Should the Kurds Have Autonomy/Independence?

I almost posted this at the original time of publication. Recent events make it a topic ripe for discussion.

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Kurds' Success
Makes It Harder
To Unify All Iraq

The North Is Seen as a Model
For Rest of the Nation --
But It Demands Autonomy
Fears of Radical Muslim State
By HUGH POPE and BILL SPINDLE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 19, 2004; Page A1

DOHUK, Iraq -- On a recent afternoon in this northern Iraqi city, children romped about a lawn and adults munched cake on land that was once a base for Saddam Hussein's military. The crowd had gathered for the grand opening of a new home-furnishings outlet in Dream City -- a megastore and amusement-park complex.

Entrepreneur Hamid Hajji Mashod rattled off his plans for the former military site: twin office towers, a hotel, a Coca-Cola bottling franchise. Standing amid carefully tended violets and marigolds, Mr. Mashod saw the blossoms symbolizing a new era for the region, home to most of Iraq's ethnic Kurdish minority. "Our homeland is like a flower," he said.

Unabashedly pro-American, secular and democratic, the Kurdish north is the one part of the country that's living up to the Bush administration's vision of postwar Iraq. The problem: The Kurdish population is showing little interest in converging with the rest of the country -- and its strong independent streak could hamper efforts to bring Iraq under one central government.


For more than a decade before the war, international sanctions aimed at Mr. Hussein insulated the rebellious northern region from the rest of the country. Since Mr. Hussein's ouster, the Kurds have pulled even closer together, and turmoil to the south has hardened their determination to set up bulwarks against Iraq's ethnic Arab majority.

"We're afraid of participating in a larger Iraq," says Fadil Omar, a Kurdish writer and physician. "We can't stand up for long against Arab culture."

The Kurdish leadership has vowed that the region will remain part of Iraq -- but only if it is granted autonomy from the central government. Meanwhile, popular sentiment for full independence appears to be rising. About 1.75 million Kurds -- half the population of the north -- have signed a petition demanding a referendum on Kurdish independence.

"We were forced to merge with Iraq 83 years ago," says Sherko Bekas, a leading poet and Kurdish nationalist who started the drive. "Now we want to be free in our own land, like other nations."

For the Kurds, full independence would bring great peril. Iraqi Kurdistan is surrounded by Turkey, Syria and Iran, all of which historically have been hostile to Kurdish independence -- as have the non-Kurdish populations in Iraq. After crushing a rebellion among its own restive Kurds in the 1990s, Turkey now could be rethinking its opposition to the aspirations of Iraqi Kurds. But a sudden move by Iraqi Kurds to grab the oilfields around the city of Kirkuk -- disputed territory the Turks have always vowed to never allow the Kurds to have -- could quickly reverse opinion in Turkey.

The north's assertiveness underscores how Iraq's three roughly defined regions are increasingly developing on their own paths. The south is under the sway of Shiite Muslim clerics, most of whom want some form of an Islamic state. The Sunni Muslim center, meanwhile, is increasingly influenced by members of the former regime, many of them Arab nationalists.

The divergence between northern Iraq and the rest of the country is already threatening to upset the transition to Iraqi sovereignty at the end of June. Kurds are clamoring for more control over a wider area, while leaders in the Shiite south and Sunni middle are threatening to try to revoke guarantees of autonomy for Kurds that are included in Iraq's interim constitution. Shiites and Sunnis have complained bitterly that the provision amounts to the first step in a plan to break up the country.

L. Paul Bremer, U.S. administrator for Iraq, has refused to consider any changes to the interim constitution. The U.S. government opposes Kurdish independence and has played down Kurdish claims to Kirkuk. U.S. officials say that once tensions recede in the south and a central government is established, it will be workable to integrate the north as an autonomous region.


But the longer an effective central government is delayed, the longer the country's three regions will continue on their diverging trajectories -- and the harder it will be to pull them back together. Some argue it may already be too late to keep the country intact, and the best option may be not to try.

