KurdistanObserver.com

Kurdish aims for a post-election Iraq

Oxford Analytica

Forbes.com

Feb 10, 2005

Provisional results from last week’s elections indicate that the Kurdish list has secured about a quarter of the votes. This places them behind the Shia United Iraqi Alliance list, but ahead of any other list, including that of incumbent interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The elections will almost certainly result in the dominance of political parties loyal to the Shia religious establishment and the Kurdish nationalist leadership, with very limited Sunni Arab or secular Iraqi nationalist presence. With the Transitional National Assembly (TNA) tasked with drafting a permanent constitution, the political destiny of the country lies in Shia and Kurdish hands for the first time.

The Kurds have entered the post-Saddam era as the most politically and militarily organised of Iraq’s communities. As such, their key demand is to maintain the high levels of autonomy enjoyed during the 1990s and to augment them by existing in a federal Iraqi state, with the contested city of Kirkuk as the capital of the proposed Kurdistan region.

The Kurds, who number approximately 20% of Iraq’s population, managed to enshrine this federal position in the Transitional Administrative Law of March 2004, which included what came to be known as "the Kurdish veto", allowing two-thirds of the population of any three governorates to block the progression of the permanent constitution to be drafted following last week’s elections.

The Kurdish position, which also includes a demand that Iraq must be a secular state, ran into opposition from parties associated with the Shia religious establishment. Objections concerned the levels of autonomy demanded by the Kurds; whether Iraq should be federal or unitary in structure; the concession of the Kurdish veto; and the role of Islam in the state.

There is also perennial concern about the status of the city of Kirkuk. Keenly aware that control of the oil city would give the Kurds the wherewithal to secede from the state, the Shia (and Sunni Arab) parties have continued to oppose the attempts of the Kurds to include Kirkuk within their region’s boundary. This opposition is particularly strong since a considerable proportion of the Arab population settled in Kirkuk during Saddam Hussein’s Arabization policy were Shia, and the other ethnic group present in numbers in the city--the Turkmen--is also, predominantly, Shia.

Two elections occurred on Jan. 30. One was for the TNA, which would be tasked with writing the constitution. The second was a local one, selecting governorate assemblies, including one for Kirkuk governorate. In addition, the Kurds also held elections for their own Kurdistan National Assembly.

The national election was organized according to a system of proportional representation, with Iraq being classed as a single constituency. The simplicity of the arrangement, which reflected the immense problems of conducting an election, has also strengthened parties that identify themselves according to communal identity at the expense of smaller parties or even individuals. This factor, combined with a very low turnout in Sunni Arab areas and a high turnout in Kurdish areas, means that the Kurds are likely to enjoy greater representation in the TNA than their actual population numbers would imply. Whatever happens, the Kurds will have considerable power in the TNA to ensure that their position regarding federalism and secularism cannot be ignored.

The provisional results of the governorate election of Kirkuk are even more spectacular from a Kurdish perspective. Following a ruling by the Independent Electoral Commission allowing 72,000 returnee Kurds to vote in Kirkuk’s election, the Kurdish list secured a massive victory, with approximately two-thirds of the vote, giving it about 26 out of 41 seats in the governorate’s assembly.

With this majority, there is little now preventing the Kurdish parties from legitimately pursuing the incorporation of Kirkuk governorate into the Kurdistan region. The leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talabani, has adopted a reasonably conciliatory note and has emphasised the need to proceed cautiously. However, his counterpart in the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Masoud Barzani, has been keen to emphasise the Kurdish identity of Kirkuk, much to the concern of Ankara.

This difference of tone highlights the fact that, for all the united front the KDP and PUK put forward in the national elections, all is not well between them. Following successive bouts of interfactional fighting in the 1990s, which resulted in Iraqi Kurdistan effectively being partitioned between the two parties from 1994 onwards, there was always a question mark over whether the Kurds could project a unified front in the political negotiations in post-Saddam Iraq for long.

Until recently, they not only maintained this unity, but actually appeared to be working very closely together across a range of issues. However, during the elections, tensions have again resurfaced. Faced with what is probably the biggest prize for the two parties--the undisputed leadership of the Kurdish region--the two parties have been trading accusations of irregularities in the elections for the Kurdistan National Assembly (in which all parties competed independently) on Jan. 30, along with the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) and the Kurdistan Independent Democratic Solution Party.

It is noteworthy that the last conflict between the KDP and PUK started as a result of contested election results following the KNA elections of 1992. The difference this time is that the parties are as focused on relations with Baghdad as they are on the local rivalries, and thus have strong incentives to stay united. It is unlikely therefore that the KDP and PUK will fall out over this dispute, but it highlights the longer-term dangers resulting from the fact that the level of trust between these two parties remains, at best, tenuous.

The Kurds are now in a strong position to ensure that the new Iraqi constitution will be drafted with their interests in mind. This does not, however, guarantee that they will secure their demands for autonomy, as the Shia parties will form by far the largest component of the new TNA. As both the Kurdish and Shia groupings consider themselves to be victors in the elections, it is possible that neither will be willing to compromise on what they regard as key issues. For the Kurds, this is their demand that Kirkuk is recognised as the capital of a Kurdish autonomous region. For the Shia, it would probably be curtailing the levels of autonomy demanded by the Kurds, and an enhanced position for Islam within the constitution.

The coming months are likely to witness intense political activity and brinkmanship, possibly including Kurdish threats to secede and Shia threats to use their parliamentary majority. Negotiations will not be helped by the continuing Sunni Arab insurgency aimed principally against the institutions of the new Iraqi government and intended to provoke a Shia backlash. However, with a two thirds majority needed in the KNA to approve the Presidency Council, the Kurds are well placed to define their interests. Furthermore, although their interests and those of the Shia are in some cases opposed, there are forces encouraging compromise, including the fact that the Kurds will withdraw from the transition process if the TAL is not observed.