Trouble looms for Iraq's Kirkuk oil province
KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) — The question of who will control Iraq's disputed oil province of Kirkuk is looming large as a UN-brokered deadline for a vote on its future approaches amid continuing ethnic and political tensions.
It is five years since US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein, who had tried to remake the area by driving out its Kurdish residents and bringing in Arabs, and the debate still rages as each side claims the territory belongs to them.
A referendum to decide the fate of the area was enshrined in the constitution adopted after the US-led forces seized control of Iraq. It was to have been held in December but was delayed for six months after rival groups were unable to agree a deal.
"In December, the question of Kirkuk was a ticking time bomb. The United Nations has stopped the clock," UN special envoy to Iraq Staffan de Mistura told AFP.
On paper, the factions are still at loggerheads and the issue threatens to explode into a new battlefield in the war-ravaged country, amid claims the United Nations has only postponed the problem.
"By rights, Kirkuk belongs to us," a foreign affairs official from the Kurdish autonomous regional government, Falah Mustafa Bakir, told AFP.
"If Kirkuk is important to others, it is because of the oil. But for the Kurds, it is first and foremost a question of justice," Bakir said. "Kirkuk is a symbol of the Kurdish oppression of the past."
The city is populated by an ever-growing number of Kurds, as well as by Arabs and Turkmen, many of whom arrived as part of Saddam's policy of forced Arabisation.
Since 2003, the Kurds have pumped huge investment into the city's political institutions and encouraged more ethnic Kurds to move to the region in an attempt to redress the demographic balance.
"It is not going to take three months to resolve this crisis, but years," said Ahmed Amid al-Obeidi, leader of an Arab group, the Kirkuk Iraqi Front.
"There is no solution in the framework of Article 140 (the clause of the constitution which set a December 2007 deadline for a referendum on the city's future). This is no longer valid."
Obeidi added that Arabs would never abandon Kirkuk or allow it to be handed over to autonomous Kurdish rule.
Turkmen community official Kanan Shakir Uzeyragal said that "in any case, none of the preconditions necessary for the establishment for the organisation of this consultation have been completed, nor the judgements over disputed land, or the census.
"Of the 40,000 contested cases of (land) ownership, only 10 percent have been resolved. And as for the census, it has not even been started."
Inclusion of Kirkuk in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq has been one of the most longstanding demands of Kurdish parties across the political spectrum.
But Hassan Turan, a Turkmen member of the Kirkuk provincial council, said: "In truth, the referendum is a dream. Nobody apart from the Kurds support this referendum, so why are they being so stubborn?
"The only solution is a political agreement involving a fair division of power between the communities at the heart of the local institutions," he said.
After ignoring the problem for some time, the Americans "seem to have now got the measure of the problem," a local analyst, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told AFP.
US Vice President Dick Cheney's recent visit to the seat of the Kurdish regional government in Arbil suggests it is likely the United States is "increasing pressure for a political agreement on the referendum," he added.
Turkish pressure on northern Iraq has also increased, with Turkish troops again crossing the border at the end of February to attack Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels.
In a sign of a shift in the Kurdish position, Bakir said recently that Kurds were ready to accept "a fair political solution" other than a referendum.
"A political agreement is possible, but we must get rid of this countdown to a referendum," Turan said.
In a bid to find a solution to the conflict, the United Nations has spoken to the various factions and promised a set of "new propositions."
"They have listened to us. Now everyone is waiting for their ideas," Obeidi said.
"Kirkuk is like a piece of meat from an old cow," he added. "It needs a long time to cook, and the UN have not even lit the fire under the stove."
