Spoils of Babylon
DRoshani
THE FATE of Iraq may well rise or fall on Kirkuk as Kurds, Arabs,
Turkmen .and Christians grapple for control of the province and the
safety of their people. Oil riches abound in this land that straddles
the border of Arab and Kurdish Iraq. And command of these resources is
the prize for the taking. As the powers that be in Baghdad fight to
hold on to the tenuous peace wrested from civil war, deciding the
political fate of Kirkuk is treacherous enough to bring down the
state. So far, the battle has largely taken place in a never-ending
political drama, but if compromise cannot be reached—and soon—bloody
conflict may well be the next step.
I FIRST visited the Iraqi province in April 1991, driving up from
Baghdad in an international humanitarian agency’s car. At the time, I
was working as a consultant for the Boston-based Physicians for Human
Rights, assessing civilian conditions in the wake of the U.S.-led war
in Kuwait and Iraq. I got far more than I bargained for. A resurgent
Iraqi regime had just crushed uprisings in the south and north of the
country brought on by the George H. W. Bush administration’s
encouragement of rebellion and promises of support. But the White
House quickly backtracked, leaving the insurgents to face the wrath of
Saddam Hussein on their own.
THE TELLTALE signs of recent conflict were everywhere I went in Iraq.
Shops were aflame in the center of Karbala with tank-shell damage to
the facade of the adjacent al-Abbas mosque. In Basra, manned
antiaircraft batteries had been deployed in the middle of
intersections, their guns trained at eye level. Throughout the entire
country there was evidence of rocket fire on government buildings, and
horrendous conditions in clinics and hospitals, with stories of
corpses stacked in hallways and toddlers laid up in cribs, emaciated
from lack of drinking water. Downed water-storage tanks and bombed
power stations littered the landscape. In the north, overturned
tractor-drawn carts of fleeing Kurds sat by the roadside, strafed by
helicopter gunships. In the Sulaimaniya government hospital in
northeast Kurdistan, a trickle of refugees was returning from the
border with Iran, bearing terrifying land-mine injuries. And, in a
hint of the vicious reprisals to come in the wake of the Kurdish
rebellion against the Baghdad government, I saw a Kurdish insurgent (a
pesh merga) being carried into a police station by two Iraqi soldiers,
hanging upside down from a pole to which they had tied his hands and
legs.1
In Kirkuk we spent the night on relatively neutral ground: the
government hospital (we consistently found medical personnel to be
apolitical and focused on immediate humanitarian concerns). There, we
were fed by a handful of Egyptian workers and got our fill of useful
intelligence on the local situation. Later that day, as we returned
from Sulaimaniya, we passed through Shorja, one of Kirkuk’s downtown
Kurdish neighborhoods. Bulldozers were razing houses, piling concrete
upon concrete. The regime was punishing a population for its
participation in, and support of, the rebellion (which had lasted a
heady few days) by expelling Kurds from the city and demolishing their
homes.
As I learned on subsequent trips to Iraq, this was more than a “mere”
collective reprisal. This was the latest episode in a long-running,
ofttimes vicious attempt at ethnically based population transfer.
UNTIL RECENTLY, not many people outside the Middle East had heard of
this northern Iraqi province, Kirkuk. Once a backwater of the Ottoman
Empire far from the cosmopolitan centers of Baghdad and Mosul, for a
long time the area presented a blend of ethnic groups—Assyrians and
Chaldeans (both small Christian communities), along with Turkmen,
Kurds and Arabs—who lived in relative harmony, frequently intermarried
and commonly spoke each other’s languages. The discovery of oil in the
late 1920s transformed the town into a magnet for an impoverished
peasantry, including many Kurds from Erbil, today the capital of
Kurdistan, and Sulaimaniya, who flocked to the oil fields during the
following three decades.
Ethnic conflict quickly came to the surface. The Kurds mounted a
series of failed rebellions against the Iraqi government in the 1930s
and 1940s, forcing their leaders to flee to the Soviet Union and Iran.
And so it went until the 1958 military coup that overthrew the British-
backed Hashemite monarchy and installed an Arab nationalist regime,
changing the political equation and precipitating decades of fighting.
Kurdish insurgents, long in conflict with the central government over
autonomous powers, returned from Iranian exile to exploit the vacuum,
but soon found themselves, yet again, in opposition to Baghdad’s rule.
