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

14
Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Basin Özeti
7 March 2013
Iraq 10 years on: From death to
dollars - how Kurds struck it rich
The Legacy - Day 5. The Kurds - Iraqi Kurdistan was the scene of Saddam’s greatest crime. It is
also the home of the country’s newest oil fields, which present both an opportunity – and a
threat – to its people
PATRICK COCKBURN
Erbil - Kurdistan presents itself as the
new economic tiger of the Middle East,
flush with the prospect of exploiting its oilfields.
The tall towers of two new luxury
hotels rise high above the Kurdish capital
Erbil, the oldest inhabited city in the world
whose skyline had previously been dominated
by its ancient citadel for thousands of
years.
Nearby, a glittering new airport has
replaced the old Iraqi military runway. In
contrast to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities
the cars in the streets look new. Above all,
and again in sharp contrast to further
south, there is a continuous supply of electricity.
“I cannot find employees to go and work in
the oilfield,” complains a Kurdish manager
in a Western oil company. “I cannot even
find rooms in the new hotels for visiting
executives because they are so full.”
Convoys of shiny black vehicles conveying
delegations of visiting businessmen from
Germany, France, the UAE and Turkey race
through the city. Many of those now coming
to Kurdistan could not have found it on the
map a few years ago and – so Kurds who
have met them caustically remark – are
often still unsure of its location when they
leave. But there is no doubting international
business enthusiasm for the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG), the semiindependent
enclave in northern Iraq that
is prospering like no other part of the country.
A Kurdish businessman says: “We are
benefiting from having a boom at a time of
austerity and slow growth in the rest of the
world, so the boardrooms of international
companies are particularly interested in
us.”
At the heart of the boom are 50 or 60 foreign
oil companies seeking to find and
exploit Kurdistan’s oil, on better terms and
with greater security and official backing
than they could find in the rest of Iraq. This
influx started with small and obscure foreign
companies in the years after the fall of
Saddam in 2003. But foreign interest deepened,
the size of the oil companies
increased, and in 2010 ExxonMobil signed
an exploration contract with the KRG. The
central government in Baghdad was furious
and threatened to punish Exxon, which has
large interests in southern Iraq, but failed
to do so as other oil majors – Chevron, Total
and Gazprom – had also signed their own
deals.
When the Kurds first encouraged foreign oil
companies to look for oil on territory they
controlled, Baghdad was sanguine. In 2007
Iraq’s Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani,
now Deputy Prime Minister in charge of
energy-related issues, said to me that, even
if foreign oil companies found oil, they
would not be able to export it. He asked sarcastically:
“Are they going to carry it out in
buckets?” It is this calculation that has
changed radically in the last year. A new
pipeline is being built between the KRG and
Turkey, which in theory would enable the
Kurds to export crude and get paid for it
without permission from Baghdad. This
would give the five million Iraqi Kurds an
economically and politically independent
state for the first time in their history after
decades of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
On the other hand, Turkey may decide
that it is not in its interests to defy Baghdad
and break up Iraq.
Self-determination is close, but not quite
there yet. One Kurdish observer said:
“We Kurds have one of the most complicated
political situations in the world.” It is
easy to forget this in the present boom-town
atmosphere of the KRG. First, the Kurdish
autonomous zone is landlocked and on all
sides faces powers – Turkey, Iran, Syria and
the rest of Iraq – that are oppressing Kurds
or have oppressed them in the recent past.
The KRG may be a haven of peace for the
moment but violence is not far away. Syria,
Iraq and Turkey are fighting guerrilla insurgences
of varying levels of intensity just
A 1988 photograph
shows a Kurdish
father holding his
baby in his arms in
Halabja, northeastern
Iraq. Both were killed
in an Iraqi chemical
attack on the city
beyond the KRG’s frontiers. In recent weeks
al-Qa’ida suicide bombers blew up the main
police station in Kirkuk 50 miles south of
Erbil and assassinated a senior general and
his bodyguards in Mosul, a similar distance
to the west.
The political geography of the Middle East
is changing in ways that so far are to the
advantage of the Iraqi Kurds, though the
trends may not always be so. The KRG consists
of three provinces – Erbil, Dohuk and
Sulaimanya – that won de facto autonomy
in 1991 after the Kurdish uprising in the
wake of the first Gulf War. This area
expanded dramatically in 2003 as the
Kurdish pesh merga militiamen advanced
and Saddam Hussein’s forces collapsed.
The Kurds captured Kirkuk and its oilfields
as well as a swathe of territory north and
east of Mosul and have never been likely to
give it up. An explosive aspect of the deal
with ExxonMobil in 2010 is that three of its
six exploration blocks are outside the KRG,
but inside territories disputed between
Kurds and Arabs and between the governments
in Erbil and Baghdad. Last year pesh
merga and Iraqi troops confronted each
other along the so-called “trigger” line,
stretching from the Syrian to the Iranian
border.
It is a moment of unprecedented political
change in the region. Iraq as a country is
getting close to disintegration as a single
state, but this is not inevitable. Old alliances
are being junked and hated enemies
embraced. Massoud Barzani, long
demonised in Turkey, was a guest at the
conference of Turkey’s ruling AKP party
and was given a standing ovation. The Iraqi
Kurds are tipping towards Ankara ➤