Joost Hiltermann on Iraq’s Kurds

Joost Hiltermann has just published what has to be the very best assessment in the English language of the situation of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. Joost has followed Iraqi-Kurdish developments very closely for 20 years or more now. (A couple of years ago he published a whole book on Saddam’s 1988 use of chemical weapons against Halabja in 1988.)
In this latest article, he writes about the degree to which, after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the two big Kurdish parties were able to start, as he writes, “Kurdifying” Iraqi politics.
He writes:

the Kurds succeeded in “Kurdifying” Iraqi politics to the extent that no decision can be taken without Kurdish input or, more, without the threat of a Kurdish veto. This power was most visibly evident in the country’s interim constitution, the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law, which held that the country’s permanent constitution needed an absolute majority to succeed in a popular referendum and could be voted down by a two-thirds majority in a minimum of three governorates— code for the three Kurdish governorates. In other words, no constitution could be passed without the Kurds’ approval. The result was a constitution that reflected the interests of the parties that had won the January 2005 elections: the Kurds and ISCI (which headed the United Iraqi Alliance, a loose coalition of mostly Shi‘i parties and individuals). Because so much of Iraq’s parliamentary politics since 2005 has concerned constitutionally mandated legislation, the Kurds have left their imprint repeatedly and decisively. They have been helped by their internal discipline and meticulous preparation (especially compared to everybody else), as well as the unity of their strategic vision…

Their crowning achievement was Article 140 of the constitution, a clause that, though dangerously vague and open to interpretation, appeared to point the way toward the Kurds’ acquisition (they would say retrieval) of Kirkuk within two years. Article 140 set out an itinerary (“normalization,” census, then referendum) and a deadline (December 31, 2007) that favored the Kurds by mandating a mechanism—a plebiscite— that could only yield victory, given the Kurds’ expected demographic majority in Kirkuk following completion of the process known as normalization. The term refers to removal of Arabs settled in Kirkuk and return of Kurds expelled from the region by former regimes as part of their Arabization policy.
But while Article 140 evinces the Kurds’ strength in the new Iraq, it has also proved their fundamental and enduring weakness as a minority… While the Kurds are able to veto legislation that runs counter to their interests, they cannot force implementation of laws that serve them and that they drafted, such as Article 140. The December 2007 deadline passed without a referendum, or a census, or indeed without meaningful progress toward “normalization.” A number of Arab “newcomers” (wafidin) left Kirkuk already in 2003, ahead of the Kurds’ arrival, but no significant numbers have followed them since, despite the Kurds’ unremitting pressure and inducements in the form of promises of state-provided compensation for those who agree to pull up stakes. Worse, from a public relations point of view, is the painful reality that few Kirkuki Kurds have come back. While expressing a desire to return one day, they decry the absence of security, jobs and essential services; many have steady jobs in Erbil and Suleimaniya, where their children can go to school safely and the situation is stable…
Control over governance in Kirkuk, where the Kurds won a majority of provincial council seats in 2005 and have arrogated most senior administrative positions (governor, heads of directorates and security chiefs) since 2003, has allowed them to advance their dominance in all areas, but not to change Kirkuk’s status. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) pays—extra-territorially—the salaries of Kurdish civil servants in Kirkuk (many of whom arrived from Erbil and Suleimaniya in April 2003), but provides no reconstruction aid, which it sees, with some justification, as the federal government’s responsibility. The Baghdad government, however, has excelled in dithering; its record of governance is so poor that ministry officials often only meet their counterparts in the governorates thanks to US “helicopter diplomacy” ferrying them to and from the Green Zone. Funds remain stuck in the federal treasury; reconstruction occurs mostly by the grace of US military commanders, who are empowered to spend emergency funds directly or via provincial reconstruction teams attached to military units. In Kirkuk, the US has encouraged the equitable allocation of reconstruction funds by the provincial council, but a boycott by its Arab and Turkmen members has given rise to discrimination, or at least the perception thereof. Rather than convincing Arabs and Turkmen of their good will and potential as fair rulers if and when Kirkuk joins the Kurdistan region, the Kurdish parties have succeeded instead in persuading them of the opposite and in hardening their opposition to any change in Kirkuk’s status. Economically backward despite its great oil wealth, the place is profoundly unhappy and divided, its disposition in limbo with the referendum deadline’s lapse. Meanwhile, Kurdish leaders have precious little to show for their immersion in Baghdad politics, as their critics in Kurdistan are quick to point out. Ironically, after having whipped up elite support for Kirkuk’s incorporation into the Kurdistan region, the KRG faces intense criticism now that it has failed to accomplish its goal by the deadline. It is also coming under growing scrutiny for oil deals it signed in secret with international companies, and for corrupt practices more generally. Kurds do not understand why they have less electricity today than in the years of hardship in the early 1990s, and tend to blame political party nepotism and kickbacks rather than other factors.
Nevertheless, the Kurds have left an indelible mark on the architecture of post-2003 Iraqi politics. The regime’s removal led not to its replacement by a more democratic administration but to a fundamental overhaul of the state system: from a highly centralized state that a ruthless leader was able to turn into a vicious dictatorship to a state that threatens to be so completely decentralized as to become utterly ungovernable. While this transformation is not solely the Kurds’ doing, they have played a leading role in bringing it about…