Their rebellion was crushed in the early 1960s at a terrible cost in
Kurdish lives and properties. It was then that Iraq’s republican
regimes began to Arabize the areas surrounding the oil fields, not
just in Kirkuk, but all along a broad band of territory stretching
from Syria in the northwest to Iran’s border east of Baghdad.
After the Baath Party came to power in 1968, it pursued accommodation
with the Kurdish rebel leader, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who used the
Kurds’ temporary, relative strength to extract a significant
concession: the creation of an autonomous Kurdish region. But both
sides interpreted the autonomy agreement, and the shape of the
autonomous region, differently, with Kirkuk as the core of the
problem, and the deal soon fell apart. The Kurds reverted to
insurgency and the foundation of the present-day battle was laid fast.
The Iraqi regime was loath to surrender control of Kirkuk’s
“supergiant” oil field (which contains 15 billion, or 13 percent, of
Iraq’s 115 billion barrels of proven reserves) and additional
suspected hydrocarbon riches permeating rock formations underfoot. The
Kurds’ allies, the shah of Iran and the Ford administration, withdrew
their support in 1975 and the insurgency collapsed, but not before
solidifying the long-held hope that Kirkuk might one day become part
of an independent Kurdistan. A deep-seated enmity between the Kurds
and Baghdad soon followed.
For years, Saddam Hussein vigorously pursued Arabization by offering
monetary inducement for relocation, confiscating property,
transferring jobs, deporting people by judicial order, even changing a
person’s registered ethnicity by an administrative procedure termed
“nationality correction.” In 1988, the final year of the Iran-Iraq
war, Arabization took the form of a counterinsurgency campaign called
the Anfal that was not limited to, but was most lethal in, Kirkuk’s
rural hinterland. In a six-month period, the regime methodically
killed tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers, consigned many more to
heavily guarded, bare-bones housing estates and erased their villages.
2
What I saw in Kirkuk in April 1991 was the regime’s henchmen taking
advantage of the Kurds’ post–Gulf War uprising defeat to further
Arabize Kirkuk. Little did I realize then that the bulldozers’ rumble
would resonate almost two decades later, magnified and transformed
into a political roar. There is no doubt that the long-term policy of
Arabization has come back to haunt Iraq, as the Kurds, returning in
force after 2003, are seeking not only to regain lost properties and
rebuild homes but to attach Kirkuk to their autonomous region, an
ambition that Arabs and Turkmen are fiercely resisting. With the
province’s status remaining unresolved, the Kirkuk question has become
the most divisive and most central issue of Iraqi politics today.
I RETURNED to Kirkuk in June 2003, this time for the International
Crisis Group, and found the province in disarray. The Kurds had
stormed into the city center ahead of American forces, seizing
government institutions, and pushing out both Saddam’s agents and the
Arabs who had settled on Kurdish properties (many of whom left
preemptively, fearing reprisals). This seemed yet another chance for
the Kurds to rule Kirkuk, and, if all went according to plan, join it
to the Kurdistan region. And thus the Kurds began a long and tenuous
struggle to gain control at the local level, but they were up against
fierce competition. The Arabs have always known their best hope for
dominance lies in keeping Kirkuk under Baghdad’s tight embrace, while
the Turkmen, fearing domination by either side, have favored a special
status (at least for the city) in which a degree of local autonomy
would ensure greater control over Kirkuk’s resources and destiny, with
the Turkmen playing a major role as a significant minority group.
