Who will get it?

The conundrum of Kirkuk

Jan 20th 2005 KIRKUK
From The Economist print edition

Can a bitterly disputed city be given a special status—or help spark a civil war?

IN THE rubble of the hillside village of Shwan, a few miles north of Kirkuk, Kurdish women with cigarettes in their mouths mix cement, while children lug jerrycans of water and the men give orders. At least 30 families in the village, destroyed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 during his ferocious Anfal (“booty”) campaign to Arabise northern Iraq, have returned in the past year or so, apparently enticed back by tonnes of free cement and grants of $1,000 (some say more) per family from the local office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two parties that runs Iraq's Kurdish region. Shwan is just one of dozens of Kurdish villages razed by Mr Hussein that are re-emerging.

This alarms Iraqi Arabs. They see the Kurds forcibly grabbing back more of northern Iraq—including the area around Kirkuk that holds the country's richest oilfields—and extending their domain closer to Baghdad and the Arab heartland.

The Kurds, naturally, beg to differ. They worry that too few of their ethnic kin have returned to the area to reverse the demographic change (so brutally wrought by Mr Hussein) in time to ensure that, by giving Kurdish parties the biggest vote in this month's election, they will be able to bring Kirkuk province (also known as Tamim) into the embrace of a wider Kurdish federal region. Indeed, many Kurdish leaders want Kirkuk to be the new capital of Kurdistan; they call it “our Jerusalem”.

As the election approaches, Kirkuk's ethnic tensions have risen. Kidnappings, intimidation and murder of politicians and electoral workers have increased. Party offices have been raked with gunfire, campaign posters torn down or defaced.

This week, the main Kurdish parties threatened to boycott the entire election unless Kurds displaced from Kirkuk by Mr Hussein were allowed to vote there. The crisis was defused by the head of Iraq's election commission in Baghdad, backed by the Americans, who said that Kurds who can provide proof that they had been uprooted by Mr Hussein's regime after 1975, when his Arabisation took off, would indeed be allowed to vote. So at least 100,000 more Kurds (some guess 150,000) are now expected to vote in Kirkuk.

This threatens to upset the delicate ethnic balance that has held since Mr Hussein was overthrown nearly two years ago. The city's diverse communities—Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen and Assyrian Christians—have managed to get along, only just. The Americans appointed 15 Kurds, 11 Arabs, nine Turkomen and five Assyrians to run the provincial council: no community held an outright majority. That may now change. With their extra voters, the Kurds may be able to run the show on their own. So Kirkuk's Turkomen and Arabs now threaten to boycott the election. If it goes ahead, violence could break out. Some even fear it could spark a nationwide civil war.

The argument has always been about demography and numbers. No one is certain of Kirkuk's population figures, now or in the past. Each main group—Kurdish, Arab or Turkomen—says that “historically” it is the most numerous. But none can agree on the date when history began.

The Kurds cite statistics from the Ottoman Encyclopaedia at the end of the 19th century, which shows they made up three-quarters of the province's population. The Turkomen, kinsfolk of the former Turkish rulers, look to a census some 20 years later, by which time the Ottomans had settled many of their ethnic brethren in Kirkuk city. And the Arabs quote Mr Hussein's last census, in 1997, when Arabs were said to comprise 58% of the city's population and the Kurds only 10%, with Turkomen, Assyrians and others making up the rest. But these figures may reflect the fact that if Kurds refused to identify themselves as Arabs they were liable to lose their land.

Since Mr Hussein's fall, the Kurds have struggled to persuade their people to leave the safety of the undisputed Kurdish region for the turbulent borderlands further south and west. American commanders say about 75,000 had returned by the end of the summer; since then, the homecoming flow has slowed sharply. Yet Kirkuk's deputy governor, Hassib Roshbayani, a Kurd, has stated bluntly that “300,000 Kurds must come back and 300,000 Arabs settled by Saddam must go.” Some senior Kurds simply want to expel the Arabs. Many, perhaps most, of the Arabs Mr Hussein settled on Kurdish lands have fled, though Arabs maintain a strong presence in the city. Some senior Arabs, in return, have threatened to kick the 750,000 or so Kurds in Baghdad out of the capital.

No solution in sight

The Americans have largely washed their hands of the Kirkuk problem. An American grant worth $100m to fund the Kirkuk Foundation to promote ethnic harmony remains largely undisbursed. Little of the $180m earmarked to pay for resolving property disputes and to compensate the displaced has been dished out. The Iraqi Property Claims Commission, set up a year ago, has settled only about 120 claims in Kirkuk (out of several thousand lodged), finding it nigh-impossible to find even-handed judges whose verdicts would be accepted by both sides.
For now, the Kurds are on top. They already hold key posts in Kirkuk's provincial government. The governor is a Kurd. So are the heads of the agricultural department (which controls the distribution of state land) and the police. Kurdish-led patrols go as far south as Khanaquin, barely two hours' drive from Baghdad.

For the moment, the conundrum of Kirkuk lies unsolved. The constitution to be written after the election may, perhaps, give it a special status whereby power must be shared. Whatever census is taken (no one seems to know when) is bound to be disputed. The peaceful adjudication of property claims seems far away. The city and its surroundings are a tinderbox.

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