Printer-friendly VersionBy Salah Bayaziddi
The Kurdish Globe
"?There are huge obstacles on the Kurds' way to repeating the same victory as they did four years ago; however, they should learn from their mistakes, mobilize their power, and stay away from the factional division."
When the result of Iraq's Parliamentary elections in 2005 were announced, it seemed that the Kurdistan Alliance had gained a tremendous victory at that time by adapting representative democracy and a promising federal system the political horizon of Iraq would change for years to come. This new political atmosphere was viewed as a great opportunity for the Kurds to make their historical case at the highest political level, and with the majority of Sunni Arabs staying away from the political process and boycotting the election, they emerged as the so-called the "King Makers" of Iraq. The Kurds achieved this new political position mostly because they were the most ethno-sectarian voting bloc in Iraq. Therefore, the Kurdistan Alliance had emerged as a key component in the creation of both the governments of Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nuri al-Maliki.
After the Iraqis went to the polls in 2005, they elected the first Parliament, which was formed under the country's new Constitution. For most Iraqis, especially for the Kurds, this period was seen as a new era into which they put a great amount of faith and hope, and a new beginning for a voluntary union with the rest of Iraq. Therefore, for the Kurds there was almost no question to ask about whom they should to vote for. The Kurdistan Alliance, as was expected, swept up most of the Kurdish vote as it did a year earlier when Iraq elected the outgoing interim Parliament. At the time, there was no doubt that the victorious Kurdish bloc would use its seats in Parliament to press a wide range of demands that still remained unresolved.
Among the major issues that the new Parliament was facing and the Kurds were waiting to resolve once for all were how to ensure the Kurds received a fair and larger share of the country's oil income; the budget of the Kurdish military forces (both Peshmarga forces and the national border guards); and the status of Kirkuk and other Kurdish territories, which still was under the central government authority and which the Kurds wanted to include in their autonomous region. But the most emotional and historical questions for the Kurds was would the new Parliament allow Kurds to regain their land and would those who had been forced out of their demographic realities in the region be able to return to their original places? Indeed, in the face of "Arabization" policies since the late 1950s and then more systematically in the 1970s and the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were forced to leave their homeland--some took refuge in mountains, others forcefully ended up in camps in inhospitable places, and close to 200,000 during the campaigns of Anfal (Kurdish Holocaust) in the late 1980s disappeared forever. Also, Arabs from southern and central Iraq were brought up to replace Kurds and occupied their lands.
The most important task for the powerful Kurdish bloc in the new Iraqi Parliament in 2005 was to protect and also materialize what the Kurds had gained under Article 58 of Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) and later in Article 140 of Iraq's permanent Constitution. The other important task included the Kurds' insistence on the issue of federalism, which was aimed to create federal regions each with its own regional government. Article 117 of the Constitution also allowed the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), with the power to amend the application of national laws not specifically under national government purview, to maintain internal security and to establish political representatives abroad.
As the Kurdish representatives prepared to attend the first democratically elected Parliament of Iraq's modern history, they aimed to press their cause in Baghdad and it seemed there was no doubt that they would face the difficult question of just how much leverage they actually had over their compatriots in the new post-Saddam Iraq. However, the Kurds were hoping the new political elites and this new elected National Assembly of Iraq, especially its Shi'a Arabs (two major political parties of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party) allies, whom for many years had used Kurdistan as a safe haven, would take a much different path from that of the previous regimes of Iraq and respect their long struggle for freedom and national rights.
The Kurds generally have viewed participation in post-Saddam politics in Baghdad, especially after the first elected Parliament of 2005, as enhancing Kurdish interests. In the four-year government selected in April-May 2006, the Kurdistan Alliance, which had emerged as one of the strongest political blocs in Parliament, received high-key positions in the newly elected government of Ibrahim al-Jaafari Nouri and later in the government of Nuri al-Maliki. Mr. Jalal Talabani was selected as president, Mr. Hoshyar Zebari as foreign minister, and Dr. Barham Salih became one of two deputies of prime minister (until he became the new prime minister of the sixth Cabinet of the KRG). Indeed, the Kurds, whom were holding almost as high as 21% of the seats on the National Assembly, were hoping that this full participation in Iraqi governments would give them an equal footing with Shi'a and Sunni Arabs.