As in all of Iraq, the politics were complicated, with each ethnicity
vying for supremacy as it attempted to work around the American agenda
and a broken-down system in Baghdad. American commanders kept everyone
in check. Despite strong sympathies toward their Kurdish allies that
persist to this day, American officers recognized the area’s ethnic
diversity and enormous wealth, and sought to maintain stability by
dividing power between local communities. They made their own
calculations of each community’s relative demographic and political
strength, and when they established a city council in May 2003, they
gave six seats each to the Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Christians,
reserving an additional six for “independents.” In a nudge toward
Kurdish interests, five of these six independents were also Kurds,
thus granting them a dominant position and allowing them to appoint
the governor. All seemed to be going well, at least at first, for the
Kurdish cause. This gave rise to Arab complaints that the Americans
favored the Kurds, while Kurdish leaders dissembled, declaring that
their acceptance of this arrangement constituted a compromise on their
part in light of their demographic majority (which no one could
verify) and historic rights (which the other communities rejected).3
Eight months later, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, in
the course of “refreshing” local governments to—among many ambitions—
make them less dependent on the U.S. military and better
representative of Iraqi demographics, created forty-seat provincial
councils that replaced the city councils. In Kirkuk, it gave the Kurds
thirteen seats, the Arabs twelve, the Turkmen eight and the Christians
seven. Because many of Kirkuk’s Christians are inclined toward Kurdish
positions and, more importantly, averse to rocking the boat, they
tended to vote with the Kurds on major issues. Thus, kept in a perfect
twenty-twenty equilibrium, the council could make no significant
decisions, inducing a temporary calm.
Still, the Kurds tried to improve their position in other areas. They
took advantage of American protection and tutelage to strengthen their
grip on the province’s administrative and security apparatus, having
seized key positions when they entered Kirkuk in 2003. Most
importantly, the Kurdistan Regional Government also began to
facilitate the return of Kurds displaced during Arabization. It
enticed and compelled Kirkuk-origin Kurds residing in the larger
Kurdistan region to move to Kirkuk. The government provided financial
incentives to enable Kurds to purchase land and start housing
construction in the city, while preventing them from buying property
inside the larger Kurdistan region. It transferred civil servants to
new jobs in the area and forced parents to register their newborns
there. The absence of an impartial mechanism to oversee these
returning Kirkukis, of course, led to chronic Arab and Turkmen doubts
that the arriving Kurds actually had roots there. They suspected
instead that the settlers were from Erbil and Sulaimaniya, or even
Iran, Syria and Turkey. What was going on, they said, was
Kurdification, a reverse ethnic cleansing—even if less violent than
Arabization in its enforcement.
In Kirkuk’s January 2005 provincial elections, the Kurds were on top
once again, cementing their local power thanks in part to low turnout
among Arabs and Turkmen (who either rejected the exercise or were
deterred by threats of insurgent violence). The Kurds’ Kirkuk
Brotherhood list, an electoral slate of allied political candidates
which comprised a handful of token Arabs, Turkmen and Christians, took
twenty-six of forty-one seats on the new council, while the Arab
parties won nine and the Turkmen parties six. Using their electoral
strength, the Brotherhood list appointed both the governor and council
president, leaving the deputy-governor position for an Arab or
Turkmen. Alas, the representatives from each group could not agree on
a suitable candidate, thus leaving the post vacant. Not long after,
the Arab and Turkmen council members, complaining of the use of
Kurdish in official proceedings and other perceived wrongs, launched a
boycott of the provincial government that was to last until 2008. In
Kirkuk, it seemed that the Kurds were gaining control. But during all
this working of the system at the local level, something quite
different was afoot in Baghdad, setting the stage for a protracted
stalemate.
KURDISH LEADERS never made a secret of their goal to incorporate
Kirkuk into the Kurdistan region. To cement their primacy over the
province, the Kurds needed to amend the Iraqi legal and constitutional
order to recognize their special rights to Kirkuk. Their success at
doing so, however, has been decidedly mixed. Kurdish leaders gained a
partial victory in the form of the 2004 Transitional Administrative
Law (TAL), a document intended to serve as Iraq’s interim constitution
while the country set up a sovereign government. Article 58 of the TAL
officially created a process to reverse Kirkuk’s Arabization,
including through property restitution and compensation, the
cancellation of agricultural decrees restricting Kurdish activity, the
voluntary departure of those settled in Kirkuk by the previous regime
and the return of those displaced (both with compensation), and the
restoration of Kirkuk’s pre-1968 administrative boundaries, which
would make it easier to eventually incorporate Kirkuk into the
Kurdistan region. The combination of these steps, if fully
implemented, would almost certainly produce a Kurdish majority in
Kirkuk province. In practice, however, the TAL made no mention of a
referendum that would determine the ultimate status of Kirkuk, leaving
this task to the drafters of the permanent constitution. And bottom
line, no matter the number of “Kirkukis” returning to the area,
without a decree as to the status of the province, it remains disputed
and, de facto, a province directly under Baghdad’s control.
