As Kurds return to oil-rich city, a fragile detente
KIRKUK, (Southern Kurdistan) -- Hassan Mohammed Amin brought his seven children to a 200-square-yard patch of mud and set up home on the edge of this city in August as part of an ambitious attempt to reverse Saddam Hussein's ethnic cleansing.
A 50-year-old Kurd who spent more than a decade as a refugee, Amin joined thousands of Kurds who have returned to Kirkuk over the past 6 months as part of a concerted plan by the two major Kurdish parties to solidify control of the oil-rich province in northern Iraq and absorb it into the autonomous Kurdish region.
The returning Kurds are seeking to undo Hussein's policy of "Arabization," whereby hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Turkomen were driven from Kirkuk in the 1980s and replaced by Arabs brought in from Iraq's south.
Some Arabs have chafed at the "Kurdization" now occurring, and some worry that the tense calm could crumble, pushing Kirkuk into the maelstrom of violence engulfing much of Iraq.
Still, the steady peace that has prevailed in Kirkuk has confounded observers, including many American officials, who predicted an ethnic civil war in the city as a result of the Kurdish determination to resettle here. The Arabs seem resigned to some kind of accommodation with the returning Kurds, who know that their strength is growing relentlessly.
"The Arabs can do nothing to us now," Amin said on a recent evening, digging a drainage ditch outside the one-room mud-brick hovel he built for his wife and children. "We will stay here forever."
In effect, the fragile detente postpones the two issues that could destabilize the entire northern region: who controls the northern oil fields, and what will happen to the roughly 200,000 "imported Arabs," mostly Shi'ites from Iraq's south pushed or lured to Kirkuk by Hussein with a combination of force and financial incentives.
After more than 20 years of Hussein's wholesale resettling of ethnic groups in Kirkuk and the surrounding province -- intended to forge an Arab majority next to the lucrative northern oil fields -- ethnic politics have now conclusively shifted to a battle for control between Kurds and another ethnic group, the Turkomen.
"Before we had Saddam. Now we have the Kurdish parties. For us Turkomen, it is the same," said Ali Mehdi, the Iraqi Turkomen Front's representative on Kirkuk's Provincial Council. Some displaced Turkomen are returning to Kirkuk as well, but their numbers are small and the few thousand who return will not have a big demographic impact compared with the tens or hundreds of thousands of returning Kurds.
The Turkomen Front -- an umbrella group with close ties to Ankara -- wants to hold provincial elections in January, before more Kurds move to Kirkuk and shift the demographic balance conclusively in their favor.
Last month Kurdish leaders won a surprising accord from a range of Arab parties who agreed to seek the postponement of provincial elections in Kirkuk even as national elections proceed in January. The Kurdish parties argued that there should be no provincial elections as long as Kirkuk's population reflects the demographic engineering of Hussein. They want elections in Kirkuk only after the city's ethnic balance has been "normalized," although what that means in practice is a subject of dispute among Kurds, Turkomen, and Arabs.
There are no reliable population figures for Kirkuk. Kurds, Turkomen, and Arabs all have claimed majority status. The city's population is about 800,000, officials think, with about the same number living in surrounding villages that are part of Kirkuk Province.
Based on sampling done this summer, Western officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the Kirkuk issue said that Kurds seem to be the largest ethnic group, with a plurality slightly greater than both the Arab and Turkomen populations.
"There's a balance of unhappiness," one official said. "None of the groups feel they have enough power. They all talk to each other. They're all targets of violence."
Mehdi, the Turkomen official, accused the Kurds of bringing thousands of people into the city who never before lived in Kirkuk, pretending they were returning refugees to boost their share.
The Turkomen resigned in protest from the local government committee in charge of resettling displaced people. They had called for a full-fledged investigation to root out the "fake refugees," people returning to the city of Kirkuk who were not originally from there.
"During Saddam's time there was Arabization. Now there's Kurdization," Mehdi said. "The Kurds control everything, and they want to change Kirkuk's demography. The government refuses to verify the IDPs," or internally displaced people.
Accusations have been rife since August that Kurds were pulling strings to manipulate a provincial census. That month, tens of thousands of Kurds like Amin suddenly flooded the city, pitching tents in unused fields, along highways, and in a soccer stadium.
But when the school year began in September and it became clear no census would be taken, most of those displaced people went back where they came from, mostly to the Kurdish region northwest of Kirkuk where they live in comfortable homes built with funds from the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Hameen Shareef, 61, lives with five of her grown children in a well-constructed cement settlement on the outskirts of Sulaimaniya, the capital city of the eastern part of the autonomous Kurdish region. Three of her sons already have moved to the city of Kirkuk, although they had originally been evicted from a village outside the city limits. The others are awaiting the right moment to go to Kirkuk.
"We will make the decision to go back when all the services we need are available," Shareef said, citing water, electricity and schools. "The only reason we haven't returned is we don't want to live in tents."
Under the leadership of a Kurd-dominated provincial government, however, thousands of Kurds have returned to the city -- but even that number is in dispute. Kurdish leaders say about 30,000 have come to the city, while rival Turkomens claim as many as 200,000 have moved to Kirkuk in the last six months.
Only two neighborhoods have been officially approved for resettlement by the provincial government. But along the major highways leading into Kirkuk from the north and east, returning Kurds are building hundreds of homes.
An oil flare burns in the background of the bustling Laylan Road settlement and stadium where 2,000 refugees live in tents. A few kilometers away, the ancient citadel is visible rising over the city center. Its dun-colored medieval walls housed a bustling multiethnic settlement until Hussein emptied it of its inhabitants. Now, the abandoned fortress faces a hilly cemetery with miles of white and green gravestones, and the expanding settlements of Kurdish returnees.
Ultimately, the Kurds want to secure the support of Iraq's national government in Baghdad for a negotiated settlement in Kirkuk. That requires finding a solution for the roughly 200,000 "Arabization Arabs" in the city, and control of the vast oil wealth on the plain just east of the city.
Kurds and Turkomen agree that the Arabs who came into the city beginning in the 1980s should be paid compensation to return to their original hometowns. But they do not say what should happen to Arabs who refuse to leave.
Only the "original Arabs," whose families hail from Kirkuk, have organized political representation in the US-appointed provincial government.
The question of Kirkuk's Arabs might end up being a resolved as part of a bigger deal over the fate of the city's oil. For now, the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad controls 10,000 jobs and the bulk of the area's economy through the North Oil Co.
At least six oil wells outside the city were on fire at the beginning of December, and the North Oil Co. hadn't decided who to hire to put them out (only a few specialized contractors, most of them American, can put out oil well fires). Insurgents have stepped up attacks against infrastructure, targeting critical parts of the oil company, like gas-oil separation plants, in addition to pipelines.
Long the exclusive province of Arabs, the company has added several hundred Kurds to its workforce, according to its director general, Adil M. Al Qazzaz.
The company has its own compound -- a gated city on the edge of Kirkuk -- and thousands of housing units for its workers. "Our dependence on Kirkuk is limited," Qazzaz said.
Some Iraqi leaders have privately bandied about the idea of letting the city of Kirkuk join the autonomous Kurdish region, if the oil fields remain under the control of the central government in Baghdad.
For the people of Kirkuk, however, the city's ethnic composition is the paramount question.
With so many outsiders moving to the city over the last decades in various ethnic gerrymandering campaigns, some Kirkuk natives want all of them to leave -- imported Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen alike.
"Only the people originally from Kirkuk should stay," said a 24-year-old Arab furniture salesman named Khalid Hussein.
"For now, it's peaceful here. I hope it stays that way."