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Kirkuk, unable to elect, unwilling to compromise
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Kirkuk, unable to elect, unwilling to
compromise
27.1.2009
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January 27, 2009
KIRKUK, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
— Unlike most of the rest of the country, Kirkuk, a
province of some 850,000 people, will not be going
to the polls on January 31.
The simple reason is that the province, riven by
ethnic and political tensions, is not ready for a
peaceful and democratic transfer of power.
New US Vice-President Joe Biden, on a visit to the
city in January, proclaimed that solving the city's
problems would be an important goal of the new US
administration under Barack Obama.
Those problems can roughly be expressed in the
following equation: Ethnic mix, plus abundant oil,
plus a weak democratic culture, equals extreme
political tension.
Kirkuk's ethnic mix stems from successive waves of
migration to the region since the Ottoman Empire.
The province is now divided between Kurds, who see
it as an integral part of the Kurdish homeland and
would wish to have it controlled by the Kurds' own
regional government, and Arabs, who were moved here
as part of a Saddam Hussein effort to 'Arabize' the
province's oil-resources.
And besides those two main groups, are Turkomans and
Christians who fear their lot should either Kurds or
Arabs achieve unbridled power.
The oil, of course, raises an ordinarily tense
ethnic situation into a murderous one.
Saddam, in the 1991 so-called Anfal ('The spoils of
war') campaign,www.ekurd.net
killed 182,000 Kurds in
the region.
Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former
regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series
of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian
population of southern Kurdistan 'northern Iraq'.
The campaign,
in which chemical weapons were used, Anfal operation
crackdown that killed nearly 200,000 Kurdish
civilians and guerrillas.
Since the US-led liberation of 2003, when tens of
thousands of expelled Kurds returned to their former
homes, complicating the demographic picture once
more, ethnic violence has been a constant feature of
life in the region.
In December 2008, a suicide bomb attack on the
Abdullah restaurant north of Kirkuk killed some 55
people - including leaders from the provinces'
various ethnic groups, who were discussing how to
ease the region's ethnic tensions.
'The Kirkuk question already threatens the stability
of the country. Conflicts between the central
government and the Kurdish parties have risen in
recent months,' said Guido Steinberg, an Iraq
analyst at the Berlin-based Institute for
International and Security Affairs.
'Without some political solution, the result might
well be violence in Kirkuk and in all the regions
bordering on the Kurdish region,' he added.
The violence - potential and actual - stems from two
seemingly irreconcilable claims, according to
observers.
On one side, the dominant Kurdish stance in Kirkuk
remains wary of any political event that weakens
their claim on the city, a stance hardened into
cynicism by the victimization experienced under
previous regimes.
'Now the Americans have abandoned us like the
British before them. They abandoned the issue of the
people of Kurdistan and their demands of including
Kirkuk in the region of Kurdistan. We are now facing
two options to surrender or to fight to assure our
existence,' Hiwa Barzanji,www.ekurd.net
38, a Kurdish merchant, told DPA.
The fact that Kirkuk's security forces are dominated
by Kurdish forces, or Peshmerga, does not make
matters easier.
On the other side, resistance to Kurdish claims on
Kirkuk is expressed as a desire to avoid the
atomization of Iraq, something that has been a
constant spectre across the country since the 2003
invasion.
In particular, non-Kurdish elements are pushing for
the Saddam-era Arabization to now be seen as
legitimate, rather than an aberration that needs to
be reversed.
'We have to put an end to the Kurdish exploitations
on the Arab and Turkoman soil. We won't achieve any
solution with the Kurdish rebellion and disrupting
of matters,' said Essam al-Biaty, 40, a Turkoman
lecturer at a Kirkuk teacher-training college.
'What we need is a (UN) Security Council resolution
that admits the Arabization of Kirkuk and divides
power equally between different factions,' he said.
To mediate between the competing claims, a UN panel
under Special Representative for Iraq Staffan de
Mistura has been set up, comprised of human rights
specialists, experts in demographic change and
elections.
The committee ought to present a draft election law
for Kirkuk's provincial council to the Iraqi
parliament before March 2009.
What such a document would contain, however, is
still far from clear, in the absence of meaningful
political concessions from the province's claimants,
thinks Guido Steinberg.
'The UN effort has shown that a compromise between
the competing parties is difficult to bring about.
The Kurdish desire to control Kirkuk remains too
strong for a reasonable compromise solution to
emerge,' he said.
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.
The last ethnic-breakdown census in Iraq was
conducted in 1957, well before Saddam began his
program to move Arabs to Kirkuk. That count showed
178,000 Kurds, 48,000 Turkomen, 43,000 Arabs and
10,000 Assyrian-Chaldean Christians living in the
city.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
DPA | Agencies
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