In a further setback to the Kurds, the TAL also included Article 53
(c), which barred Baghdad and Kirkuk from forming autonomous regions
separate from the national government, in effect giving these two
provinces a special status. As such, when the Iraqis began to draft
their new constitution in 2005, the Kurds had a legal mandate to
reverse Arabization, but still had no specific claim to the most
valuable of assets—Kirkuk.
The 2005 constitution could have reversed this situation and given the
Kurds a shot at gaining full legal control over the oil-rich province.
Approved by 80 percent of votes cast nationwide in October 2005, the
constitution served as the Kurds’ biggest political triumph. Article
143 eliminated the TAL’s stipulation that Kirkuk could not form a
regional entity separate from the central government. And Article 140
laid out a process to resolve the status of Kirkuk and other disputed
territories (which it left undefined) through a census and a popular
referendum (whose nature it failed to specify) by December 31, 2007.
Kurdish leaders who drafted this and several other key articles with
the help of Western consultants such as Peter Galbraith (who has since
come under criticism for his involvement in the process)4 calculated
that a referendum based on a Kurdish majority in Kirkuk achieved via
de-Arabization would place the province irrevocably inside the
Kurdistan region.
So, through all these ups and downs, it looked as if the Kurds were
set to finally achieve control of Kirkuk through perfectly legal
means. But, as in much of Iraqi politics, nothing is quite so simple.
Although the constitution is written in their favor, the Kurds have
proved incapable of inducing the federal government to implement it.
Two years after the deadline set in Article 140, Baghdad has yet to
conduct a census and hold a referendum on Kirkuk. The government’s
foot-dragging reinforces the notion that Kirkuk is unique and
deserving of special treatment—but that doesn’t make it a part of the
Kurdish region proper.
Making matters even worse for the Kurds, many in Iraq, including the
first constitutionally elected prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, have
questioned the constitution’s legitimacy. The way in which the
document was drafted behind closed doors, lacking significant popular
input and in the absence of elected Sunni Arab representatives, passed
by a pliant parliament and subsequently endorsed by a mostly passive
electorate (Shia religious leaders exhorted their flock to embrace the
document) has done little to improve its credibility. Controversies
swirl around a number of its provisions. Non-Kurds are especially
irked by that Article 140—meaning that it may be impossible to
implement.
Nonetheless, the Kurds continue to argue that their quest for Kirkuk
has historical and emotional bases, and represents a thirst for
justice after the terrible wrongs committed by Iraq’s republican
regimes, especially that of Saddam Hussein. One must remember, the
Kirkuk question cannot be separated from the broader Kurdish
aspiration for independence, and it can hardly be considered a
coincidence that the Kurds’ fervor over the disputed territories
increases the closer one gets to Kirkuk. Just as Saddam’s regime used
Arabization as a tool to retain its grip on the province and thus
preserve Iraq’s economic strength and territorial unity, so the Kurds
see Kirkuk’s wealth as the economic basis for a bid—currently
submerged but in preparation—for independence sometime in the future.
Kurdish leaders realize full well that none of their powerful
neighbors, be it Iran, Turkey or Syria, would tolerate an independent
Kurdistan, given their own Kurdish populations, and that even if the
Kurds were somehow to achieve statehood, theirs would be an entity as
hopelessly landlocked as it is today. With Kirkuk, however, such a
statelet would have significantly more leverage in its external
dealings, and it holds out the hope of a more satisfying arrangement
once regional dynamics change. In June 2007, a Kurdish leader asked me
whether the Bush administration would attack Iran in its waning
months. When I offered him a tentative “no,” he responded with deep
disappointment. In his view, a U.S. war with Iran would change the
political equation in the region, possibly allowing for a shift in
boundaries, raising the Kurds’ chances of success, just as the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire had done. It is this sort of border-
changing event the Kurds are waiting, and preparing, for.