"In terms of ethno-political conflict, it's the calm before the storm," says Gareth Stansfield, a Middle East expert at Britain's Exeter University. He argues that the least troubling U.S. strategy at this point would be to partition Iraq into two states, one Arab and the other Kurdish.

The Kurds are one of the world's largest peoples without a state, counting 25 million people whose mountainous homeland is split among Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. An ancient people whose ancestors were mentioned by Greek historian Xenophon, the Kurds have traditionally lived in valleys between remote mountains; it is speculated that the difficulties of communication enforced loyalties to individual tribes and prevented them from founding a state. In recent decades, especially in Turkey, the Kurds have been forced into towns by economic circumstances and military sweeps.

Over the centuries, the Kurds have made a living on the margins of other societies, doing jobs as diverse as herding and smuggling. Despite periods of tribal autonomy in remote valleys, their history is mostly a long run of betrayals, inter-Kurdish rivalries and short-lived uprisings against central governments. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslim, but they have a strong secular streak: They don't normally speak Arabic, the language of the Quran, and they have been oppressed by Arabs throughout their history. Some Iraqi Kurds are Shiite, others in Turkey are schismatic Shiites, and still others in Iraq and Turkey are Yezidis, a religion loosely related to mainstream monotheistic faiths.

There are estimated to be five million Kurds in Iraq, about one-fifth of the population. For decades official use of their language was banned by Baghdad, and Mr. Hussein's regime treated them brutally. Government forces leveled 4,500 Kurdish villages and killed as many as 5,000 Kurdish townspeople with poison gas in 1988.

After a 1991 uprising against Mr. Hussein in which Kurds played a major role, the U.S. and United Nations effectively established a protectorate in the north. Fighter jets kept Mr. Hussein's forces at bay, and under a U.N.-administered program the Kurds were guaranteed an allotment of Iraq's oil revenue.

The Kurds used their protective bubble -- and the influx of international aid -- to make remarkable strides. They built roads, schools and cellphone networks, and nurtured Kurdish culture in ways that were never allowed by the Arab regimes that have ruled Iraq.


Entrance gate to the Dream City amusement park and shopping center in Dohuk, Iraq


When U.S. forces arrived last year, Kurdish militiamen known as peshmerga fought alongside them. Freed of Mr. Hussein for good, the Kurds built on foundations they had already laid. A residential building boomlet is creating jobs and business for the home-furnishings store at Mr. Mashod's development. Salaries of public-sector employees and the local Kurdish militiamen have quadrupled under the new U.S.-backed government.

Once bitter rivals, the two Kurdish factions that dominate the north have reunited their parliament and plan to form a unified government. The last election was in 1992, but new democratic elections to be held by January will likely include a sizable number of women. The parliament already has voted to ignore a section of the interim constitution that Kurdish legislators viewed as limiting women's rights.

Kurdish unity has also intensified a cultural awakening. Until Baghdad compromised to end a long-running civil war in 1970, the Kurdish language was banned in schools and public places, and even after that it was discouraged. Now Badran Habib, a prominent publisher, says his company will bring 150 books to market this year, including Kurdish short stories and poetry and a book, in Kurdish, about the philosophers Heidegger and Descartes.

Mr. Habib is currently working on a definitive dictionary of the Kurdish language, and he supported a recently released Kurdish translation of the Quran. Demand for books in the Kurdish tongue surpasses what his company can produce. "We don't have enough printing presses," he says. "There's a huge growth in Kurdish culture."

Kurdish militiamen have exchanged their baggy native trousers and turbans for the uniform of the Iraqi national army, but many now sport a shoulder patch with their own Kurdish flag. Kurdish leaders serve on the U.S.-appointed national Iraqi Governing Council, but they use their influence largely to ensure Kurds can opt out of whatever system governs the rest of the country.

Kurdish leaders have simultaneously fanned nationalist sentiment and demanded autonomy, while acknowledging that an independent state is not possible for now. "Independence isn't a realistic approach," says Nechirwan Barzani, prime minister of the western half of Iraqi Kurdistan. "But it doesn't mean we should never have it. A Kurd has never felt like an Iraqi."

