Kirkuk: the heartland of Kurdistan

  Summary: The ancient city of Kirkuk is one of the oldest sites of continuous occupation in the region.

It sits on archaeological remains that are 5,000 years old. Because of the strategic and geographic location of the city, Kirkuk had been the battleground of various empires, including the Mede Empire (the Kurdish ancestors) who controlled the city around the 7th or the 6th century BC. In the medieval era, Kirkuk was part of the ancient Wilayah of Sharazor, which had significant importance to Kurdistan's economy. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the colonial powers divided Kurdistan, and then the Wilayah of Mosul (which the region of Kirkuk was a part) came under the British protectorate. At the beginning, the British had a plan to create a Kurdish state under their mandate and control all its natural resources. In 1921, the British estimated the population of Kirkuk to be 75,000 Kurds, 35,000 Turkmen, 10,000 Arabs, 1,400 Jews, and 600 Chaldeans. A Committee of the League of Nations, which visited the Wilayah of Mosul in 1925 todetermine its future, estimated that the Kurds in Kirkuk made up 63% of the population, the Turkmen 19%, and the Arabs 18%. The British colonial power that hid the potential of the region for its oil exploration from the French was completely aware of the economic importance of Kirkuk and surrounding areas. Finally, the artificial state of Iraq was created from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire and parts of the Kurdish region including Kirkuk were forcefully annexed to that in 1921. The discovery in 1927 of vast quantities of oil by the British explorers in Kirkuk marked the turning point in the modern history of the Kurds.Since the creation of modern state of Iraq, the Kirkuk region, rich in its oil fields and farms, has been one of the principal obstacles in finding a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question. All the Iraqi governments without any exception have tried to deny the historical and legal rights of the Kurds over their ancient city. For more than 80 years the oil fields of Kirkuk have been brought into use by the Iraqi regimes; these fields used to produce almost half of all Iraqi oil exports. In order to make sure it would stay like this, since the early stages of the new state of Iraq and particularly from 1963 onward, there have been continuous attempts by various Iraqi governments to transform the ethnic make-up of Kirkuk and its surrounding regions. There is no doubt that the vast amount of wealth from the oil fields of Kirkuk and surrounding areas has brought upon the Kurds nothing except misery, displacement, and genocide. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Iraqi governments--while aiming to grab more land from the Kurds--destroyed over 4,000 Kurdish villages. As Denis Natali, on page 58 of her book "The Kurds and the states: evolving the national identity in Iraq, Turkey and Iran," pointed out: "As the Iraqi state petrolized, the political elite started to ethnicize essential oil-rich Kurdish territories. Iraqi officials constructed a series of homes called the Arab Circle around the Kurdish regions in Kirkuk, deported Kurds from their homes, granted land deeds only to Arabs, and gave Kurdish localities Arabic names." During the 1960s, the money from the oil gave the central government a new type of power never before realized, and it was the early stages of full-scale state repression against the Kurds in the years to come. Indeed, the growing oil industry brought with it not only economic developments by a rapidly growing enterprise, but also the need for the state to secure the resource from any possible regional or internal threat.For the wider Middle Eastern region, the future of Kirkuk and indeed other disputed Kurdish territories in Iraq is of crucial importance.

During all these years, the Iraqi governments have claimed their willingness to recognize the legitimacy of Kurdish national aspirations, but they have never kept their promises. The Autonomy Agreement of March 11, 1979, recognized the Kurdish political and cultural rights; however, it came short when it came to the judgment on the territorial extent of Kurdistan, especially the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding oilfields. The Ba'ath Regime claimed that a new census would determine the status of Kirkuk and other oil-rich Kurdish territories. Kurds were sure that such a census would have proven a Kurdish majority in all of these areas that the regime had denied to recognize as a part of future autonomous Kurdistan.