During the last four year, the budgetary issue has been one of the major sources of tension between the KRG and the central government. Every year, in the Iraqi budget deliberations, the new elites in Baghdad have unsuccessfully tried to reduce the revenue share for the Kurds from 17% of the national budget to 13%. No doubt, this contentious problem has taken lots of energy from both sides, and it seems that the Iraqi Arabs are pretending that they have forgotten that a major part of national revenue is coming from the Kurds' oil.
The Kurdish leadership calls Kirkuk the heart of Kurdistan or their Jerusalem, and since the removal of Saddam's regime from power, they have aimed to set up a process to reintegrate Kirkuk and other Kurdish territories into the KRG by peaceful and legal means. Article 58 of TAL in 2004, and later Article 140 of the Iraq's permanent Constitution in 2005, called for normalization, a census, and a referendum on the fate of Kirkuk by December 31, 2007. But neither a census nor a referendum has been completed because of unresolved disputes between the Kurds and the two Shi'a Arab governments. 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.
Another unresolved dispute between the KRG and the central government has been the budget of the Kurdish military forces. Article 117 of the Iraqi Constitution has permitted the Kurds to maintain internal security forces. The Peshmerga force and the Border Guards are legal security forces in the KRG, and some of the Kurdish military unites have joined the Iraqi army and are serving different parts of country such as Mosul and surrounding areas, in the Baghdad "troop surge," and in spring 2008 participated in the crackdown on Shi'a militia in the southern city of Basra. While it is constitutionally legal, the Iraqi government has promised the Kurdish military forces' salaries to be paid out of national revenues, but this issue also has been unresolved and continues to be another source of tension between two sides.
The debate of a power-sharing system and federalism in Iraq is certainly to be highly contentious and will determine the future of this country. While the Kurdish leadership aimed to fully participate in the political process of Iraq, aligned with two major Shi'a political parties, and also supported Nouri al-Maliki to become prime minister in 2006, at the end it turned out that he was also dreaming about a strong and centralized government in Baghdad. Maliki, same as previous elites in the modern history of Iraq, is also trying to monopolize power and is taking away most of the political and economic powers from the regions (especially the KRG), which is totally opposite of his previous support for the federal system in Iraq.
The dispute over the election law of the upcoming Parliamentary election in 2010 among the three main ethnic groups (Kurds, Shi'a, and Sunni) has emerged as one of the major obstacles to continuation of the power-sharing system in Iraq. At the beginning, two major issues that delayed the approval of the election law were disagreement about the voter rolls in the city of Kirkuk and whether to hold elections on an open or closed list system. The dispute got worse when it disclosed that among the extra 48 seats to be added (Iraqi Parliament seats will increase from the 275 to 325), only three are being allocated to the KRG while 12 seats will be added to Ninewa province. Because voter rolls have been based on information released based on food-ration distribution of the Ministry of Trade, the increased population of the Kurdish provinces reported fewer than 3% while some regions were reported as high as over 60%. Approval of an election law for 2010 almost failed, owing to the convergence of two problems: threatening of the Kurds to boycott the elections and vetoing of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. It was only after U.S. and U.N. pressure that the way was paved by Parliament for the new law passed. Three Kurdish provinces will have 41 seats plus two more seats for religious minorities, which will total 43. Hashimi also back down from the second round of his vetoing, and it seems that he is thrilled by the result.
Four-years of experience of the first democratically elected Iraqi Parliament appeared as a major battleground between the Kurds, who aimed to use legal and peaceful ways to achieve their national rights, and new elites in Baghdad, who-the same as previous regimes--were resisting that. These policies are included deliberate acts of delaying and sometimes denying the process of Article 140, weakening the power-sharing of a federative system, trying to create a strong and centralized system, and all these wrong policies will endanger the future of Iraq. As for the Kurds, they appeared as the King Makers following the first parliamentary election in 2005, and with the boycotting of elections by Sunni Arabs, they achieved a tremendous political victory. As we analyzed, there are huge obstacles on the Kurds' way to repeating the same victory as they did four years ago; however, they should learn from their mistakes, mobilize their power, and stay away from the factional division.