Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

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Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Özeti ➡ Abu Ghraib in Baghdad who “after 30 years as a school teacher is out of a job and a pension. They just sent him a message written on a scrap of paper saying “Go home”. He is penniless. If he was younger he would get a gun.” Many Shia express sympathy for cases like this, but they add that Sunni in Anbar, Salahudin, Nineveh and Sunni districts of Baghdad are frequently unemployed because they used to have plum jobs under Saddam Hussein as army, police or intelligence officers. In the 1980s it was said that 80 per cent of army officers were Sunni and 20 per cent Shia, while the proportions were the reverse in the lower ranks. A retired Shia general says “it is hypocritical of Sunni to demand back security jobs that they only held in the past because of sectarian bias in their favour.” The Sunni demonstrations, now entering their third month, raise a question crucial to the future of Iraq: how far will the Sunni, once dominant, accept a lower status? Members of the government fear the real agenda of the Sunni is not reform but regime change, a counterrevolution reversing the post-Saddam Hussein political settlement. “Shia leaders believe they have been elected, are legitimate and any change should come through an election,” said one senior official. “If there should be any attempt to take power from them by force, they will fight.” There is no doubt that in 2003, with the fall of Saddam Hussein and again in the sectarian civil war of 2006-8, the Sunni of Iraq suffered historic defeats. Baghdad became a largely Shia city with few mixed districts and remains so to this day. “More than half of all Baghdad neighbourhoods now contain a clear Shia majority,” reads a US embassy cable on the changed sectarian balance in the capital dating from the end of 2007 and published by Wikileaks. “Sunni have largely fled to outlying areas or have been concentrated into small enclaves surrounded by Shia neighbourhoods.” A sub-heading in the cable about these enclaves reads “islands of stability in a sea of fear”. This generally remains the situation to this day. Shia and Sunni do not necessarily hate each other, but they do fear each other and that fear will take long to dissipate. Much of Iraq has been cantonised into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish areas in a way that was not true before 2003. In places, burnt out Sunni mosques, or mosques taken over by Shia, underline the extent of Sunni defeat. Abdul-Karim Ali, a real estate broker, says Sunni may want to return, but they are frightened by rumours of action against them, even when these are not true. “I was just with a Sunni family in Doura, who want me to sell a good house in Bayaa in another part of Baghdad, where they used to live, but they think it is now too dangerous for them to go there even to visit.” Sunni hopes and Shia fears are being heightened by the struggle for power in Syria with the Sunni majority there likely to emerge the winners. This emboldens the Sunni of Iraq who no longer feel isolated and sense that they benefit from a region-wide Sunni counter-attack against the Shia led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. “Extreme Sunni and Shia both feel a sense of power,” says Dr Atiyyah, “The Sunni say we have the whole Arab world behind us. The Shia leadership says we are the majority in Iraq.” He fears these beliefs are a recipe for mutual destruction. A strong sign that the civil war in Syria is spreading into western Iraq came this week when 48 unarmed Syrian soldiers and nine Iraqi guards were killed probably by al-Qa’ida in an ambush on Iraqi territory to which they had fled. Al-Qa’ida in Iraq is using the protests to issue a call for Sunni to take up arms against the government. There has been an increase in suicide bomb attacks on Shia targets and harassment of government forces, mostly in areas where al-Qa’ida has traditionally been strong north of Baghad, There is no doubt these attacks fuel sectarian animosities, particularly as the government suspects Sunni politicians and religious leaders of giving a green light to these actions as a form of leverage against the state. “There are those who will close their eyes to what al- Qa’ida is doing,” says a leading politician. “Maybe al-Sahwa, the Sons of Iraq [the government paid Sunni militia], will not be so interested in fighting al-Qa’ida.” At the heart of the problem of creating an acceptable consensus and balance of power between Shia, Sunni and Kurd in Iraq is that they have all been traumatised by atrocities inflicted on them by other Iraqi communities in the recent past. In the case of the Shia and Sunni the memory of the sectarian slaughter of 2006-7 is still fresh and it takes little to revive past terrors. For instance, in the largely Shia Jihad district