But such a census never was held, and the legendary Kurdish leader, Mustafa Barzani, insisted on the inclusion of the Kirkuk oilfields to any autonomous agreement. In line with this argument, the author of an article named "Factual Accuracy Is Disputed" said that "Baghdad interpreted this as a virtual declaration of war, and, in March 1974, unilaterally decreed an autonomy statute. The new statute was a far cry from the 1970 Manifesto, and its definition of the Kurdish autonomous area explicitly excluded the oil-rich areas of Kirkuk, Khanaqin, and Shingal. In tandem with the 1970-74 autonomy process, the Iraqi regime carried out a comprehensive administrative reform in which the country's 16 provinces, or governorates, were renamed, and in some cases had their boundaries altered. The old province of Kirkuk was split in half. The area around the city itself was named Al-Ta'mim (nationalization), and its boundaries were redrawn to give an Arab majority." From then on, securing the oilfields of Kirkuk and surrounding areas continued behind policies of Arabicizing, and every subsequent Iraqi government followed that pattern, including the mass deportation of the Kurdish people from their ancestors' lands that was ordered by Saddam's regime from the late 1970s on. By the mid-1970s, the brutal A1/2Arabizatione campaigns of the Ba'ath Regime that seized power in 1968 embarked on a plan to alter the demographic makeup of the Kurdish city of Kirkuk and surrounding areas.

This inhumane process was based on a concerted campaign that involved one of the most massive relocations of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish families from the oil-rich regions of Kirkuk and other areas, transforming them to purpose-built resettlement camps. Meanwhile, the Iraqi regime resettled thousands of Arab families (Shia Arabs from the south, and some Sunni populations from the center) in the Kurds' place in an attempt either to create the security buffer zone from the northern governorates or to simply increase Arab presence in certain areas. During the late 1980s, the Ba'ath government used chemical weapons against the Kurds and then started the brutal Anfal (genocide of the Kurdish people) campaigns, which was the final attempt to finish once and for all the Kurdish people from the Kirkuk region and the surrounding areas. These forced displacement policies of the Kurdish families continued during most of the 1990s until the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003. According to Human Right Watch, from the 1991 Gulf War until 2003, the former Iraqi government systematically expelled an estimated 120,000 Kurds and some Turkmen and Assyrians from Kirkuk and other towns and villages in this oil-rich region.After the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003, thousands of displaced Kurdish families and others returned to Kirkuk and other Arabicized regions to reclaim their homes and lands, which were and are occupied by Arabs from central and southern Iraq. While the Kurds have all legal and historical claims on Kirkuk as their ancestral homeland, they patiently have avoided taking back the city through violence and extreme measures. However, the Kurds have made clear to everyone that Kirkuk is everything to them. Therefore, as one of the main victims of Saddam Hussein's Arabization efforts, Kirkuk has come to symbolize the injustice the Kurds suffered at his hands-and its annexation to the KRG is the only way to remedy it. Article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law, which was considered the Constitution of Iraq that dissolved the Iraqi Governing Council, states in part: "The Iraqi Transitional Government shall act expeditious measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime's practice in the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk, by deporting and expelling from their place of residence and forcing migration in and out of the region." (This is from the same article mentioned above, "Factual Accuracy Is Disputed.")The Kurds patiently witnessed that Article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law was replaced with Iraq's 2005 Constitution, including a provision, Article 140, to resolve these competing claims. Article 140 consists of three steps: 1) Normalization: the return of Kurds and other residents of Kirkuk displaced by the Arabization campaigns; 2) census to determine the make-up of the province's population; 3) a referendum to determine Kirkuk's status. This process was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007, but neither a census nor a referendum has been completed because of unresolved disputes between Iraq's Arabs and Kurds. Rather, the government postponed the deadline by six months to June 2008, and then the United Nations attempted to broker a solution outside the Article 140 framework, but the final result hasn't been disclosed yet. Today, the dispute over Kirkuk has spilled over into every corner of national politics, and it seems that it is getting worse day by day.

The new electoral law for new elections, which will be held in January of next year, took weeks of debate among lawmakers, and it was only after U.S., UN, and regional power pressure that the way was paved by Parliament for the new law to be passed. By upholding the implementation of Article 140, the future of Iraq is moving toward an uncertain future- and no doubt that those who are resisting to accept the new Iraq and power-sharing with the Kurds are the main factors in breaking up this country.

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