historic capital, which was
forcibly settled by Saddam Hussein's "10,000-dinar
Arabs" in the 1970s. The new Iraqi constitution
promised a referendum by the end of last year on
whether the oil-rich city should be part of the KRG.
The vote would almost certainly be in favour of that
result.
The Kirkuk question mainly concerns oil, but that is
an oversimplification. Whether Kirkuk is formally
part of the region or not, oil revenues accrue to
Baghdad and are then shared out proportionately. If
the KRG region became larger that would,www.ekurd.net
of course, increase the
Kurdish share. But Turkey fears that Kirkuk's oil
could come to provide the material basis for an
independent Kurdistan, even though KRG leaders have
long opted for autonomy within a democratic Iraq.
The KRG understands the glaring political reality
that Kurdish independence is a non-starter.
So we have a Mexican stand-off between two moderate
and non-Arab Islamic entities that theoretically
have much in common. Ankara refuses to deal directly
with the KRG, which urges multilateral diplomatic
action.
But although politics is in deep-freeze, trade is
red-hot. Turkish companies are the main drivers of
the region's rapid construction boom, nowhere more
so than at the British-designed, multimillion-pound
mega-airport in Erbil, where Turkish contractors
proudly showed us the planet's fifth-longest runway.
Historically, Iraqi Kurds say they have "no friends
but the mountains", but they will soon have a
political and commercial bridge to the world and
possibly a railroad to Istanbul.
Kurdish leaders are playing a major role in building
a federal Iraq - for example, as president and
foreign minister. Yet there is a pervasive sense of
limbo in the region and less optimism than in the
first flush of "liberation" after 2003. The Iraqi
parliament was slow to agree an oil law. Small oil
companies have set up shop, but big players are
nervous. The KRG desperately needs investment to
maximise revenue from oil, gas, agriculture and
tourism - yes, tourism.
Kurdistan is moving from a bloody past to an
uncertain future. It has history in abundance:
182,000 Kurds died and 4,000 villages were razed in
Saddam's genocidal Anfal campaign. Children are
still being born with deformities caused by his
chemical weapons. All this weighs heavily on the
small, landlocked region, but there are signs of
hope blowing in the wind, literally.
For Iraqi Kurds, the Iraqi flag was tainted by
Saddam's totalitarian legacy and has long been
banned. Now it has been redesigned and has been
unfurled over the Kurdistan National Assembly beside
KRG colours. The mostly secure and secular Kurdistan
could yet be a model for the rest of Iraq, and the
wider Middle East. It deserves better friends and
neighbours.
Gary Kent visited Iraqi Kurdistan with the UK
all-party parliamentary group on the region
newstatesman com
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