Saturday, January 03, 2004
More Ethnic Violence in Kirkuk
AP reported that in the northern, mainly Arab city of Mosul, on
Wednesday assailants kidnapped and killed Adel Jabar Abid Mustafa, a
Baathist whom Saddam had appointed dean of the faculty of political
science at Mosul University. Thursday morning his body was found; he
had been killed Mafia-style, two bullets in the head. There have been
a number of unsolved assassinations in Mosul lately, with some victims
having been anti-Baathists and others former Baathists. This pattern
suggests that underground gangs or clans are engaged in vendettas
about the past.
AP said that in Kirkuk on Thursday night, armed Arabs killed one Kurd
and wounded another as they strolled through an Arab quarter of the
city, according to Police Chief Gen. Turhan Youssef.
Az-Zaman reported that Shirku Shakir, a high police official in
Kirkuk, said that an Arab protest was held late Thursday that resulted
in an exchange of fire with the police, who took one wounded Arab
gunman prisoner. Shakir said another body was found in the vicinity of
the protest and the shoot-out, but declined to give his ethnicity.
Jalal Jawhar, local head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party,
said that two Arabs were killed and several wounded in this incident,
according to AP.
All of these incidents follow on the Kurdish parties' demand that
Kirkuk be incorporated into an expanded Kurdish ethnic enclave in the
north, which would enjoy substantial states' rights from a loose
federal government in Baghdad.
Thursday night, representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority
met with ethnic community leaders in Kirkuk and asked them to strive
to reduce tension (al-Zaman).
AP also noted that ' At Friday prayers, firebrand Shiite cleric
Muqdata al-Sadr spoke against any federal system, saying it "is meant
to divide the country according to their interests." He apparently was
referring to Kurdish interests when he spoke at Kufa mosque, just
outside the southern city of Najaf. ' The hostility to loose
federalism and the devotion to a strong central government is
characteristic of the major Shiite parties across the board.
Daniel Senor of the CPA dismissed the events in Kirkuk as "isolated
incidents," and said that reprisals against Baathists had been
relatively few. He pointed out that thousands of Fascists had been
killed in reprisals in Italy after World War II.
It is always a bad sign when political spokesmen try to schmooze
journalists into thinking that anything less than 20,000 deaths is not
significant. I certainly hope the press corps can see through that
ploy. But in addition, Senor's point does not even make any sense. The
events in Kirkuk were not reprisals against Baathists. They were
ethnic fighting over the future of the city. Historical analogies are
always misleading, but if you had to compare them to something, it
would to post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and the question is whether we
are dealing with Bratislava, Slovakia (peaceful splitting from the
Czech Republic)) or with Bosnia in spring of 1992. In the latter, a
multiethnic society was subsequently torn apart.
The reason the events in Kirkuk may be significant is that something
will have to be done with the city. Either it will be left as the
capital of at-Tamim Province and the 250,000 Arabs transplanted to it
will be allowed to stay in the homes Saddam stole from the Turkmen and
Kurds to give to them; or it will, as the Kurds demand, be transferred
to a new Kurdistan province that will unite in itself at-Tamim, Dahuk,
Arbil, Sulaimaniya, and Diyala (Diyala is a stretch). Either decision,
to leave things as they are or to change things, is going to make some
part of the population fighting mad, and they all have guns (a lot of
them seem to have rocket propelled grenades).
So the fact that there haven't been large scale reprisals against the
Arabs in Kirkuk is certainly positive, but the fact is that Kurds have
been streaming back into the city and it is early days. That ethnic
conflict came to a low boil as soon as the Kurds so much as mentioned
their plan to annex Kirkuk is a very bad sign for the future Iraqi
government's stability (the CPA will carefully avoid taking a decision
before July 1, so as not to risk provoking major violence on its
watch). Though, since the US plans to have an embassy in Baghdad with
3,000 personnel, even decisions of the new Iraqi government will in a
way be on its watch.
Other recent entries on this subject:
http://www.juancole.com/2004_01_01_juancole_archive.html#107320323488976347
http://www.juancole.com/2004_01_01_juancole_archive.html#107302852016798448
[Fwiw, his provisional estimate seems to be that Kirkuk is presently 1/3 Kurd, 1/3 Arab and 1/3 Turkmen; that it has a population of 730,000; and that roughly 100,000 Turkmen and Kurds were displaced by Saddam.]
[It is of course also the heart of the Northern oil industry and an agricultural entrepot.]