Iraq's Kurds Face Mounting Anger
From All Sides

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann
January 18, 2007                          

Cairo (DPA) -- With additional soldiers and pressure on the government, US President George W Bush aims to contain terrorism and anarchy in Baghdad and in the Iraqi provinces of Anbar, Diyala and Salaheddin mainly inhabited by Sunnis.

Simultaneously, a time-bomb is ticking in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, and nobody has so far dared to defuse it.

Iraqi Kurds are working hard at integrating the multi-ethnic city and its rich oil fields into the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Arabs and Turkmens living in Kirkuk, however, are desperate to prevent this. They are afraid of becoming second-class citizens in a city dominated by Kurds.

Sunni groups support them, as does Turkey, which feels close to the Turkmens and wants to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdish state at all costs.

'Turkey cannot just sit idle and watch the demographic structure of Kirkuk change,' Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened recently.

The presidential office in Arbil, seat of the autonomous Kurdish government, sent the sarcastic reply: 'We would like to remind you that the Ottoman empire no longer exists and that Iraq is not part of Turkey.'

However, this conflict is not simply about words. Kurdish groups are working hard to resettle thousands of Kurds in the city who had been banished under Saddam Hussein's regime.

Subsequently - if possible even this year - the Kurds want to hold a referendum to ask the city's inhabitants whether they want Kirkuk to become part of the autonomous Kurdish region.

To speed up their return, the state committee for 'normalization' in Kirkuk has this week decided that every family coming back to Kirkuk should receive a plot of land to build on and some money.

The Arabs from the south, whom Saddam had once lured to Kirkuk with financial incentives, were to return to southern Iraq.

However, in Kirkuk resistance is growing against the Kurdish plans.

'We will defend our city together with the Turkmens', Arab Jazim al-Jaburi says.

Kirkuk is an Iraqi not a Kurdish city, the accountant says. Of course, the Kurds had suffered injustice under Saddam, 'but you can't correct one mistake by another.'

Mahmud Muhammed, a member of the politbureau of the Kurdistan Democratic Party(KDP), sees the return of the Kurds as 'the right way towards normalizing the situation in Kirkuk.'

He does not think that a referendum would increase violence in the region.

However, the most recent UN report on human rights in Iraq mentions 'threats, bullying and arbitrary arrests' of Arabs and Turkmens by members of the Kurdish police and secret service in Kirkuk.

'Assaults like that could be first indications of an upcoming crisis in Kirkuk within the next few months,' the report says.

Washington is worried too. The US Congress's expert commission, led by former foreign secretary James Baker, has suggested a delay of the referendum until 2008 to avoid an escalation of violence.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice uses the Kirkuk conflict as an argument in favour of Bush's new strategy in Iraq which she thinks could prevent the breakup of the country: 'If Iraq breaks up, they (the Kurds) will make decisions (other than staying part of Iraq), and this will create problems with Turkey.'

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann