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A Kurdish state is being established, and
Baghdad may accept it
25.12.2012
By David Hirst, The Daily Star - Lebanon |
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December 25, 2012
I was surprised last week to read an article in the
Baghdad newspaper Al-Sabah, by its editor Abd al-Jabbar
Shabbout, suggesting it was time to settle the
“age-old problem” between Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds by
establishing a “Kurdish state.” For never before had
I heard so heretical a view so publicly expressed in
any Arab quarter. And this was no ordinary quarter
either. Sabah is the mouthpiece of Iraqi Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Shabbout went on to suggest a negotiated “ending of
the Arab-Kurdish partnership in a peaceful way. ”He
called his proposal Plan-B – Plan-A being what was
already in train: namely, a continuous “dialogue”
between Iraq’s central government and the Kurdish
regional government, conducted within the framework
of the “new Iraq” – constitutionally defined as
“federal, democratic and parliamentary” – that
followed the fall of Saddam Hussein.
But Plan-A, Shabbout observed, was going nowhere.
Differences – over power and authority, oil and
natural resources, territory and borders – were so
profound that dialogue had repeatedly failed. And
this month it almost came to war. For a while the
Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga faced each other
across the frontiers between Kurdistan and the rest
of Iraq in an atmosphere so tense, noted Shabbout,
that hostilities could have broken out at any
moment.
And it wasn’t only Shabbout, but Maliki himself, who
warned that if war did break out it wouldn’t be just
a war between Kurdish rebels and Baghdad, as it used
to be under Saddam. It would be an “ethnic war
between Arabs and Kurds.”
Be it Plan-A or Plan-B, war or diplomacy, the
latest, dangerous standoff has made one thing clear:
the “Kurdish question” has now reached another
critical stage in its long history, and it is
intimately bound up with the regionwide cataclysm
that is known as the Arab Spring.
It was ever thus for the Kurds, their destiny as a
people always shaped less by their own struggles
than by the vagaries of regional and international
politics, and particularly by the great Middle
Eastern upheavals regional and international
politics periodically produce. These began, in
modern times, with World War I and the fall of the
Ottoman Empire. In the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement
Britain and France promised Kurds a state of their
own, but then reneged on that promise. Kurds became
minorities, more or less severely repressed, in the
four countries – Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria –
among which their vast domains were divided. They
repeatedly rebelled against this new order,
especially in Iraq. But their landlocked location
and their broader geopolitical environment were
always against them. Their rebellions were
invariably crushed – the last one, under Saddam
Hussein, through genocide and the use of chemical
weapons.
But they never ceased to dream of independent
statehood. And the first of two great breakthroughs
toward this grew out of the megalomaniac folly of
Saddam himself, with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
One of the entirely unforeseeable consequences of
this was the establishment of an internationally
protected “safe haven” in northern Iraq that enabled
Kurds to take their first state-building steps, in
the shape of a regional assembly and a degree of
self-government.
The second breakthrough grew out of that whole new
constitutional order which the United States-led
invasion of Iraq in 2003 ushered in. Under it, the
Kurds consolidated their already existing autonomy
with broad new legislative powers, control over
their own armed forces, and some authority over that
mainstay of the Iraqi economy, namely oil.
From the outset, the Kurds had made it clear that
they would only remain committed to the “new Iraq”
if it treated them as equal partners, and not, as
before, a subordinate minority.
It wasn’t long before this ethno-sectarian,
power-sharing democracy began to malfunction, and to
generate those disputes no amount of dialogue could
resolve. And as these disputes deepened, they only
intensified the Kurds’ yearning for independence –
and their practical preparations for it. Openly or
surreptitiously, they began accumulating
constitutional, political, territorial, economic and
security “facts on the ground,” designed to ensure
that, if and when they proclaimed their new-born
state, this entity would have the means and ability
to stand on its own feet, to thrive and to defend
itself.
So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their
third, perhaps final, breakthrough, the great losers
of Sykes-Picot about to become, 90 years on, the
great winners of the Arab Spring? They themselves
certainly hope so. “Not only is Iraqi Kurdistan
undergoing an unprecedented building boom,” reports Joost Hiltermann in the American magazine Foreign
Affairs, “its people are now articulating a
once-unthinkable notion: that the day they will
break free from the rest of Iraq is nigh.” And
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani often openly alludes
to this possibility. “We have had enough,” he says,
of the “the dictatorship in power in Baghdad” and of
the Kurds’ participation in it.
It seems, however, that he awaits one last thing
before taking the plunge, another of those
game-changing events – such as the breakup of Syria
– that can transform the whole geopolitical
environment in the Kurds’ favor. But the quarter in
which Kurds are actively looking to bring this
change about is in Turkey. That they should even
think of this is, historically speaking,
extraordinary, considering that, of all the Kurds’
neighbors,www.ekurd.net
Turkey probably has most to lose from
independence-seeking Kurdish nationalism, and has
brutally repressed it in the past. Considering, too,
that ever afraid that Kurdish gains elsewhere may be
a progenitor of Kurdish aspirations in Turkey,
Ankara has long set great store on Iraq remaining
united, with its Kurds an integral part of it.
But since 2008, in a complete reversal of earlier
policy – which had once been to boycott Kurdistan
altogether – the government of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan has been pursuing “full economic
integration” with Iraqi Kurdistan. Meanwhile, its
relations with the Iraqi government have been
relentlessly deteriorating, with the two now on
opposite sides of the great Middle Eastern power
struggle that pits Bashar Assad’s Syria, Shiite
Iran, Maliki’s Iraq, and Hezbollah against the
Syrian revolutionaries, most of the Sunni Arab
states and Turkey itself.
Under pressures from this struggle, Turkey’s
extraordinary courtship of Iraq’s Kurds has
continued to bloom, and to move from the merely
economic to the political and strategic as well. In
fact it has moved so far – the Kurds believe – that
Turkey might soon break with Maliki’s essentially
Shiite regime altogether, and deal separately with
those two other main components of a crumbling Iraqi
state, the Arab Sunnis and, more importantly, the
Kurds.
The allurements that an independent Kurdistan could
proffer in return would include its role as a
potential source of much-needed, abundant and
reliable oil supplies, as a stable, accommodating
ally and buffer between it and a hostile Iraq and
Iran, and even – in a policy option as extraordinary
as Turkey’s own – as a collaborator in containing
fellow Kurds, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party,
or PKK. Having established a strong presence in
“liberated” Syrian Kurdistan, the PKK is now seeking
to turn this territory into a platform for reviving
the insurgency in Turkey itself.
It is even said that Erdogan has gone so far as to
promise Barzani that Turkey would protect his
would-be state-in-the-making in the event of an
Iraqi military onslaught. However, presumably that
would never come to pass if, adopting Plan-B, the
Maliki regime really is contemplating the seismic
step of letting the Kurds go of their own free will.
David Hirst is a former Middle East correspondent
for The Guardian and author of “Beware of Small
States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East.”
He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star,
Lebanon.
Copyright ©, respective author or news agency, dailystar.com.lb
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