Don't take Kurds for granted, Iraq's Dy PM warns
Agence France-Presse
Baghdad, January 24, 2005
Kurdish nationalist Barham Saleh, a thin man, with an affable smile, sits in the Iraqi Government's halls of power.
That a Kurd, who champions his ethnicity, serves as Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister would have been unthinkable under jailed dictator Saddam Hussein.
"We are talking about a new political and social contract in Iraq. We cannot afford another eight decades of ethnic discrimination and ethnic cleaning in Iraq," Saleh of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) tells AFP, explaining his role in the national Government.
But mindful of Saddam's past campaign to gas and raze villages, men like Saleh have vowed 'never again' and want to make loud and clear they are not formally bound to Iraq's Arab majority.
"If they want us to be Iraqis, we have to be treated as full citizens of the state and not second-class citizens. Those days are over," Saleh says.
He advocates a federal system for Iraq, a principle already enshrined in the country's transitional constitution.
The Deputy Prime Minister embodies Iraq's messy experiment in democracy, brought on with the US invasion in 2003 that shattered the old order of Saddam Hussein and left the country's mosaic of Kurds and Shiites and Sunni Arabs to hammer out a new power structure.
He is both conciliatory and wary of the new co-habitation in Baghdad.
"If Iraq were to turn back towards dictatorship and apartheid and ethic cleansing, I think most Kurds would not feel safe in a country like that," he says.
Again and again, Saleh and other Kurdish leaders have aggressively pushed their case in Baghdad, playing brinkmanship politics to guarantee their new stature in Iraq where for decades they were the enemy.
The Kurds played hardball in December and January over the issue of the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds want to claim for their northern self-rule enclave.
Saleh and other leading lights of the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) threatened an election boycott over the Iraqi Government's failure to award the vote to those thousands of Kurds expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam.
But faced with growing Kurdish anger, the Iraqi Government finally buckled and allowed an estimated 100,00 displaced Kurds from Kirkuk to vote in the city, effectively handing power in the community to the Kurds.
"We believe Kirkuk is an integral part of the Kurdistan region. We have an abundance of historical and demographic documents and data that proves this point."
The Kurds believed their victory was long overdue and say it presages plans to reclaim land across Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Nineveh province, which were lost under Saddam's policy of expulsion.
Saleh wants to see lost territory taken back in the coming years and reincorporated into northern Kurdistan via legal means.
"Saddam has imposed that (frontier) line and pursued the most vile and violent ethnic cleansing campaign to affect the demographic characteristics of those territories. The Kurdish leadership has rightly accepted the legal process by which ethnic cleansing would be reversed."
Kurds hold the ministries of foreign affairs, displacement and migration, human rights and public works, and the post of minister of state for women and vice president. PUK officials warn they want a seat on Iraq's three- person presidency in the next Government.
Last summer, Kurdish officials bolted Baghdad until Saleh and others were reassured they would have heft in the interim Government.
The Kurds are expected to play a power broker role in the next parliament, serving as a bridge between religious Shiite legislators and secular Arabs.
A tribal society, long nurturing the dream of a Kurdish homeland stretching across the frontiers of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, the last decade, after the 1991 Gulf War, gave these tough mountain people a first taste of the independence denied to them for centuries.
Led by Massud Barzani, head of the KDP, and Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, the Kurds have put aside years of quarrels and internal rivalries as they navigate their way through post-Saddam Iraq.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.