Kurds have reached out to the rest of Iraq at times, but those efforts sometimes haven't been well received. The Kurdish leadership in Baghdad recently dispatched a team of 18 doctors and medical personnel to the besieged Sunni Arab city of Fallujah to offer residents medicine and aid -- despite a long history of persecution at the hands of Sunni Arabs.

Insurgents briefly took the team hostage and accused Kurds of fighting alongside the Americans. In the end, the group was allowed to deliver its supplies, but stayed only three hours. "They said, 'Thank you very much, but we don't want Kurdish people, because they're with the enemy troops,' " says Farhad Barzinji, who led the medical team.

Professional associations in the north have also received a harsh welcome. The head of the Kurdistan Lawyers Union recently traveled to Baghdad for talks with a national lawyers organization. Kurdish lawyers groups had been part of the group until Saddam Hussein cut all official links with the north in 1992. Sherwan al-Haidari, head of the Kurdish group, wanted to offer a new partnership and share what the Kurds had learned about reform in the north.

The Baghdad group rebuffed what it regarded as a breakaway Kurdish organization. In April, the Baghdad group initiated a Justice Ministry order banning lawyers licensed by the Kurdistan group from appearing in court anywhere in Iraq.

Sitting in his office in the city of Irbil, Mr. al-Haidari waves a copy of the order in frustration. "I tell them, 'We'd like to join you,' and we get a response like this," he says. Still, "we're not angry. We're just going our own way, keeping an eye on our goal." On his desk sits the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan -- a yellow sun set between bands of red, white and green. His television set is tuned to a Kurdish channel, featuring a Kurdish singer playing folk songs on a traditional instrument.

The Kurds also have raised tensions with attempts to expand the area they control. With Mr. Hussein's regime gone, Kurdish organizations of all kinds -- women's groups, religious groups, civil-society proselytizers, the peshmerga militia -- have reached out to Kurds who were left outside the 1990s zone of protection. Kurds returned to homes from which Mr. Hussein's regime had chased them, demanding their property back.

Arab leaders in the city of Mosul, which contains a large Kurdish population just south of the region under Kurdish control, have complained that Kurdish leaders are encouraging this policy of "Kurdification." Kurds say they are just reversing decades of Saddam Hussein's policies of "Arabization."

No city has been more nettlesome than Kirkuk, also just south of the area under Kurdish control. Turkomans, Assyrian Christians, Arabs and Kurds all stake claims to the oil-rich city. In December, Kurdish demonstrators poured onto the street chanting, "Kirkuk, Kirkuk, the heart of Kurdistan." Responding with a protest of their own a week later, Arab and Turkoman demonstrators shouted, "Kirkuk, Kirkuk, an Iraqi city." At least five residents were killed in the latter demonstrations, and the city remains very tense, with bombings and killings of foreigners. Populations in Kirkuk and Mosul are now segregating themselves into dueling ethnic ghettos.

Despite their relative isolation, even the northern Kurds haven't escaped the violence plaguing the rest of Iraq. On Feb. 1, unidentified suicide bombers sneaked past security guards at two large celebrations for a Muslim holiday and killed more than 100 Kurds, dozens of them among the top leadership.

More recently, the Kurds have expressed concern about how Fallujah has fallen under the control of former members of Mr. Hussein's Arab-nationalist Baath Party. And they worry about the south of Iraq, where the Shiite-dominated population is following the lead of religious leaders hoping to establish a nation guided by an Islamic government.

"History, geography, politics have made us part of the country. Instead of erasing history, we've said, 'Let's try to make this work,' " says Barham Saleh, the Prime Minister of eastern Iraqi Kurdistan. But "if Iraq turns into an Islamic state, or an [Arab] nationalist state, we'll have no way to accept such a country."

Write to Hugh Pope at hugh.pope@wsj.com5 and Bill Spindle at bill.spindle@wsj.com6

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