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

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Özeti
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If civil war erupts after handover,
Kirkuk may be its starting point
Knight Ridder Newspapers
by Mark McDonald
24 June 2004
KIRKUK / The children at the Shorja middle school in
Kirkuk raise the flag and sing the anthem everymorning -
the Kurdistan flag and the Kurdish national anthem.
There's not an Iraqi flag in sight. .
"Look at our past, how red it is with blood," they sing. "Let
no one say the Kurds are no more. They are here, and
their flag never falls."
The Kurdish anthem, like the Kurdish past, is bloodsoaked
and dramatic, and many people in northern Iraq
expect more bloodletting very soon. If there's going to be
a civil war in Iraq - and many believe that's inevitable - the
first cut, and the deepest, could well come in Kirkuk.
The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority yields control
of the Iraqi government on June 30, and the stability of
the country, perhaps even the region, could be
determined by what happens in oil-rich Kirkuk.
"The worry is that when we go, the political vacuum will
get filled in a . cataclysmic way," said Paul Harvey, the
Kirkuk coordinator for the CPA.
The violence has already started. A spate of unsolved
political murders has hit Kirkuk in recent weeks, and
coalition officials now use bodyguards and armored cars
at all t!mes. The U.S. airbase has been taking light but
regular mortar attacks, especially after Friday afternoon
prayers.
Saboteurs also have blown up two pipelines in the last
month, one of them an important export pipeline.
Kirkuk is a sprawling, dust-choked city of nearly 1 million
people. It's made up of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and
Assyrian Christians. The size of each community is a
matter of hot debate. All but the Assyrians claim to be
predominant.
The Kurds are Muslims, but they're neither Arab nor
Persian. They're a separate ethnic group with their own
language and customs. Most of the estimated 4.5 million
Iraqi Kurds live in the north.
The Turkmens are an ethnic group with linguistic and
cultural ties to Turkey, and they practice a moderate form
of Shiite Islam. Assyrians have lived in the region for
centuries.
"There's so little trust among the different groups that it's
hard to see how civil war can be avoided," said Ismael
Shukir, a professor of modern Kurdish history at the
University of Salahaddin. "Kirkuk could be the flashpoint
for all of Iraq. All the nationalities are preparing for a big
fight."
The ultimate prize is the oil, and Kirkuk sits atop an ocean
of it. The Kirkuk fields hold an estimated 40 percent of all
the oil in Iraq.
The state-owned
Northern Oil Co. controls the Kirkuk
crude, which is pumped north to the Turkish port of
Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Exports have been halted
for pipeline repairs, but outflows reportedly have never
reached more than one-fourth capacity since liberation.
Harvey, a career British diplomat who'd never been to the
Middle East before, thinks a war in Kirkuk isn't inevitable,
although he admits that there are "huge challenges
ahead . . . and every problem here has an ethnic
dimension to it."
Foreign powers and various Baghdad regimes have been
fiddling with the ethnic makeup of Kirkuk for the better
part of a century. Now it's the locals who are doing the
tampering.
Kirkuk and its outlying farming villages are being flooded
with Kurdish refugees, many of whom Saddam Hussein
brutally displaced 20 years ago.
When Saddam kicked out the Kurds, he moved in Arabs.
Since liberation, the returning Kurds have been
reclaiming their homes and farms, sometimes ejecting
the Arab tenants at gunpoint. Arab-Kurd tension is
unmistakable and nasty.
Meanwhile, Kurdish political parties have been paying
Kurds to move to Kirkuk before elections and a census.
After liberation last year, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
and the Kurdistan Democratic Party quickly seized the
city's broadcast center and set up their own TV stations.
They transferred squads of Kurdish police officers to
Kirkuk. And the Kurdish president of the university in the
city of Irbil exhorted his Kurdish professors to move to
Kirkuk to claim teaching posts there.
Turkmen political agents, meanwhile, have been
conducting covert censuses of their people in the city.
And the Arabs, like the other groups, cite dusty historical
tracts to substantiate their claims that Kirkuk is
traditionally theirs.
If things do turn cataclysmic, the Kurds could mobilize
70,000 armed men, most of them well-trained guerrilla
fighters. These Kurdish peshmerga, "those who face
death," fought alongside U.S. Special Forces teams
against Saddam's troops.
Turkmen parties also claim. to have a military force in
ready reserve. Turkey continues to make baleful
statements about coming to the aid of its Iraqi brethren.
Sunni insurgents and Shiite volunteers could intervene on
behalf of Kirkuk's Arabs.
There are reports of thousands of armed Shiite volunteers
mustering across the border in Iran, and the Shiite cleric
Muqtada al Sadr also seems to be anticipating a fight in
Kirkuk. He's been busing some of his followers into the
city.
"They come on Fridays, they pray at the mosque, then
they create chaos in the streets," said Mudhafer abed,
whose TV and appliance shop is around the corner from
the mosque.
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