A FREQUENT visitor to Kirkuk since 2003, I have built contacts with
political leaders of all the parties that claim to represent the four
communities living in the province, as well as journalists,
intellectuals and other members of civil society. I have heard every
conflicting historical and psychological narrative that keeps this
profoundly unhappy place a cauldron of unrest. If the Kurds cite
demographic numbers to support their case, Arabs and Turkmen present
their own; in the absence of a census, none can be considered
reliable. Likewise, if the Kurds invoke historical legacy, the Turkmen
claim original dominance under the Ottomans who brought them to the
region, while the Christians go so far as to declare themselves the
descendants of the ancient Assyrians, under whose rule Kirkuk, then
named Arrapha, was a small trading center; to both, the Kurds are late
interlopers. Moreover, when the Kurds denounce Arabization, Arabs say
that while the Baath regime did remove Kurds, many Arabs came to
Kirkuk simply because they were attracted by the growing oil industry,
as would occur in any economy even without state inducements (and much
in the same vein as earlier Kurdish settlement in Kirkuk). Though the
Kurds say this is not about oil, the others say of course it is only
about oil, and that the Kurds are being disingenuous. All sides
present documents that they claim support their narrative, denouncing
their rivals’ evidence as fraud.
In Kirkuk itself, everything is on hold. In governance, there is
gridlock. The economy is at a near standstill, with oil production
from a large but damaged oil field far below its pre-2003 performance,
let alone its potential. And Western oil companies are hesitant to
invest as long as the status of the territory in which the black gold
lies remains unsettled. Although security has been relatively stable
under Kurdish control, grievances continue to mount, especially among
Arabs, who have long found themselves both at the forefront of the
insurgency and at the receiving end of a joint U.S.-Kurdish
antiterrorism campaign.
Local leaders, seeing no solution to their predicament, look to
outside parties to bring solace, fearing that their rivals’ patrons
will prevail even as they loudly decry external interference in
Kirkuk’s affairs. Each major group has its own promoter and protector,
but none of these relationships is comfortable. Kirkuk’s Arab
politicians, who are Sunnis, look to Baghdad for support but see a
Shia-Islamist-led government for which they harbor an innate distrust,
even if Maliki shares their position on Kirkuk. For their part, the
Kurds count on the United States to enable their acquisition of
Kirkuk, but perceived betrayals in 1975 (when the Ford administration
withdrew its support from Mullah Mustafa) and 1991 (when President
George H. W. Bush allowed Saddam to crush post–Gulf War rebellions
with helicopter gunships) have made them wary of U.S. intentions in a
region where they suspect the bottom line will be Washington’s
relations with states such as Iraq and Turkey, not nonstate actors
such as themselves. As for Turkmen, the Shia Islamists among them have
turned their gaze toward Baghdad, while many Sunni and secular Turkmen
appear to favor a scenario in which Turkey would step in, but only as
a last resort.
Maliki’s remarkable rise from a weak compromise prime minister in 2006
to a leader of considerable power and stature today can be attributed
in part to his use of the Kirkuk issue to burnish his credentials
among Iraq’s majority Arabs. He sent troops to push Kurdish pesh merga
and security agents out of mixed-population towns in Diyala, a
province to the northeast of Baghdad that borders Kurdistan, in August
2008. He then began building up the Iraqi army’s presence in Kirkuk,
especially near the oil fields. Soon, army units ventured out on
probing missions in majority-Kurdish areas to show the flag, acts that
angered and alarmed the Kurds but that many other Iraqis received with
satisfaction.
Moreover, as the process to resolve Kirkuk’s status by census and
referendum has ground to a halt, the Kirkuk question has vaulted to
the top of the list of factors that could undermine the larger effort
to stabilize Iraq. Once a sideshow in the endeavor to rebuild the
country, it has now begun to contaminate politics.
KIRKUK HAS turned into a political hot spot and an elections spoiler.
In July 2008, lawmakers passed a draft bill on provincial elections,
which were tentatively scheduled to take place less than three months
later. It contained a clause on Kirkuk, however, that so angered
Kurdish parliamentarians that they boycotted the vote; the law
subsequently triggered a veto by the presidency council, headed by a
Kurd, Jalal Talabani. It took two months to hammer out an amendment
that all sides could live with. The new provision postponed elections
in Kirkuk province until after a parliamentary committee could
investigate and make recommendations about power sharing, the voter
registry and property disputes in Kirkuk. Since the committee proved
incapable of completing its task, Kirkukis are still waiting for those
elections.
