Those are good questions, something I neglected to say was the document was reportedly written by Sami Abdul Rahman, the deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government.
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A Moment of Decision for Iraq's Kurds
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Northern Iraq Between Boom Times and Danger
Amalia van Gent
In northern Iraq, a de facto state has been created which marks the longest period of self-government in Kurdish history. Is Washington's threatened war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq a historic opportunity for the Kurds to consolidate what they have already achieved, or does it harbor a danger of their losing everything again?
The Kurdish vice-premier in Erbil, Sami Abdul-Rahman, already clearly hears the drums of a new war in his homeland and he knows that a great deal is at stake. But he questions to what extent the Kurds' future depends on their own decisions. "We can neither start this war nor stop it," he remarks, emphasizing that the important thing is to secure his people's safety and rights. A changing of the guard in Baghdad, he emphasizes, must not be merely a matter of a change in personalities. The structures created by brutal dictators must be fundamentally altered and a democratic, pluralistic Iraq created. Abdul-Rahman leaves no doubt that, for the Kurds of northern Iraq, creation of an Arab-Kurdish "Federation of Iraq" is the price they are asking if they are to participate with the Americans in a new war against Saddam Hussein.
Cementing Autonomy
According to a draft constitution recent worked out by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), a post-Saddam Iraq would be divided into two federal regions: an Arab region, which would embrace central and southern Iraq, and a Kurdish region in the north. Each region would have its own constitution, its own parliament and its own president. The central government in Baghdad would continue to have control over the army and internal security and would be authorized to formulate foreign policy, conclude international treaties, draft the laws of the land and administer the nation's oil revenues. In essence, what Iraq's Kurds are calling for is actually a cementing of the present situation.
In the past 11 years, since the estimated 3.5 million Kurds have no longer been under Baghdad's control, a de facto state has been created in northern Iraq, the second such in the history of the Kurdish people. The "Republic of Mahabad" was created in Iran in 1946; it lasted for barely a year before falling victim to the start of the cold war. Iraqi Kurdistan today has its own flag, its own army and police (which will also be accepting female officers starting this summer). There are newspapers, television stations, and an elected parliament in which opposition parties such as the Communists and minorities such as the Assyrians and Turkmen are represented. Self-confident Kurdish academics work on their doctoral thesis at the universities of Dohuk and Suleimaniye. Instruction in the schools is in the Kurdish language, with Arabic taught only as a second language (or even a third, after English). And just as the portrait of Kemal Ataturk is to be seen everywhere in Turkey, so in Iraqi Kurdistan the portrait of Mullah Mustafa Barzani, "the father of the nation," hangs in every public building, every inn and school building.
The Trauma of Betrayal
Yet the KDP's draft constitution does deviate from the present situation in one significant respect: it assigns the oil-rich province of Kirkuk to the Kurdish region. In 1970, Abdul-Rahman negotiated with Saddam Hussein's people over Kurdish autonomy. He relates that, back then, the two delegations were able to reach agreement on most points of contention – except for Kirkuk. Finally, Saddam offered the Kurds half of Kirkuk Province, but Mustafa Barzani, calling Kirkuk "the heart of Kurdistan," refused Bagdad's offer. It was then that the Kurdish revolt broke out over Kirkuk's oil. The uprising ended in 1975 when, after Iran and Iraq had reached an agreement over the Shatt al-Arab, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger halted aid for the Kurdish movement and thus laid the groundwork for its devastating defeat. Some 300,000 people were forced to flee to Iran, and Sami Abdul-Rahman also went into exile with the aging Barzani.
Meanwhile, in Kurdistan, Saddam wiped out every trace of opposition. During the notorious "Operation Anfal" in the 1980s alone, an estimated 180,000 people lost their lives and 4,000 villages with more than 2,500 mosques and close to 100 Assyrian churches and monasteries were destroyed. Then, in 1988 in the town of Halabja, more than 5,000 people died violent deaths on a single day as a result of the massive use of chemical weapons by Saddam's forces. Like every Kurd, Sami Abdul-Rahman longs for the fall of the Baghdad ruler; to the Kurds, Saddam Hussein is the incarnation of evil and the memory of the period of his rule is a nightmare. Like most of his people, he too fears that the Kurds could once again become the plaything of international interests. The memory of 1975, or of 1991 – when President Bush Sr. called on the Kurds to revolt against Saddam, but then sat back passively while Iraqi tanks smashed Kurdish cities and forced more than a million Kurds to flee to the mountains of Turkey and Iran – these memories operate as a trauma in the collective Kurdish consciousness. And the trauma of betrayal determines the actions of the Kurdish elite to this day. "We have too much to lose," says political veteran Abdul-Rahman.
