Kirkuk at heart of poll law deadlock

Baghdad: Iraqi politicians have been turning up their rhetoric over Kirkuk, the oil-rich city that both Kurds in the north and Arabs in the south want to control.

The dispute has caused a deadlock over the country's election law, threatening to delay Iraq's nationwide elections set for mid-January.

Any vote setback could, in turn, disrupt American plans to withdraw troops from Iraq, scheduled to ramp up after the vote.

"We are getting to a crisis," said Marina Ottoway, director of the Middle East Programme at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They have been trying for over a year to reach a compromise on Kirkuk."

"Now," she warns, "it is becoming a problem for the United States."

The immediate dispute centres on voting rolls listing who can vote in Kirkuk in the January national election. While many proposals have been discussed, Kurds have favoured using the 2009 voter registry, which likely reflects the Kurdish growth, while Arabs generally prefer the 2004 voter registry, when the Kurdish population was not so large. That has delayed the necessary deal on the election law.

Long term, money also plays a role. Because of the surrounding oil, whoever controls Kirkuk stands to benefit enormously.

The Kurdish-Arab dispute over Kirkuk is different from Iraq's main political dispute between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, which plays out more in the capital of Baghdad and surrounding areas.

The Sunni-Shiite split has less relevance in Kirkuk where both Kurds and Arabs are mostly Sunni Muslims.

There, the fear among Arabs — both Sunnis and Shiites — is that Kurds will gobble up all jobs and government benefits if Kirkuk joins Kurdistan.

As the election approaches, tensions have increased with Arab lawmakers saying Kirkuk is an Iraqi city and Kurdish lawmakers boycotting a parliament session last week over the issue.

Iraq's central government should have tried to resolve the underlying Kirkuk issue long before now, asserts Mohammad Ihsan, the former Minister of Disputed Territories, who is now in the Kurdistan regional government.

"They forget that without sorting out this issue, you cannot develop a serious partnership throughout the country," Ihsan said.

Speech

But a Turkomen lawmaker, Abbas Al Bayati, said Iraq's parliament has not given up hopes of a deal on the election law.

"Delaying the elections is a red line. Elections must not be postponed at any price."

The tensions over Kirkuk — already high — rose last week after Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, said in a speech: "We refuse to give Kirkuk a special status in the election".

The wording refers to an April United Nations report recommending giving Kirkuk such "special status" with oversight by both the near-autonomous Kurdish region and the central government in Baghdad. Kurds reject that.

The controversy over Barzani's words was further complicated, at least initially, by a mistranslation of his remarks on Iraqi state television, which inaccurately quoted him as saying he pledged to "annex" Kirkuk — a more hardline position.

A regional official with state-owned Iraqiya TV, Evan Nasser Hassan, said on Saturday the station made the translation error inadvertently when translating from Kurdish to Arabic.

The mistranslation aside, emotions run high.

Fawzi Akram, a legislator in radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Al Sadr's bloc, who listened to Barzani's speech in the original Kurdish, called his comments provocative.

"We must contain the situation, not make it more complicated," he said. "Kirkuk is an Iraqi city."