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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Election Day was jubilant for Kurds returning to the oil-rich city. But if rivals question the vote, they might call in reinforcements.
Jan 31, 2005 | Hoshyar Darbandi made a quick trip to his hometown of Kirkuk this week to cast his vote. Leaving his wife and kids behind in Stockholm, Sweden, he may have the honor of being the Kurd who came the farthest to make it to the polls. Darbandi could have voted for the new Iraqi parliament from a safe distance in any number of European cities that allowed Iraqi exiles to vote, but he wanted to come home to vote in Sunday's local elections. To Kurds, who wins the local race in Kirkuk is as important as who eventually becomes prime minister in Baghdad. Maybe more: Most Kurds don't care if Baghdad continues slipping into an anarchic black hole. Kirkuk, they'd like to keep.
"We've never written our own history," said Darbandi, as he walked from a polling station at the end of Election Day. "It's always been forced on us." Darbandi walks comfortably through the crowd here, though his haircut, his boots and his new ski jacket give him away as a returned exile. Like hundreds of thousands of Kurds, he was driven out of this part of Iraq during Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaign in the 1980 and '90s. Darbandi fled to Iran in 1984 at age 22 and then was granted asylum in Sweden. Now he'd like to move his young children back to Iraq. But he doesn't call it Iraq. To him this is Kurdistan, and Kirkuk is the jewel in the crown.
Kirkuk is one of the spots where an Iraqi civil war is supposed to start. Analysts in Washington often neatly divide Iraq into a homogenous Shiite south, a de facto Kurdish state in the north and a troublesome Sunni wedge in the center. The idea has some merit. In many ways, Iraq makes more sense in three than in one. But as some sort of partition passes in and out of vogue with talking heads, Kirkuk remains a big bump in the road map.
Kurds say the city is their Jerusalem. A sizable Turkoman minority says Kirkuk has always been theirs. Arabs living here are terrified -- some rightly and some wrongly -- that they'll be punished for the Arabization campaign that Saddam waged here when he evicted or killed Kurds and gave their homes to poor Arabs from the south along with large cash payments.
Holding a census here to find out who is the real majority would probably unite the city briefly; everyone would criticize the findings before the open warfare began. But Sunday's voting may achieve the same result. And if some people consider the results foul when the final count is in, perhaps a week to 10 days from now, they may call in support from the outside. The Kurdish parties to the north have over 60,000 militiamen (and some women) to back up their claim. The Turkomans have an ethnic and possibly military link to the Turkish capital, Ankara. Some Turkomans and many Arabs are Shiite Muslims, with links to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani or the more militant Muqtada al-Sadr. And, of course, the Sunnis already have the sympathy of the insurgents.
What's amazing is that almost no one here struggling for power in Kirkuk mentions that the place is swimming in oil -- maybe a fifth of Iraq's massive reserves. Even putting that significant asset aside, people seem willing to fight for Kirkuk. Let's just hope they did their fighting at the polls.
Since the U.S. invasion, Kurds have been flocking to Kirkuk. One, Haybad Rostum, turned to her son when asked her age -- he said without much certainty that she's 56. She has borne 12 children and lived most of her life as a Kurd in Saddam's Iraq; it's no wonder she looks older. I met her this week in Kirkuk, but this is not her home. Until this month, she was living in Hawija, south and west of here.
Hawija wasn't part of the Kurdish autonomous zone under Saddam. Haybad says she and her family suffered then, but they knew how to follow the rules and stay alive under the Arab Baathists who controlled the city. But in the power vacuum left by the U.S. invasion, she says, the same old Baathists have taken over, and they blame the Kurds for helping the Americans. After months of threatening letters and graffiti, nine Kurds were assassinated in Hawija last month. One of them was Haybad's nephew. Haybad, as well as hundreds of other Kurdish families, picked up and left for Kirkuk.
After decades of fleeing or being forced from Kirkuk because of Saddam's ethnic cleansing, they've been coming back here these last two years as a place of refuge. Their return is bittersweet. I sat in Haybad's house, and as her sons and nephews slowly filled the room, another bit of irony hit me -- I realized I'd been here on the day Kirkuk fell in April 2003. This was an Arab neighborhood then, and I was interviewing Shiite Arabs who were all afraid Kurds were going to come back and commit a little reverse ethnic cleansing. It may not have been the same house, but Haybad and her sons have moved into a neighborhood the Kurds have taken over from fleeing Arabs. It's like musical chairs. When the Kurds try to declare an autonomous zone, Hawija may be left standing with the Arabs, but Kirkuk is going to be firmly seated in Kurdistan. The Kurdish politicians keep saying they have no intention of declaring independence. But at the same time, they sanctioned a referendum during Sunday's vote asking if Kurds would prefer to stay in Iraq. The result is a foregone conclusion.
What may have delivered Kirkuk to the Kurds had to do with refugees, but not those like Haybad. At the last minute, the Kurdish leadership managed to secure voting rights for about 100,000 returnees who don't have official residency. The Kurds see it as redressing the crimes of the past. But to the Arabs and Turkomans in town, it looks like stacking the voter rolls. The sometimes bombastic Turkoman Front representative in Kirkuk, Fowzi Akram, told me before that Election Day this "cheating" was making the Kurdish victory a certainty. Akram said that meant civil war is just around the corner. He sat in his office in the center of the city as his assistants loaded up their trucks with pamphlets and Turkoman fanfare.