Kirkuk’s role as an election spoiler is not only limited to local
politics. Disputes over its status are also curbing Iraq’s ability to
function as a democratic state. In October 2009, lawmakers were
supposed to pass a law establishing a system for parliamentary
elections due to be held in January 2010. But the parliament could not
agree on a bill, forcing Iraq to resort to the laws governing the
previous elections of December 2005—and amending them only where
absolutely necessary. This, too, proved an almost-insurmountable
challenge. And Kirkuk was at the heart of the matter. Legislators
sparred over which voter roll would be used in the province. Would it
be the one updated by the Iraqi High Electoral Commission as recently
as September 2009, which took into account all the Kurds who had
entered Kirkuk on the claim they had been expelled before 2003? Or the
one created in 2004, before the Kurds started arriving in big numbers?
Kurdish leaders favored the former option; Arab and Turkmen
politicians from Kirkuk, the latter. Both sides feared that a decision
on who gained the right to vote in Kirkuk would set a dangerous
precedent that would prejudge the outcome of provincial elections and
an eventual referendum on the province’s status. That is because there
is a prevailing perception in Iraq that Kurds will vote for Kurdish
candidates, Arabs for Arabs, Turkmen for Turkmen and so on, and that
the same will of course be true in Kirkuk.
In the end, the 2009 voter registry ruled the day and the law was
passed, but loopholes remain. Challenges of election results are
allowed in provinces where annual population growth has exceeded 5
percent—no surprise, as has happened in Kirkuk. And those election
results cannot be used as a precedent for changing current political
or administrative arrangements; in other words, they will not have an
impact on the status of Kirkuk. For all their efforts, Iraqi lawmakers
only managed to kick the Kirkuki can further down the road.
And even that paltry legislative triumph has been short-lived. Tariq
al-Hashemi, one of Iraq’s vice presidents, indicated he would not join
his colleagues on the presidential council to sign the bill into law.
Political crisis ensued. And although Hashemi’s veto had little to do
with Kirkuk, the legislative wrangling over the province’s
representation greatly complicated the bill’s initial parliamentary
passage. So powerful is the Kirkuk issue, it has managed to delay
national elections.
AND EVEN once Iraqis finally do go to the polls, the next opportunity
for trouble is not far off. This time Kirkuk could turn out to be an
even-bigger spoiler. The winners will set about cobbling together a
governing coalition. Given the fragmented nature of Iraq’s political
landscape, however, this will be a complicated task that could take
months. The biggest winner may not gain more than a quarter of the vote
—respectable in any democracy perhaps but a dramatic departure from
the 2005 elections, when the Shia Islamist alliance fell only ten
seats short of an absolute majority. Prolonged postelection bickering
is likely even though the Kurds will probably not reprise the role as
kingmakers of Iraqi politics that they had in 2005 and 2006.
The Kurds’ main electoral list, the Kurdistani Alliance bloc, will
still play a major role in light of its proven ability to get out the
vote in Kurdish areas. The bloc’s principal condition for joining a
new government will be a sworn commitment by its governing partners to
make concessions on Kirkuk. Kurdish leaders have been coy about what
demands they will make, but if previous experiences are anything to go
by, the focus will be on concrete steps that would facilitate Kirkuk’s
incorporation into the Kurdistan region. These could include a firm
date for a Kirkuk referendum, or a date for provincial elections in
Kirkuk using the updated voter registry, or Baghdad’s consent to pay
oil companies that signed contracts with the Kurdistan Regional
Government, including for fields located in disputed territories. It
is doubtful, however, that political leaders would be willing or able
to make any compromise on Kirkuk in the midst of resurgent Iraqi
nationalism.
THE OBAMA administration has slowly, though not explicitly, begun to
move its support behind some sort of special status for Kirkuk, a
choice that would dissatisfy virtually everyone but seems the only way
to keep the peace. The White House has started to focus energies on
finding a way out of the Kirkuk conundrum ahead of the announced U.S.