He has some scathing criticism, too, of the role that Viceroy Bremer played in feeding the idea that Iraq’s different ethnic and sectarian groups “could not” live together. But he notes that the original concept of a tripartite division of Iraq– into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia subdivisions– that was relentlessly promoted by Bremer and all the other US viceroys, has not, in the end, been bought by the majority of the country’s ethnic Arabs.
He writes that after the victory of, in particular the fairly strongly Arab/Iraqi-nationalist Sadrist movement in the January 2005 election,

the Kurds may have thought that the safest way forward would be to eviscerate the state by encouraging additional regions to emerge and devolving as much power as possible to them. Moreover, Kurdistan’s existence and powers would find helpful justification in a quest by other Iraqi actors, such as ISCI, to attain regional status as well. The upshot has been an increasingly polarized debate about the degree of decentralization necessary to keep together a country that is coming apart at the seams.
It may be difficult to undo the damage, although a new, but very loose, coalition of Iraqi parties is trying. Spanning the ethno-sectarian divide, these parties have a nationalist undercurrent in common. They include the Sadrists, who have no interest in playing second fiddle to ISCI in a Shi‘i super-region in the oil-rich south when their main strength lies in Baghdad, an area with little oil; the Fadhila Party, a Shi‘i Islamist group strong in Basra; Iyad Allawi’s secular National Iraqi List; and the two main Sunni Arab lists, the religious Iraqi Consensus Front10 and secular Iraqi National Dialogue Front. Although these groups do not all wholeheartedly embrace federalism as a concept, they all have indicated they can live with some form of decentralization, disagreeing mostly about the degree. They share an intense distaste for the extreme decentralization advocated by ISCI and the Kurds, however, and they have started to push back against the latter’s drive to implement their vision of a decentralized Iraq via constitution-based legislation, including a law that sets out a mechanism for creating regions. This law squeaked through a vote in the Council of Representatives in October 2006 following a last-minute compromise that delayed its entry into force for 18 months.
That period has just passed but, tellingly, Baghdad has remained silent: There is no apparent movement to launch local initiatives in southern governorates, as ISCI has advocated. Instead, Iraqis appear preoccupied with provincial council elections that are supposed to take place by October 1 and whose outcome could transform politics. Nor have ISCI and the Kurds found any support among neighboring states, or in the world, for their particular brand of federalism. To the contrary, Iraq’s neighbors may prefer a relatively weak state but not one so incapacitated that it would fall to pieces, threatening the region. In sum, Iraq’s federalism remains in an unsteady holding pattern based on local and regional power balances in which neither domestic side can impose its own preferred scheme.
Saddam’s Kuwait gambit opened a window of opportunity for the Kurds. President George W. Bush widened it with his madcap adventure to transform the Middle East by using the US military as a vehicle for installing democracy in Iraq. Today it has started to close again. This is a result of the surge, Bush’s “hail Mary” bid to salvage both his undertaking and his legacy. To diffuse the centrifugal forces that are tearing the country apart, his administration has sought to recalibrate power in Iraq, curbing the ruling parties’ latitude and luring disaffected Sunni Arabs into the new order, all the while fighting “irreconcilable” extremists, such as fighters associated with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), as well as “Special Groups” loosely affiliated with the Sadr movement that are allegedly sponsored by Iran. In Baghdad and Anbar, this effort has taken the form of a struggle to absorb as many insurgents-turned-“concerned citizens” as possible into the state’s institutions and security forces, and find employment for the rest. In the so-called disputed territories, however, the move by Sunni tribal elements to establish anti-AQI Awakening councils (sahwat) is being resisted by the Kurdish parties, who see the councils as a direct challenge to their influence in these areas, which they seek to annex to Kurdistan.

