Vote Stirs Ethnic Rivalries in Kirkuk

Looming elections in this ancient city are igniting the kind of ethnic strife that many have long feared.

Militants kidnapped a local Kurdish politician two weeks ago, and seven Kurdish refugees were slain in a Sunni Arab neighborhood late last month. Last week, gunmen sprayed the main Turkmen political party headquarters with bullets. Campaign posters for the leading Arab slate have been torn down or crossed out with black paint.

On Saturday, a mortar round landed near the Kurdistan parliament building in Irbil shortly after leaders debated whether to boycott the Kirkuk local election.

“If this continues, we are headed for a civil war,” said Riad Sari Kehya, the political chief of the Iraqi Turkmen Front in Kirkuk.

Since the invasion of Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi leaders have feared that Kirkuk, with its evenly divided population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, was the most likely place for sectarian violence to erupt. To everyone’s surprise, the city, capital of Kirkuk province, remained relatively calm even as insurgent attacks rocked other towns.

Now, the Jan. 30 vote is testing the groups’ fragile coexistence.

Tensions escalated in recent weeks as Kurds began pushing to postpone local elections, saying any decision on the fate of the disputed province must wait until the return of tens of thousands of Kurds displaced during an ethnic cleansing campaign by Saddam Hussein.

“Saddam Hussein expelled the real citizens of Kirkuk,” said Gov. Abdulrahman Mustafa. “We can’t have elections until this is resolved.”

On Saturday, the Kurdistan parliament reached a tentative deal to participate in the vote, pending the registration of an additional 100,000 Kurdish voters.

Along with a 275-member transitional national assembly, Iraqis in each of the nation’s 18 provinces will choose regional councils. In addition, the three Kurdish provinces in the north are to elect a Kurdish parliament.

But now Kirkuk’s Turkmen and Arab leaders are threatening to pull out. They accuse Kurds, who currently hold most of the seats of power in the province, of attempting to steal the election.

All three groups claim to represent the majority of residents in the province.

“This is the Jerusalem of Iraq,” said Col. Lloyd Miles, the U.S. Army commander in charge of the province.

Census figures are of little use because Hussein not only replaced as many as 100,000 Kurds with Shiite Arabs from southern Iraq, he also forced many Turkmen and Kurds to identify themselves as Arab or face deportation. The discovery of a mass grave outside the city served as evidence of what happened to Kurds who refused to leave.

Rivalry over Kirkuk is fueled by oil -- the province sits atop one of the world’s largest known petroleum reserves, representing about 40% of Iraq’s supply.

“It’s all because of the oil,” said Adnan Ridha Baba, who manages Kirkuk’s census office. “All the parties are lying about their population numbers because they are driven by self- interest. It’s all a political game.”

Kurdish leaders, eager to absorb the province into their semiautonomous region, say they aim to reverse the effects of Hussein’s “Arabization” campaign.

Many Kurds view Kirkuk as a future capital and economic heart of a long-desired independent Kurdish state. After the U.S. invasion, Kurds flooded back to Kirkuk, with nearly 75,000 returning last summer, U.S. military officials estimate. Some sought to reclaim their old homes, but most lived in refugee camps scattered around the city’s edges, receiving financial assistance from the two major Kurdish parties, with promises of more to come.

At the same time, Kurds -- with U.S. support -- gained control of the governorship, a majority of seats on the city council and the top jobs in the police force and Iraqi national guard. Kurdish flags were raised around the city until U.S. officials forced them to come down.

“For 35 years we had to live with the Arabization of Kirkuk,” said Col. Burhan Tayeb, a Turkmen and the city’s police chief. “Now we are living with the Kurdization of Kirkuk. Their aim is to change the demographic map.”

The issue has become a political hot potato that neither the U.S. nor the interim Iraqi government wants to deal with. Under Article 58 of Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law, Kurds are allowed to return, and Arabs, if relocated, must be compensated. But the details and timing have not been spelled out. A commission created to handle resettlement claims remains unfunded and inactive. Not a single claim has been processed.

Arabs worry that returning Kurds will force out families who have lived in Kirkuk for more than 30 years, creating new refugees. Hundreds have fled in fear.

“They are threatening our existence in Kirkuk,” said Ghassan Muzhir Assi, head of the Arab Gathering and Tribes Council.

Sukayna Ghazi Said, whose family moved to Kirkuk from Basra in the early 1980s, worked in the city’s Customs and Smuggling Office for four years. When Kurds took over, they disbanded the office and left her without a job or even a desk.

“When I asked what I was supposed to do, they said, ‘You are from the old regime. Go back to Basra,’ ” she said.

Her mother fears the family will be forced to leave.

“We have committed no crime,” the mother said. “What’s wrong with us? We are good citizens. Aren’t we Iraqis?”

Despite such fears, efforts to repopulate Kirkuk with Kurds have largely failed. As winter approached and the new school season began, most of the refugee families returned to more comfortable, secure residences in Irbil or Sulaymaniya, leaving behind ghost camps of empty tents along the highway. Many refugees were disappointed when assistance never materialized. Others left when it became clear that the Iraqi government would not conduct an all-important census to measure the ethnic make-up of the province.

“The repopulation is not going as fast as the Kurds would like,” said Joost Hiltermann, Middle East Project director in Amman, Jordan, for the International Crisis Group. “In fact, the joke in Kirkuk is that the Kurds came to town for summer camp.”

Several thousand impoverished refugees, as many as 30,000 according to U.S. estimates, remain in the city’s sports stadium and other neighborhoods. But the dwindling numbers have caused Kurdish leaders to rethink their support for the Jan. 30 election.

“The Kurds made an assessment a few months ago and realized that they don’t have the numbers to win,” said Miles, the U.S. commander. “That’s when they started talking about boycotting.”

Earlier this month, all sides began discussing a compromise under which they would join forces on a united slate, in effect duplicating the current government council structure. The council has 13 Kurds, 10 Arabs, 10 Turkmen and seven Assyrian Christians. Since Kurds and Christians often vote together, the arrangement has created a virtual deadlock.

Negotiations on the united slate broke down over how many seats each side would receive.

The latest battle is over voter registration. Kurds are demanding that election officials register 100,000 additional Kurds to vote in the city, claiming their names were mistakenly or intentionally left off registration lists.

The missing voters include people like Taha Latif Hassan, who was expelled from Kirkuk in 1972 at age 20. He now lives in Sulaymaniya, where he is a well-known photographer. Though he has no plans to move back, he wants to register himself, his wife and their four grown sons, all born outside Kirkuk, to vote in his hometown.

“For 30 years there has always been the hope that some day we could go back,” Hassan said. “We have a lot of memories there. But I won’t go back to live without guarantees that I will not be expelled again and that my rights will be protected.” On election day, his family intends to make the one-hour drive to Kirkuk.

Turkmen and Arabs accuse the Kurds of artificially inflating their support by sending such “commuter voters.” They also accuse the Kurds of forging identification papers. According to census director Baba, a Turkmen, there are approximately 200,000 more food-ration cards issued in Kirkuk than the actual population supports.

“It’s not logical,” he said. “Some of them, about 25,000, are for actual refugees. We believe the rest are fake.” Kurdish party officials insist all the refugees and registered voters once lived in Kirkuk and that they have the documentation to prove it.

Over the weekend, Kurds announced that they’d reached a deal with the nation’s electoral commission to register the additional voters and accelerate the return of Kurds to Kirkuk.

Turkmen leaders promptly vowed to boycott the election.

“We will not accept the annexation of Kirkuk to Kurdistan,” said Kehya of the Turkmen Front.