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Can the U.N. avert a Kirkuk border war?
28.4.2008
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April
28, 2008
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- Kirkuk provincial council head Rizgar Ali says
one proof of the province's "Kurdishness" is in the
maps.
Several maps dating from the Ottoman and British
colonial eras hang on his office walls showing the
city of Kirkuk at the heart of a Kurdistan that
spans parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey. A 1957 map
shows Kirkuk Province's original border prior to it
being renamed Tamim and then altered by Saddam
Hussein's Arabization policy.
But Ali Mahdi, a Turkmen leader here, has his own
maps. His show the city of Kirkuk at the heart of
Turkmeneli: the supposed home of Iraq's ethnic
Turkmen population.
The vastly different ways that Iraq's ethnic groups
view this province and its capital city, Kirkuk,
illustrate the deep-rooted, complex, and potentially
explosive issue of its status and the ongoing debate
over Iraq's internal borders. In Kirkuk,www.ekurd.net
the issue was supposed
to have been decided by a constitutionally mandated
referendum to take place by the end of 2007. The
vote is delayed until June.
In the meantime the United States is using its
leverage with all sides – Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs
– to keep the situation from blowing up into an
all-out war for control here as the United Nations
Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) works on a plan
to broker a peaceful solution to the status of the
province that is the home of northern Iraq's oil
industry.
In addition to Kirkuk, the UNAMI plan is looking at
other disputed areas spanning an arc that is almost
300 miles long and stretches from the city of Sinjar
in northwest Iraq to Diyala Province in the east.
"We do put it as a very top priority of ours to deal
with this issue ... now we believe that UNAMI's
efforts have the best chance of getting at a stable
and secure resolution to this issue," says a US
diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of
anonymity due to embassy requirements.
According to the US diplomat and Muhammad Ihsan, the
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) minister on the
national committee dealing with Kirkuk, UNAMI's
efforts involve suggestions for resolving the fate
of at least four contested areas in the hopes of
leading to a greater compromise on Kirkuk Province
territories on which each ethnic group has claims.
Its plan is expected to be announced in mid-May.
"If you start with some of the areas that are less
controversial ... you might have some processes in
place that have buy-in from all the sides involved,www.ekurd.net
so you have an easier
way of getting at ultimate resolution on the
boundaries," says the US diplomat, adding that
UNAMI's proposed solutions look at how commerce and
the sharing of water resources would be affected in
the process of border resolution.
"We are looking for ways to compromise. Some areas
are soft, some areas are hard," says Mr. Ihsan,
using the terms "soft" in English to describe the
areas that are overwhelmingly made up of one of the
three ethnic groups and "hard" being the more mixed
and contentious areas.
He says the KRG would be open to working out within
the UNAMI-administered process "power-sharing
formulas" in places where Kurds are present but do
not make up the majority.
In return, he says, the KRG would demand that areas
that are overwhelmingly Kurdish and are now de facto
under the control of the two main Kurdish parties be
annexed to the KRG. As for the city of Kirkuk, he
says the KRG is willing to have its fate decided
through a referendum but no later than the end of
2008.
Kurdistan's Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani says
that although his government is determined that the
city of Kirkuk and other contested areas become part
of its semiautonomous KRG that does not mean it
would not be willing to have other communities –
namely the Arabs and Turkmen – be represented in the
local administration.
"We are ready for power-sharing in Kirkuk," says Mr.
Barzani, adding that his government's willingness to
have the implementation of Article 140, which calls
for a vote on the fate of Kirkuk, extended until
June is a sign of goodwill.
But Barzani says the KRG's willingness for
compromise does not mean it will give up on the city
of Kirkuk. He recounts how his grandfather Mustafa
Barzani, considered a Kurdish national war hero, had
proposed to Mr. Hussein in 1970 "just do not deny
Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan and we are ready for any
agreement. He refused and fought us."
For the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), the most militant
camp that is supported by Turkey, and many Arabs,
Article 140 has expired. The ITF says the only
solution now is to declare Kirkuk "a special
province" and allow a period of at least 10 years to
resolve internal border disputes.
Many Arab leaders here say they are caught between a
rock and a hard place when it comes to the Kirkuk
question.
"We are like a dog who can't go anywhere because his
tail is stuck … we are accused by the Americans that
we support the insurgency and if we take part in the
political process we are labeled by our own people
as agents," says Sheikh Abdullah Sami al-Assi al-Obeidi,
a member of the Kirkuk council. He has been the
target of three assassination attempts since 2005.
The Arab leaders in Kirkuk, including some of the US
supported and funded sheikhs involved in the
Awakening movement, or sahwas, against Al Qaeda,
held a conference last month to announce that the
Kurds are "dreaming" if they think Kirkuk would ever
be part of the KRG.
"Kirkuk is for all Iraqis and it will stay that
way," says Sheikh Issa al-Jubbouri, who leads a
US-funded militia in Zab, southwest of the city of
Kirkuk. He says he receives nearly $250,000 each
month from the US military.
But as the resolution of the Kirkuk issue drags on,
many average Iraqis feel as if they are living in
limbo. Almost daily, hundreds of people come to the
provincial council office in the hopes of receiving
payment from the national committee tasked with
implementing Article 140.
Kurds, driven out by Arabization and who have
resettled in Kirkuk, receive roughly $8,300 in
assistance. Arabs leaving receive double that. But
there is still much hardship on both sides.
Bikhal Karim, a Kurd, says that her family fears the
potential of more violence and still can't afford to
stay in the city of Kirkuk and want to go back to
Sulaimaniyah, inside the KRG.
"When I get this check cashed we are going back,"
she says.
An Arab family that has returned to Samarra, in
neighboring Salaheddin Province, is also trying to
collect compensation. "If they share the oil, we do
not have a problem if they [Kurds] take Kirkuk,"
says Omar Mustafa. But his comment is immediately
condemned by other Arabs standing nearby, just one
piece of evidence of how difficult it will be to
solve the Kirkuk question
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
csmonitor com
*
Kirkuk city is historically 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. Kurds
have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk,
which they call "the Kurdish Jerusalem.".
The article 140 in Iraqi constitution calls for conducting a census to be
followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants
decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed
to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having
it as an independent province.
These stages were supposed to end on December 31,
2007, a deadline that was later extended to six
months.
The former regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
had 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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