Little Iraq

A solution to Kirkuk's dispute will be elusive so long as conflicting parties pursue conflicting ethnic agendas, writes Saif Nasrawi

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Thousands of Shia pilgrims gather in front of the Shrine of Imam Abbas in the central city of Karbala to mark the anniversary of the birth of Mohamed Al-Mahdi, the 12th imam of Shia known as the "hidden imam"

The failure of the Iraqi parliament this month to agree on an election law that would allow Kirkuk's multi-ethnic, multi religious population to choose their representatives to the city council has underscored how incendiary is the city which many like to call "little Iraq".

Kirkuk stands on the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Arrapha, near the Khasa River, on the ruins of a 5,000- year-old settlement known as the Kirkuk Citadel. Historians note that Kirkuk was the battle ground for three ancient empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media, that controlled the city at various times long before Arabs, Kurds, Turkomens and Christians -- its present day population -- found dwellings there.

The heated war of words that followed the parliament's failure to include Kirkuk in the scheduled date for provincial elections has sparked anew squabbles as Kurds, who call the oil-rich province "Our Jerusalem", threatened to annex it to their semi-independent Kurdistan region while Arabs and Turkomens accuse them of being secessionists trying to tear Iraq apart.

The escalation came after parliament enacted the new local election law 22 July, giving Kirkuk a special status by dividing its elected provincial council equally among the three main ethnic groups -- Arabs, Kurds and Turkomens -- with each receiving 32 per cent of the seats and giving its Christian population a quota of four per cent. Kurds immediately dismissed the law as designed to annul an earlier agreement and suppress Kurdish ambitions to win formal control of the city.

Kurds claim Kirkuk is an essential part of Kurdistan and insist that its demography has been changed in recent decades largely as a result of ethnic cleansing campaigns implemented by previous Iraqi regimes. They claim that the majority of the city's population was Kurdish and Turkomens while Arabs began to settle in the region only after Iraq's independence from the Ottoman Empire following World War I. They also say that after the 1968 coup that brought to power the Iraqi Baath Party, it seized upon an already existing Arab domination of Kirkuk and strengthened it. After the US-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein, Kurds worked hard and fast to bring Kirkuk into their fold.

The current crisis goes back to Article 58 of the transitional administrative law (TAL) of 8 March 2004, enacted by the occupation administration led by Paul Bremer. That article, which called for a series of expeditious measures, including a referendum on whether Kirkuk should be part of Kurdistan, was later enshrined in the Iraqi constitution itself based on the TAL. Under Article 140 of the constitution, the Baghdad government was charged to undertake three key steps in Kirkuk: namely, normalisation, a population census, and a referendum to determine the future of the city to be held no later than 30 December 2007.

Although the Kurds pressed the federal government hard to implement Article 140, the parties failed to agree unanimously on a set of recommendations as Arabs and Turkomens accused Kurdish parties of intimidating them, grabbing their land, and expelling them from their places of residence while bringing hundreds of thousands of Kurds from other locales to settle in the city and surrounding towns and villages. Later Arab and Turkomen representatives claimed that Article 140 had become obsolete after its deadline had passed.

Complaints among Kurds about the slow pace of normalisation and the failure to prepare for the referendum led to accusations against the government that it had reneged on the agreement, violated the constitution and encouraged Arab and Turkomen defiance in the city. When the parties reached the point of deciding a new provincial elections law in July, the situation had become so inflammatory that no one could display flexibility for fear of being seen as giving in to the other's demands.

With the dispute over Kirkuk still unsettled and the parliament having recessed for the summer without passing amendments demanded by Kurds, it remains to be seen if the parties will be able to patch their differences in order to allow local elections scheduled for 1 October to go ahead.

The UN has reportedly proposed a year-long freeze on issues related to Kirkuk in order to allow elections to go ahead as scheduled in Iraq's 17 other provinces. This proposal has been rejected by various Arab and Turkomen factions who want to press ahead with elections under the new law. Kurds are sceptical that these factions are trying to out- manoeuvre their coalition with the main Shia bloc and illicit support from Arab and Turkish governments to torpedo their efforts to gain control over the city.

With all sides dug in, it seems difficult to foresee a way out of this dismal tangle. Yet all sides will lose if they pursue single-mindedly ethnic and sectarian agendas that offer no peaceful solution. It is a good sign that all sides seem to agree on the need for dialogue, but unless a deliberative consensus-based solution is reached the trouble in "little Iraq" could prove explosive for the country as a whole.