About the Turkish air attacks on Kurdistan from december 2007 on, he writes:

Iraqi Kurds saw the Turkish pilots, and the politicians behind them, as having not only the PKK but also the KRG in their sights, and they responded with great anger, including over the realization that the US had publicly signed off on the attacks and apparently had supported them with actionable intelligence. To the Kurds, all this pointed toward a US reaffirmation of Iraq’s territorial integrity and a reminder that US support of the Kurds was contingent on their willingness to subscribe to the US agenda in Iraq.12
Of course, the Kurds do not claim to be preparing for secession, even as they assert at every turn that independence is in their hearts. They remain caught in their principal dilemmas: Should they push to incorporate Kirkuk by hook or by crook and thus risk alienating, angering and incurring reprisals from neighboring states such as Turkey, on whom they are economically dependent, and allies such as the US, who have protected them, because of the perception that what they really are doing is making a veiled bid for statehood? Or should they press for greater rights, powers and access to resources within current boundaries and political constraints and thereby risk facing another powerful central Iraqi state sometime in the future that could undo all that they have accomplished over the past two decades, and worse?
How can they escape geography? Some Kurdish maps may show a Kurdistan that reaches the Mediterranean, but no Iraqi Kurdish politician I know has fooled himself into believing that this is a realistic ambition. Even if the Kurdistan region wins the Kirkuk oilfields and/or develops the ones located inside its own territory, it will still need to pump the stuff out and sell it, and for the moment the only viable route leads through Turkey. If it wishes to diversify, it would have to make a deal with Syria as well, which takes just as low a view of Kurdish designs on Kirkuk as does Turkey (or, for that matter, Iran, which has made its opinion abundantly clear through statements uttered by its officials in public fora). The Kurds’ freedom of maneuver will depend on their good relations with their neighbors for a long time to come.

He also gives an interesting small reflection on the gas attack against Halabja having been really quite predictable by the Kurdish peshmerga:

while Saddam Hussein unequivocally was guilty of a crime against humanity by sending his bombers to drop their poisonous load on a Kurdish city, the Kurdish parties played a role that cannot be ignored— one that is actively being questioned by people in Halabja and beyond. It was the Kurdish parties who chose to ally themselves with Iran during a war that was existential for both countries, and it was they who guided the Iranian Revolutionary Guards into Iraqi territory to throw out Iraqi forces and liberate Halabja. However justified the wartime alliance may have been given the Iraqi regime’s extreme brutality, the peshmerga made a gamble, knowing full well what the regime was capable of doing, and would do, in reprisal against the defenseless townspeople. If there was anything surprising about the Halabja chemical attack, it was its extraordinary scale and ferocity, not that it took place or even that it involved gas, which the regime had been using against the Kurds for almost a year at that point.
The result was not only a civilian catastrophe but also the utter collapse of the Kurdish national movement, which gave up the fight and fled. The parties had clearly overreached and they suffered the consequences.

Hiltermann assesses that the Kurds are unlikely now to be able to succeed in their quest to win and hold onto control of Kirkuk. He concludes:

The better way forward for the Kurds in their legitimate quest for security may therefore lie in a push for the maximum that is realistically and consensually attainable at this historical juncture. Backed by the US they have an uncommon opportunity to strike deals that will be both beneficial and durable. These deals are unlikely to yield exclusive Kurdish control over Kirkuk. But they may allow the KRG to develop its own oil and gas fields under federal legislation that will draw the international investments the Kurds require to explore and develop their natural wealth. Such deals could also produce a boundary to the Kurdistan region that would be accepted by Iraq and neighboring states and as such could be recognized officially by the UN and major states, and thus could attract guarantees of inviolability.
In the end, the Kurds will have to choose between endemic strife and a compromise accord that could buy them peace for a generation or more.

Altogether, an extremely helpful contribution to our basis of knowledge and understanding.