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Power Struggles in Baghdad and Beyond Mean
Opportunities for Iraq's Kurds
26.4.2012
By Tony Karon - Time |
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Massud Barzani (L), president of the autonomous
Kurdistan region in Iraq's north, said Iraqi Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki is monopolising power and
preparing the ground for a return to dictatorship in
an interview published on April 8, 2012. Photo:Safin
Hamed & Yasser Al-Zayyat, AFP/Getty Images
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April 26, 2012
The thriving Kurdish mini-state in northern Iraq
is a monument to the ability of the nationalist
Kurdish-Iraqi leadership to parlay the conflict
between more powerful geopolitical forces around
them to maximum advantage. And the escalating power
struggle in Baghdad, combined with the regional
conflict between Iran, Turkey and the Gulf Arab
states being played out in Syria, may offer the
Kurdish leadership in Erbil new opportunities to
strengthen foundations for independence from Iraq.
It may be a perilous game of temporary alliances of
convenience among forces that don’t necessarily
share a common vision, but that’s precisely the sort
of political balancing act that created the Kurdish
polity in northern Iraq, which already has many of
the attributes of independence such as its own flag,
administration and security forces — and is seeking
to expand its independent economic base.
The power struggle in Baghdad has escalated to
alarming proportions in the months since the last
U.S. troops withdrew in December 2011, with Prime
Minister Nouri al-Maliki eschewing the principle of
a unity government that gives all stakeholders a
share of power and instead amassing power in his own
hands. Even the radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
whose support was critical to getting Maliki
reelected, has taken to referring to the Prime
Minister as “the dictator.” Sunni insurgent violence
continues, while Sunni political leaders have been
hounded out of government by Maliki. Recent days
have seen him huddling with his key regional allies
in Tehran, as he steps up a war of words and threats
with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
whom he accuses of meddling in Iraq’s affairs.
Turkey makes no secret of its support for Iraq’s
Sunni political bloc, Iraqiyya, and has castigated
Maliki for pursuing a sectarian and “egocentric”
style of ruling. Ankara has recently played host to
fugitive Iraqi Sunni leader Tarek al-Hashemi, who
was forced to flee Baghdad to escape a criminal
prosecution his supporters see as a trumped up
charge designed to hobble the Sunni political
leadership. Hashemi fled first to Erbil, capital of
Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), whose
terrain the Iraqi security forces are not authorized
to enter.
As dramatic as the language and gestures of some of
the key players may be, however, patronage politics
has entrenched a certain pragmatism in Iraq’s
political class that shows no sign of evaporating in
a headlong rush into civil war. Still, every new
breakdown and episode of brinkmanship brings
opportunities to press the Kurdish cause.
The Kurds, who represent some 20% of Iraq’s
population, maintained good relations with Iran
before Saddam Hussein’s ouster, and have typically
been courted in post-Saddam politics when the major
Shi’ite and Sunni political players have needed them
to tip the balance against the other. The de facto
casting vote provided by their share of Iraq’s
proportional representation parliament has allowed
the leaders of Kurdistan’s main parties — the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Jalal Talabani, who
serves as President of Iraq, and the Kurdistan
Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani, who holds the
position of Prime Minister in the KRG — to extract
more concessions on autonomy and territorial control
than Iraq’s Arab politicians would otherwise offer.
And these days, it’s not only Iraqi politicians that
are courting the Kurds. Turkey last week feted
Barzani in Ankara, rolling out the red carpet and
affording him a meeting with Turkey’s President
Abdullah Gul and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu,
and he recently returned from a visit to Washington
D.C. where he met with senior Administration
officials. Those visits seemed to amplify Barzani’s
defiance of Baghdad in a dispute over oil revenues,
with the KRG prime minister accusing Maliki of
paving the way for a return to dictatorship, and
warning that absent “radical solutions and a
specific time-frame to resolve the present crisis …
we will resort to other decisions” — a not-so-veiled
threat to declare independence from Iraq.
Independence, of course, remains the historical goal
of Kurdish Iraqis, and a referendum on the issue
staged in 2005 saw some 98% vote to break away from
Iraq. Geopolitical realities, however, has required
a curbing of that popular sentiment. Iraqi Kurdistan
is small and landlocked, and while it possesses
significant oil reserves, it would require the
cooperation of one of its powerful neighbors —
Turkey, Iran or Iraq — to pipe that oil to market.
