Image credit: New York Times Caption: A Kurdish woman and a girl bake bread at their makeshift home, a stadium in Kirkuk, Iraq.
The New York Times published an article today on the condition of Kurdish refugees in Kirkuk. Tragically, in contrast to many of Iraq's refugees, the refugees in Kirkuk are more a product of politics than they are of war or other forms of mayhem.
Kirkuk is a region that Saddam Hussein tried to "repopulate" with Arabs during the 1980s. It was the place where "Chemical Ali" Hasan al-Majid earned his name and reputation as a mass-murderer. Ever since then, the region has been a bone of contention within Iraq itself, and with neighboring Turkey as well:
The issue is further complicated by Turkey’s desire to safeguard Kirkuk’s Turkmen minority and its hostility to the notion of the Kurds gaining control of Kirkuk’s oil fields. Turkey fears this could embolden the Kurds to declare their own state, thereby encouraging Kurdish separatists in northeastern Turkey.
“No Iraqi government could ‘give’ Kirkuk to the Kurds and hope to survive, in view of broad popular opposition in Arab Iraq,” said the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prevent or resolve deadly conflicts. “The Kirkuk question could, therefore, trigger total deadlock, breakdown and violent conflict, just when the Bush administration hopes its security plan for Baghdad will yield political dividends.”
As Iraqis Vie for Kirkuk’s Oil, Kurds Are Pawns
The NYT article highlights the plight of Kurdish refugees who are now living in a football stadium in Kirkuk:
Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a startling sight.
On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq’s most lucrative oil reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren playing field.
There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have converted the dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
These homeless Kurds are here not for soccer but for politics. They are reluctant players in a future referendum to decide whether oil-rich Tamim Province in the north and its capital, Kirkuk, will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government or remain under administration by Baghdad.
As Iraqis Vie for Kirkuk’s Oil, Kurds Are Pawns
When they say "reluctant", they mean these people were forced from their homes, often by Kurdish leadership:
Hajji Walid Muhammad, 67, a taxi driver here, grumbled that after the 2003 invasion, the Kurdish authorities told a gathering of Kirkuk-born Kurds living nearby in Chamchamal, “Even if you own a small tent you have to go back to your own homeland.”
When asked what would have happened if he had refused, Mr. Muhammad said: “By God’s name, they would cut off our food basket and not pay us our salary and give us nothing else and force us to go back. They ordered us to go back.”
Najat Jaseem Muhammad also said that the authorities “encouraged” him to leave Chamchamal, where he had lived since 1997. He said he was happy to be back in the town of his birth, but not to be living in such conditions, without enough money to escape.
“They said: ‘If you do not return, we will lose Kirkuk. You are Kurdish and Kirkuk must return to the arms of Kurdistan,’” he said, standing in front of political graffiti on a stadium pillar.
“It was not a matter of being forced, but if anyone stayed over there they would not have been supplied with anything and they would have been oppressed,” he added. “They would have stopped my work.”
As Iraqis Vie for Kirkuk’s Oil, Kurds Are Pawns
Like many problems refugees face in Iraq, this one has as its root cause the disjointed and tribal nature of politics in Iraq. Our policies, along with other effects of the war, have amplified the differences between various groups there:
The invasion, the insurgency and America’s less than competent administration of post-war Iraq has caused crucial pre-exiting divisions in Iraqi society – and here I don’t mean merely Sunni-Shia or Kurd-Arab – but rather divisions of class, urban/rural and those that divide the conservative, religiously-minded from secular modernists to emerge in a rapid, explosive and uncontrolled manner. These differences had been suppressed by the authoritarian and divide-and-rule style of Baathist rule and ironically, by the UN sanctions that starved the countryside and impoverished Iraq’s middle class alike. One of the most significant outcomes of the explosive decompression of those strains of conflict is that the genie of radicalized Arab-Islamism, which had rested furtively at the margins of Arab society — al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad, in particular – is out of the proverbial bottle in a very big way.
Guest Editorial by Keith Watenpaugh
As Pat Lang elaborates:
I sympathize with those ... who would like to see a unitary state in Iraq that receives the meek submission of the various groups. In fact, that was never going to happen in Iraq. The state and the national identity were too tentative and fragile to survive the battering that we inflicted on it. There is a chance now of restoring national unity on the basis of bargaining (deal-making) and power sharing across ethno-sectarian and regional lines.
Ricks on the big question in Iraq
Unfortunately, it appears these refugees have little hope of returning to their homes any time soon.
UPDATE: I have tried to correct the link to the Watenpaugh speech, which did not work as originally posted. I don't know how to correct it properly, so I've included a relevant quote. You can click on the link and search for "Watenpaugh" to find the rest. You can also check Pat Lang's article in Foreign Policy for more on this subject.
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