Erbil Transformed
The Kurds of northern Iraq have made the city of Erbil their capital. Today, it is a city in transition. Countless construction cranes and new buildings bear witness to lively activity. A gigantic mosque with its slender minarets is just being completed and is to be opened this summer. The streets of the city, as well as the four-lane highway leading to Salaheddin (headquarters of the KDP's powerful party apparatus), are filled with Land Cruisers, Mercedes and BMWs. In the "Four Candles Hotel," an Internet café offers undisturbed contact with the outside world.
Erbil has undergone an amazing transformation. Eleven years ago, it was a colorless city in which the streets were dominated by skeletons of bombed-out buildings, refugees and armed Peshmerga guerrillas. The sense of insecurity was ubiquitous, and grew even stronger in 1994, when a bloody internecine conflict broke out between the KDP and the second-largest Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which split Iraqi Kurdistan into two regions. Since then, the south has been controlled by Talabani's PUK and the northwest by Barzani's KDP. The year 1998 brought a cease-fire between them, and now, according to Sami Abdul-Rahman, relations between the two parties are "warm."
Not the "Northern Alliance" of Iraq
From the barracks of a command unit in Salaheddin, "Defense Minister" Bruska Shawais can look down over the broad plain of Erbil all the way to the demarcation line with Iraq. He does not anticipate an American move against Saddam before November. The highly sensitive American instruments would not work well in the heat of an Iraqi summer, he says mischievously (the temperatures in Erbil and Baghdad these days are up around 50 degrees Celsius or about 120 degrees Fahrenheit).
Asked whether, in the event of a war against Saddam Hussein, the Kurds of northern Iraq would be willing to play a role similar to that of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, he waves the question aside. The differences between Iraq under Saddam and Afghanistan under the Taliban are too great, he says. Unlike Afghanistan, he continues, Iraq is a state with intact institutions, tightly organized and well-trained armed forces, and oil reserves that are important to the entire region. And unlike the Northern Alliance, Shawais notes, Kurdish troops are battle-tested but poorly equipped. He is convinced that a new war would mean the end of the Baghdad dictator. Of greater concern to him is Iraq after Saddam Hussein. As if eager to stave off any alternative to a federalist solution, he notes that the draft constitution authored by the KDP has been accepted by the "Group of Four." This group is a combination of the two largest Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, and the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Teheran-based organization of Iraqi Shiites. Those three have been joined by the Movement of Iraqi National Agreement, headed by Ali Ayad al-Alawi, an Arab who used to work for the CIA. Many people today regard the Group of Four as the most credible opposition group in Iraq.
Turkish Reluctance
The thing that worries Shawais most, however, is the possible reactions of neighboring countries in the event of a war. Turkey, Iran and Syria are watching developments in the region with mistrust, fearing that creation of a "Federation of Iraq" could inspire and encourage their own Kurdish minorities. Turkish hostility toward the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq is evident along the old trade road which runs from Baghdad through Kirkuk to the northern Iraqi city of Zacho and then via the border crossing at Habur into Turkey. There, hundreds of tank trucks loaded with oil are tightly packed into parking areas, constituting probably the biggest traffic jam in the Middle East. Since the start of this year Turkey has either kept the border crossing closed or has allowed only a fraction of normal traffic to pass through – which is intended as a warning that it can block the economy of northern Iraq if it chooses to do so.
According to press reports, in mid-July, when a high-ranking American delegation turned up in Ankara looking for support for a military move against Saddam, the Turkish leadership laid down a number of conditions: there must be no establishment of an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq – that would be a casus belli for Turkey; even the creation of a federated Iraq along ethnic lines is unacceptable to Ankara; moreover, oil-rich Kirkuk must not come under Kurdish control, and finally, the Turkmen minority – Ankara's protégés in Iraq since 1991 – must be granted extensive rights.
The Turkmen in Iraq
Most Turkmen in Iraq live in the central Iraqi provinces of Mossul, Kirkuk and Deyalah, and in Erbil to the north. Historically, Iraq's Turkmen have served as a buffer zone between the Arabs in the south of the country and the Kurds in the north. Since there are no reliable census figures, their exact numbers remain a matter of controversy. The Kurds estimate them to number between 500,000 and 800,000, but Turkey speaks of 2.5 million. Turkmen under Baghdad's rule complain that they are brutally persecuted and that use of the Turkish language is forbidden in public and in the media. In Kurdish northern Iraq, on the other hand, the Turkmen enjoy extensive minority rights. They are represented in the parliament, have their own schools and maintain media in their own language. |