Also, the KRG was carved out in large part because
the U.S., which had just overthrown Saddam Hussein,
helped ensure its emergence, but made clear it was
not ready to support a breakup of Iraq.
Thus the Kurdish political game, as described by the
International Crisis Group:
“Kurds have waited for the moment when they will
succeed in removing the shackles of an overbearing,
at times highly repressive, central state. They know
that when Baghdad is weak, they can take steps to
bring their dream of statehood closer to reality,
but that when the centre is strong it will use its
superior resources to push them back into their
place – or worse. This is why the Kurds are so
alarmed at attempts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
to amass power at the expense of his rivals and
rebuild a strong state, armed with U.S. weaponry,
under his unchallenged control.
“Ever since arriving in Baghdad on the coattails of
the U.S. invasion in 2003, the Kurds understandably
have used their new position and the centre’s
weakness to develop their own region. They seek to
reverse a legacy of discrimination and economic
neglect but also to create an escape route should
relations with Baghdad sour beyond repair. Yet, in
many ways, this approach contains elements of a
self-fulfilling prophecy: by pressing their
advantage, Kurds inevitably aggravate matters,
convincing the federal government that they are
aiming for secession – and aiming to take with them
a good chunk of disputed territory that Kurds claim
as historically part of a notional Kurdistan but
that also appears to be immensely rich in oil and
gas.”
Conventional wisdom before the U.S. invasion had
held that Turkey would fiercely oppose the emergence
of an autonomous Kurdish entity in northern Iraq for
fear of spurring separatist inclinations among its
own Kurdish minority. But even as the violent
insurgency of the Kurdish separatist PKK has sparked
an increasingly repressive backlash by the
authorities in Ankara in recent years, Turkey has
instead emerged as a key ally and economic partner
of the emerging Iraqi Kurdish polity, with Turkish
trade with the KRG amounting to fully half of all of
its trade with Iraq.
It’s a pragmatic arrangement of mutual benefit: The
Kurds have lately expanded their autonomous oil
industry, concluding deals late last year with Exxon
Mobil — which include the right to drill fields that
are not currently recognized as part of the KRG, but
are coveted by it as part of the patrimony of their
state in the making. That move outraged Baghdad, and
Erbil earlier this month halted oil exports through
territory controlled by Baghdad over a financial
dispute. The Kurdish leadership hope to use a
pipeline built through Turkish territory as an
alternative export route once it has been completed,
which would lessen the KRG’s dependence on Baghdad.
Whereas a thriving autonomous Kurdish entity on its
border may once have been deemed deeply threatening
to Turkey, today Ankara appears ready to support
Iraq’s Kurdish separatists not only as part of its
contest with Iran for regional influence, but also
because Turkey sees the KRG as a potentially
important ally in its struggle against the PKK.
Turkish support is premised on the willingness of
the authorities in the KRG to clamp down hard on PKK
operations in territory under its control. Barzani
certainly talks the talk, publicly demanding, in
Ankara last week, that the PKK lay down arms,www.ekurd.net
and warning that he will not allow the group to
operate freely in Northern Iraq as long as it
remains committed to violence. But as analyst MK
Bhadrakumar has noted, it may not be quite that
simple: While Iraq’s Kurdish leadership may
understand the geopolitical necessity of cooperating
with Turkey’s campaign against the PKK, the
peshmerga fighting men on whom they’d rely to
actually tackle PKK operations on their turf are
generally far more sympathetic to the plight of
their brothers in arms from across the Turkish
border.
Turkey’s PKK fears are exacerbated by the crisis in
Syria, where its support for those fighting the
regime of President Bashar al-Assad has prompted
Damascus to threaten to retaliate by resuming
support for the PKK — a move that could spell
trouble inside Turkey which shares a long border
with Syria’s Kurdish region. Some suggest enlisting
the likes of Barzani could serve as something of a
hedge, and possibly even persuade more Syrian Kurds
to move off the sidelines and support the anti-Assad
rebellion.
They may be one of the peoples overlooked by the
British and French when they redrew the borders of
the Middle East in the wake of World War I, but
today’s Iraqi Kurds appear to have digested the
lessons of history, first and foremost the maxim
that every crisis is also an opportunity.
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