of south-west Baghdad in recent days menacing notes have been turning up at Sunni homes. They read “the zero hour has come. So leave along with you families... you are the enemy.” They are signed by the Mukhtar army, a newly formed Shia sectarian group though their spokesman denies the flyers come from them. Even so, many Sunni residents are panicking, packing up and fleeing to Sunni enclaves in other parts of the city. It is easy to see why they go. Before 2006 Jihad was a mixed middle class neighbourhood. I had driver called Bassim Abdul Rahman, a Sunni who had built a house for himself there with a sitting room and two bedrooms in 2001. “I didn’t complete it because I didn’t have enough money,” he says. “But we were so happy to have our own home.” In the summer of 2006 Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army took over Jihad, and Bassim fled with his wife and three children to Syria. When he came back three months later he found that a Shia family was occupying his house and neighbours told him to leave immediately or the militiamen would kill him. He and his family were forced to squat in a single damp room in his brother-in-law’s house in a Sunni district. He tried to work as a taxi driver but most of Baghdad was too dangerous for him to drive in. In his old neighbourhood he was denounced as “being a high ranking officer in the former intelligence service.” He discovered that all his possessions had been looted. Desperate, he sold his car and his wife’s jewellery and used the money to try to get to Sweden illegally via Malaysia using a Lithuanian passport. His plan failed and he returned miserably to Baghdad. He is driving a taxi again, but the streets of Baghdad are so full of yellow taxis, and traffic is so bad, that he cannot earn more than $25 on a good day. Iraq has many people with similarly ruined lives. Many Sunni have seen their lives torn apart by occupation and sectarian violence over the last decade and are fearful of it happening again. Another Sunni friend has done better and has a middle ranking post in a ministry where he says most jobs are going to members of the ruling Dawa party of Mr Maliki. “They run it like a tribe,” he says. “Every appointee is one of their relatives.” He speaks fearfully of civil war but adds that “if the Sunni could just get jobs and pensions all this fury would ebb away.” ● 11
12 Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dent.ro de la Prensa-Basin Ozeti niusniunu ïuralô^ .^Sribunt MARCH 7, 2013 Unexpected DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY Moves by Turkish leader and senior militant raise hopes, but war continues BYTIMARANGO When three prominent Kurdish women were slain in Paris in January, some people predicted that the activists' deaths would derail peace talks started late last year with the Turkish govern¬ ment. Just the opposite appears to have NEWS ANALYSIS happened, as both sides have moved forward with more determination to end the conflict, which has claimed almost 40,000 lives over nearly three decades. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has become such a forceful advocate for peace that he said he would drink "hemlock poison" if it meant an end to hostilities. Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or P.K.K., which is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, recently released a letter from his prison cell calling for a cease-fire by March and the withdrawal of fighters from Turkish territory by August. Mr." Erdogan, frustrated with Tur¬ key's limited ability to shape the Arab world's revolutions and facing a back¬ lash at home for his support ofthe rebels in Syria's civil war, has shifted to seek¬ ing peace in his own backyard. If the talks bear fruit, they will bolster Tur¬ key's position as a regional power, burn¬ ish Mr. Erdogan's legacy as a peace¬ maker and, perhaps, propel him to the presidency next year. "If the talks are successful, he would get a peace dividend, as the leader that finally brought peace to Turkey after three decades of internal strife," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat who is chairman of the Center for Eco¬ nomic and Foreign Policy Studies, a re¬ search organization in Istanbul. According to analysts like Mr. Ulgen, Mr. Erdogan has found himself without the votes in Parliament to make consti¬ tutional changes to create a stronger presidency, the office that he might seek in next year's election, and is gambling that the peace process will attract enough support from Kurdish law¬ makers to alter the Constitution. "That is his only hope now to get this shift to a push for peace BULENTKIUC/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Kurds in Diyarbakir awaiting the arrival of the bodies of the three Kurdish women killed in Paris in January. Their deaths seem to have helped negotiations, not derailed them. --;i ,w-, Stt
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