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The city of Kirkuk faces up to the curse
of oil
29.8.2008
By Deborah Haynes in Kirkuk
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August 29, 2008
It should be Iraq's biggest success story. Beneath
the soil of Kirkuk lies oil worth billions of
dollars - the world's sixth-biggest reserve.
Yet there is no sewerage system, the roads are
cracked, rubbish is strewn all over the pavements,
unemployment is as high as 40 per cent and there is
no sign of any improvement.
Even more worrying - to the Government as well as to
the US-led coalition - is that the city is being
pulled between different ethnic groups, making it
the most dangerous issue facing Iraq.
The Kurds of Kirkuk, who are a majority and hold the
top political and security posts, believe that the
city belongs to Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdish
north.
After years of “Arab-isation” as Saddam Hussein
tried to ensure control of its oil wealth, offering
poor Arab families money to relocate there,www.ekurd.net
Kirkuk is now filling
with Kurdish families returning in their droves.
The Arab settlers have the option to go back to
their original towns and cities for a cash payment
of 20 million dinars (L9,100).This worries and
infuriates the Arabs and the city's other main
ethnic group, the Turkomans. They want Kirkuk to
stay under the control of Baghdad or for it to be
made an independent zone where power is shared.
All sides are equally passionate about their cause,
with Kurdish leaders talking of protests if their
rights are eroded, while Arab and Turkoman
politicians pledge to resist to their last breath
any move to make Kirkuk part of Iraqi Kurdistan.
All sides can, however, agree on one thing: the
frenzy over the city is because of its oil and gas
wealth. “The citizens of Kirkuk have a saying that
the blessing of oil has become a curse,” Abdulrahman
Mustafa Fattah, the Kurdish Governor of Kirkuk, told
The Times.
“Oil has destroyed our land; oil has changed the
demographics ... Even now we feel there is an
injustice done to Kirkuk because of oil.”
Caught in the middle is the United Nations, which
has the unenviable task of trying to devise a
compromise solution to which everyone will agree.
“It is probably the most delicate and potentially
explosive issue in Iraq,” Staffan de Mistura, head
of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, said. “That
is why we are giving it top priority.”
The arguments that put politicians at loggerheads
have yet to feed down to the street,www.ekurd.net
where ordinary Kurds,
Arabs and Turkomans insist that they remain friends.
Press the people of Kirkuk about their hopes for the
future, though, and the ethnic fault-lines soon
emerge.
“What the Kurds want the Arabs don't. What the Arabs
want the Kurds don't. And the Turkomans don't really
agree with either side,” said Nisreen Shukur, 33, a
Kurdish teacher who was one of thousands pushed out
by Saddam but who returned after his overthrow.
Arabs and Turkmen, upset by the demographic
realignment, accuse the two main Kurdish political
parties of exploiting the system to enable
additional Kurds to move in. They also claim that
Arab and Turkoman families are being forced to leave
to manipulate further the ethnic ratio in the Kurds'
favour.
“We cannot get jobs, our families are displaced and
those who speak out get kidnapped, killed or
arrested,” said Ahmed Hamid al-Obeidi, general
secretary of the Arab Unity Bloc, the main Arab
political grouping in Kirkuk. “The Kurdish parties
have hurt us in a way that is unprecedented in
history.”
Kurdish leaders deny charges that they are behaving
to others as Saddam did to them.
“Did we ever commit acts of genocide?” asked Rizgar
Ali, head of the city's provincial council and a
leading member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
“Do we put people in mass graves?”
Rifts over Kirkuk's status have delayed the passage
of a law on provincial elections, throwing into
doubt the prospect of a nationwide poll before the
end of the year. This has dismayed the United States
and Britain, who regard this as a crucial milestone;
the Iraqi parliament is due to wrestle with the
problem when it reconvenes next month.
In addition, Mr de Mistura says, the UN is working
on a variety of proposals for the city to be put
first to the various factions, and then eventually
to a referendum.
Everyone knows how high the stakes are. Last month a
suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of
banner-waving Kurds in the city centre who were
protesting against draft election legislation. In
the violent chaos that followed, a mob of angry
Kurds attacked the offices of a Turkoman political
party. More than 25 people were killed in total and
over 200 were injured.
Ahmed Askari, a Kurdish provincial council member
who sits on a committee that deals with
reconstruction, says that Kirkuk, source of enormous
wealth, is itself being neglected by the central
Government.
“Who owns the petrol?” he asked. “All the money is
taken by Baghdad and spent on cities across Iraq but
Kirkuk is at the end of the list. We only get the
smoke, dirt and occupation of the land.” he said.
Mr Askari believes that the city should receive
compensation for helping to generate the main source
of Iraq's income.
Mahbuba Kakamir, a rotund Kurdish housewife, summed
up the feelings of many of Kirkuk's people. “What is
the use of living on a sea of oil if it does not
improve my life?”
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
timesonline co.uk
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."
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is related to
the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk city
and other disputed areas.
The article also 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.
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.
Kirkuk, sits on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old
settlement. Because of the strategic geographical
location of the city, Kirkuk was the battle ground
for three empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media
which controlled the city at various times.
Kirkuk is the center of the northern Iraqi petroleum
industry. It is a historically and ethnically mixed
city populated by Assyrians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi
Turkmen. The population was estimated at 1,200,000
in 2008.
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