troop withdrawal, to be completed by the end of 2011. The shift from
the Bush administration’s support of Article 140 was moved along by
the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) which launched an
investigation into the Kirkuk question after the 2007 referendum
deadline was missed. The ensuing report supported neither Kirkuk as
part of the Kurdistan region nor as a province directly under
Baghdad’s rule. Just as importantly, UNAMI rejected the notion of a
referendum based on an ethnic vote, which it referred to as a “hostile
referendum” that could only augur war. Instead it advocated
negotiations that would produce a compromise agreement that then would
need to be ratified by Kirkuki voters in what it called a confirmatory
referendum. Such a compromise would most likely entail some kind of
special status which would, for example, allow both Iraq’s central
government and the Kurdish government to have significant influence in
the province and create a power-sharing arrangement inside Kirkuk for
an interim period until Iraqi leaders reach a consensus on final
status. No surprise, the UNAMI report deeply displeased Kurdish
leaders. But nevertheless, given the report’s endorsement by their
only ally, the United States, they couldn’t possibly reject its
findings outright. The Maliki government also gave it the nod. Of
course, little progress has been made since, but in Iraq, the fact
that Baghdad and Erbil are still talking is seen as a blessing all the
same.
The reason the shift in U.S. policy hasn’t yet been turned into action
is because the Obama administration doesn’t want to break the bad news
to Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region, lest the
Kurds boycott the parliamentary elections and upset the U.S.
withdrawal timetable. Nor has it wanted to put pressure on the Maliki
government to make painful concessions—a special status is clearly not
Maliki’s preferred outcome—just as it is heading into an election. UN
and U.S. diplomats have suggested, though, that they intend to tackle
the Kirkuk question in earnest just as soon as the winners are known
and well before a new government is formed. Meanwhile, they are
considering a number of steps that would bring the sides closer
together—anchoring in law the constitutional principle (to which all
sides appear to agree) that revenues from oil sales should be
distributed fairly across Iraq’s population, and the integration of
Kurdish regional guards into the federal army—before moving on to
address Kirkuk’s disposition. They hope that in effecting such steps,
they can also facilitate the creation of a coalition government by
removing the blockage Kirkuk would otherwise cause.
FRUSTRATED FOR over eighty years in their quest for independence, with
Saddam’s ouster, the Kurds saw a chance to make serious headway,
focusing their energies on Kirkuk. Their window of opportunity, opened
in 1991 and widened in 2003, now appears to be closing. The outcome is
grim. Attempts to reverse Kurdish gains will be destabilizing. The
same goes for any further Kurdish attempt to seize full control of
Kirkuk.
The only sensible way forward is for all communities to acknowledge
the intrinsic legitimacy of each other’s narratives and to sit down
and work out a deal. Such a deal could not be limited to Kirkuk; it
would have to address the related questions of how the oil economy
should be managed and revenues shared, and how power should be divided
between the Kurdistan region and the rest of Iraq.5 Kurdish leaders
will have to decide what they value most: their region’s long-term
security, with a consensually defined and internationally guaranteed
boundary, or that region’s expansion in a manner that can only lead to
endemic strife. The goal for all stakeholders should be to reach a
long-term arrangement that would preserve Kirkuk’s rich ethnic and
cultural diversity; distribute power equitably between its main
components; encourage investment in its oil and gas fields; restart
its economy; protect the rights of all its denizens and their
properties, regardless of their provenance; and leave open a future
review of Kirkuk’s status if conditions warrant it. The people of
Kirkuk, largely ignored and forgotten in the political battles between
Baghdad and Erbil, deserve no less. And only a peaceful settlement of
Kirkuk’s status holds the promise of keeping Iraq together and afloat
following the American military’s departure.
Joost R. Hiltermann is deputy program director for the Middle East and
North Africa at the International Crisis Group.
1 For my accounts of my journey to postwar Iraq, see “Bomb Now, Die
Later,” Mother Jones (July/August 1991); and “Assessing the Damage in
Iraq,” Journal of Palestine Studies (Summer 1991).
2 See Human Rights Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign
Against the Kurds (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1995); an
earlier version is available at http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/1993/07/01/genocide-iraq
.
3 The International Crisis Group has analyzed developments in Kirkuk
from 2003 onward. Its reports are available at http://www.crisisgroup.org.
4 For Peter Galbraith’s controversial role in assisting Kurdish
leaders in the drafting of the Iraqi constitution, see James Glanz and
Walter Gibbs, “U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits,” The
New York Times, November 11, 2009.
5 The International Crisis Group outlined a possible deal in Oil for
Soil: Toward a Grand Bargain on Iraq and the Kurds (Brussels, October
28, 2008).