The Kurds Go Their Own Way

Can freedom flower in Iraqi Kurdistan?

Michael J. Totten from the August/September 2006 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

There is some disgruntlement. I met a university professor who got so wound up in his opposition to both major parties I thought he might have a heart attack. “They are all corrupt!” he said as he flailed about in his chair. “All of them!” There is, indeed, an enormous amount of corruption. Leaders and functionaries in both parties take a cut from almost every business that matters. “And they want everyone to become a Peshmerga!” the professor exclaimed. “We have more generals than the Red Army!”

Perhaps the security apparatus is a bit overdone. Few Kurds are in the mood to take any chances, though. The Peshmerga are in charge of security here; the Iraqi army has been infiltrated by Ba’athists and isn’t allowed anywhere inside the autonomous zone. Like most people, the Kurds believe a modern civilized country needs a state with a monopoly on the use of force. But they don’t think the state in Baghdad is civilized yet.

The Peshmerga offered to patrol the roads in and out of Kirkuk, which is just outside Kurdish government territory. But the U.S. authority on the ground wouldn’t have it. Arab tribes in the area might get twitchy about being policed by the Kurds.

The Kurds took the pushback in stride. The minister of the interior in Suleimaniya laughed out loud when I asked him how well they get along with the American military. “Ha ha ha, our relationship is very good,” he said.

Racial Profiling, Kurdish-Style

It’s certainly better than their relationship with Arabs. The Kurds may be the most liberal of Iraq’s three dominant ethnicities, but they’re the quickest to impose illiberal laws on everyone else. I learned that when Omar and Mohammad Fadhil, the bloggers behind Iraq the Model, drove up to Kurdistan from Baghdad to meet me at my hotel. They never made it. The Peshmerga told them Arabs were not allowed to enter the region without a Kurdish escort.

It was racial profiling at its worst. The Fadhils did nothing at all to deserve that kind of treatment. Two upstanding citizens were not allowed to visit a region in their own country for no reason except that they’re Arabs. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Political Freedom ranks Iraq the third freest Arab-majority country, after Lebanon and Morocco. Yet freedom of movement, one of the most basic freedoms, still doesn’t exist. It’s a one-way limitation too: Kurds can visit the north, center, and south of Iraq whenever they feel like it.

Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Regional Government actually provides money and housing for Arab Christians who want to pick up and resettle in the north. The overwhelming majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims. Yet they discriminate against their fellow Sunnis in favor of “infidels.”

Arab Muslims aren’t barred from the region. They can visit as tourists, and they can buy new homes there. But they must have connections if they want to settle in Kurdistan, and they must prove they aren’t a security threat before they can even show up.

And then there’s Kirkuk. Perhaps nothing in all Iraq poses a bigger challenge to Western liberal principles than this city.

Kirkuk sits atop one of Iraq’s biggest oil fields. It has always been an ethnically mixed city on the southernmost fringe of Iraqi Kurdistan. Today it lies just beyond the Kurdistan Regional Government’s autonomous zone. From 1986 to 1989 Saddam Hussein ethnically cleansed a good portion of the Kurds who refused to change their ethnicity to “Arab,” then moved more Arabs, Stalin-style, into the Kurds’ former homes.

No ethnic group dominates the city today. Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Turkmen (Iraqi Turks who speak their own dialect of Turkish), and Assyrian and Chaldean Christians live cheek by jowl. It’s a little Lebanon where everyone is a minority. And it’s one of the worst tinderboxes in all of Iraq. Two violent incidents, from terrorism to kidnapping to sniping, occur every day in that city.

The Kurds want it back. They don’t want to leave Iraq without the city they call “Our Jerusalem.” Nor will they tolerate a federal Iraq that doesn’t include Kirkuk in their autonomous zone.

I asked KDP Minister Falah Bakir what “Our Jerusalem” was all about. Is Kirkuk some kind of cultural capital? Is there a historic significance to the city that Westerners aren’t aware of?

“No,” he replied. “Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan. But it isn’t ‘Jerusalem.’ Kirkuk is Kirkuk, just as Erbil is Erbil and Mosul is Mosul.” It’s just another Kurdish city, in other words. It was dubbed “Our Jerusalem” by Jalal Talabani as part of a P.R. campaign.

The Peshmerga could take Kirkuk militarily any time the order is given. But they’re holding back. The Kurdistan Regional Government says it wants to take the city peacefully and with honor.

Trouble is, first they want to kick out the Arabs moved there by Saddam. Not all the Arabs. Those who lived there before the Arabization campaign, those who are actually from there, are welcome to stay. The Kurds swear they have no interest in creating an ethnic-identity state. They merely want, they insist, to make the city as safe and secure as Erbil, Suleimaniya, and Dohok.

South of the Peshmerga line, some towns with Sunni Arab majorities are forcibly evicting Shia Arabs at gunpoint, with rocket launchers, and without compensation. The Kurdistan Regional Government, by contrast, says it will financially compensate everyone asked to leave. Even so, reversing one population transfer with another isn’t right. The Kurds seem to understand this, given that they’re offering to pay damages to the evicted. They might not even care about the city’s ethnic composition if Kirkuk weren’t wracked with violence. But the city is a dangerous place, and the aftershocks of Saddam’s divide-and-rule strategy are still explosive.

I didn’t get to visit Kirkuk, but Guardian reporter Michael Howard knows the city well. “Many of the Arabs I’ve spoken to in Kirkuk are aware that they are in someone else’s territory,” he told me. The overwhelming majority of Kirkuk’s residents eschew violence no matter what their politics might be. But there are just enough people who don’t to turn the city into a looming mini-Yugoslavia.

Waiting to Jump

It’s hard to say what will come next. The Kurds seem to know what they want, but even they have no idea what their next move is. If they declare independence today, Turkey very well may invade; the Turks dread nothing more than Turkish Kurdistan attaching itself to Iraqi Kurdistan. Or open war could break out between Kurdistan and what’s left of Iraq. No one wants to lose the black gold mine in the earth beneath Kirkuk. Even the U.S. might not recognize an independent Kurdish state for the trouble it may cause if Ankara and Baghdad aren’t persuaded to go along first.

The Kurds are patiently biding their time. But make no mistake: They aren’t waiting to decide if they want to remain part of Iraq. They’re waiting for just the right moment to jump.

Racial profiling may or may not outlast the war. Iraqi Kurds want to be protected from predominantly Arab terrorists. More than anything, though, they want self-determination for Kurds. How they treat their own ethnic minorities if they ever achieve independence will be a crucial first test. Are they really the kind of people they think they are?

On February 1, I had lunch in a restaurant in Dohok with my driver and translator. A music video played silently on a TV in the corner: a beautiful woman with flowing black hair singing what seemed to be a slow, quiet song.

“Is she a Kurdish singer?” I asked my translator.

“Look,” he said. “She is at the oil fields of Kirkuk.”

He was right. A flame shot out the top of a well.

“What’s she singing about?” I asked.

I expected a heavy dose of Kurdish nationalism, but he surprised me. “A long time ago,” he said, “before the Kurds knew Islam or science, when we still worshipped fire, Kirkuk was a mystical place. We did not know then what oil was. Flames came out of the earth.”

On screen, the singer swayed slowly and sadly. “People used to go there and pray when they hoped to give birth to a son,” my translator said. “She is there now asking for peace.”