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Kirkuk: countdown to chaos?
8.5.2008
By Bill Weinberg
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May 8, 2008
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- A referendum to decide the fate of Kirkuk—the
northern province contested by Arabs, Kurds and
Turkmen, among others—was enshrined in Iraq's 2005
constitution, and was initialy scheduled for
December 2007. Delayed six months after rival groups
were unable to terms, it is now no closer to
realization as the deadline looms. "In December, the
question of Kirkuk was a ticking time bomb. The
United Nations has stopped the clock," UN special
envoy to Iraq Staffan de Mistura told AFP. Rival
factions tell very different stories. "By rights,
Kirkuk belongs to us," a foreign affairs official
from the Kurdish regional government, Falah Mustafa
Bakir, told the French agency. "If Kirkuk is
important to others, it is because of the oil. But
for the Kurds, it is first and foremost a question
of justice. Kirkuk is a symbol of the Kurdish
oppression of the past."
But Turkmen community official Kanan Shakir
Uzeyragal said that "none of the preconditions
necessary for the establishment for the organization
of this consultation have been completed, nor the
judgements over disputed land, or the census. Of the
40,000 contested cases of (land) ownership, only 10
percent have been resolved. And as for the census,
it has not even been started."
Hassan Turan, a Turkmen member of the Kirkuk
provincial council, said: "In truth, the referendum
is a dream. Nobody apart from the Kurds support this
referendum, so why are they being so stubborn? The
only solution is a political agreement involving a
fair division of power between the communities at
the heart of the local institutions." (AFP, May 7)
Background from an April 19 article in The
Economist, online at Kerkuk.net, website of the
Iraqi Turkmen Front (emphasis added):
Broadly speaking, there are four choices. If a
promised referendum is held at the end of June and
the majority of voters so wish, the province of
Kirkuk could join the self-ruling block of three
northern provinces already run by the Kurdistan
Regional Government. Or it could become a
self-ruling entity of its own, as some Turkoman
groups propose. Or it could remain under the
administration of the central government in Baghdad,
as many Arabs prefer. Or the province could be
divided, so that those districts voting to stay
under Baghdad's control would be able to do so,
while those that want to be run by Kurds join the
Kurdish region.
But if the various groups refuse to compromise,
Kirkuk is a powder-keg that could blow up. If
wholesale violence broke out between the main groups
(Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans), then Iraq's
neighbours, in particular Turkey, could be drawn in.
Article 140 of Iraq's constitution provides a clear
road map for settling the issue of Kirkuk and other
disputed territories in the north, all of which were
affected by a ruthless campaign of gerrymandering
and ethnic cleansing under Mr Hussein and his
Baathists,www.ekurd.net
in order to Arabise the
region. Kurds want to right what they see as
historic wrongs-and take Kirkuk into their region.
Arabs and Turkomans vehemently disagree, fearing
they would be marginalised under Kurdish rule. So
far, nobody has found a workable compromise-and the
problem has festered. "The trouble is," says a
Western diplomat, "doing nothing in Kirkuk is almost
as bad as doing something."
So the UN is having a go. At the end of last year
its special representative in Iraq, Staffan de
Mistura, helped persuade the Kurds to accept a
six-month delay in holding a controversial
referendum on whether people in Kirkuk and other
areas wanted to join the Kurdistan region. Now he is
trying to find a formula to settle boundary disputes
in other slightly less tricky areas in the north, in
the hope of creating a model for a future deal for
Kirkuk itself-without having a referendum that many
analysts think would certainly cause bloodshed. Mr
de Mistura admits that Kirkuk is "the mother of all
issues".
The city is just one of the disputed areas addressed
by Article 140 that form an arc running about 450km
(280 miles) from Sinjar in Iraq's north-west corner
to the province of Diyala in the east. So far, the
officially demarcated Kurdish region covers only the
three northern provinces: Dohuk, Erbil and
Sulaymaniyah. But the de facto Kurdish region, which
the Kurdish government claims and currently
controls, spills over into parts of the provinces of
Nineveh, Saladin, Kirkuk (also called Tamim by the
Arabs) and Diyala.
Mr de Mistura says he will table a clutch of
suggestions by May 15th for Iraqi leaders to decide
under which authority to put four or five disputed
areas as the first of three phases for settling the
status of areas on the edge of the officially
recognised Kurdish region. He has not publicly
identified these areas but Kurdish officials say
they may include Makhmour, south-west of Erbil;
Qaraqosh, east of Mosul; an area near Akre populated
largely by members of the Yazidi sect; and Barderash,
north-west of Erbil. These all have mainly Kurdish
populations that could join the Kurdish region
immediately without too much fuss. A second phase
could include territorial adjustments near Sinjar in
the north-west; Altun Kupri, south-east of Erbil on
the road to Kirkuk; and Khanaquin and even Mandali,
near the border with Iran. Some areas could peel
away from de facto Kurdish control. For instance,
the Sunni stronghold of Hawija, where al-Qaeda has
been active, could be taken out of Kirkuk province
and transferred to Saladin.
The stage would then be set for dealing with Kirkuk
itself, though nobody has suggested a timetable. The
idea, says Mr de Mistura, is to consider "objective
criteria", such as the results of the elections in
December 2005, the gerrymandering of provincial
boundaries under Mr Hussein, and how well minority
rights and the sharing of resources in the disputed
areas are respected. A referendum could perhaps
eventually be held at the end of the process, with
luck merely confirming territorial deals previously
struck.
Last week the UN man took his proposals, which are
still being honed, to EU and NATO leaders in
Brussels. Before he left Iraq he stopped off to talk
to Kurdish leaders in Erbil, who have angrily
accused Nuri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad of
dithering over Article 140. But the Kurds have
themselves so far failed to persuade Arabs and
Turkomans in the disputed areas that they would be
better off in a Kurdish-ruled region. The Turkomans
would, for instance, have a much larger proportion
of seats in a Kurdish regional assembly than they
now do in the federal parliament in Baghdad.
Publicly, the Kurdish leaders still insist on a
referendum by the end of June, as promised by the
Iraqi government. Privately, however, they have
given Mr de Mistura's ideas a cautious welcome.
Apart from a referendum, he says, his is "the only
plan on the table". If it worked, it would be a huge
breakthrough towards a stable, federal Iraq. But it
is a long shot.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
ww4report 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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