Kirkuk Council Faces Big Challenge

Friday, 18 November, 2005

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Samah Samad

IWPR trainee-reporter

The new council in Taamim governorate, which includes the divided city of Kirkuk, is facing the difficult task of mending ethnic ties after a bitterly fought election.

Turkomans, Arabs and Christians in Kirkuk have denounced the local election results, which gave the Kurdish-led Kirkuk Brotherhood list 26 of the council’s 41 seats. Prior to the poll, the council’s membership was carefully balanced among the city’s rival ethnic groups.

The Kirkuk Brotherhood list was formed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, PUK, specifically for the Taamim Governorate election. The list of 12 parties included Arabs and Turkomans.

The Kurdish-run list was aided by a controversial decision from Iraq’s electoral commission that allowed more than 70,000 Kurds displaced by Saddam Hussein’s “Arabisation” policy to return to Kirkuk to vote. Many Arab and Turkomans said they would boycott the poll in protest.

The two Kurdish parties led another joint list that came in second in the National Assembly election, winning 75 seats in the 275-member parliament.

The January 30 poll has raised fears that the Kurds will use their newfound political power to make Kirkuk the capital of a future Kurdish state, throwing the city into ethnic turmoil. Arabs and Turkomans also lay claim to the oil-rich city.

Yawiz Omer Adil, head of the Kirkuk branch of the Turkoman Front, called the elections unfair. His party reported polling irregularities, such as ballot shortages and too few polling sites, to the electoral commission. However, election officials dismissed the claims.

Adil said the Turkoman Front opposes many of the key aims of the Brotherhood list, especially Kurdish desires to change the border of their autonomous zone to include Kirkuk.

“We don't agree with ethnic federalism, the kind that the Kurds want,” he said.

One of the Turkoman parties that participated in the Kurdish list said it is important for the different ethnic communities in Kirkuk to put aside their differences and recognise each other’s rights.

"Why should we erect a barrier between us?” said Adil Muhammed Salih al-Atraqchi, head of the Fraternity Turkoman Party. “We are all Iraqis."

Atraqchi said his party did not join the Iraqi Turkoman Front list because it stressed the differences between Turkoman and Kirkuk’s other ethnic groups.

"We call for fraternity with other nationalities,” he said. “These [ethnic] blocks do not serve us, especially in these circumstances.”

A Kirkuk police spokesman said he does not believe that the city’s ethnic communities will go to war over the election results.

“People here in this city have been through experiences and know that unity and tolerance are the only objectives that everybody wants,” said Captain Yadgar Shukir Abdullah, head of the joint operations centre in the Kirkuk Police Directorate.

Shukir predicts that the losing parties will form coalitions in the government to strengthen their positions and achieve their goals. He said the lack of post-election violence is a good omen.

“It was all because of the strong will of the people and their desire to form a fair and real government,” he said.

Rizgar Ali, a PUK candidate on the Kirkuk Brotherhood List, said he agrees that post-election tensions will soon pass. "The coalitions that want peace are more than the number of those who want the opposite," he said.

But he said the Kurds are committed to bringing Kirkuk into the Kurdish-controlled region and reversing the “Arabisation” of the city.

The term refers to the Iraqi government’s effort in the 1980s to forcibly remove Kurds and Turkomans from Kirkuk and replace them with Arabs. The move was an attempt by Saddam Hussein to gain more control over Kirkuk’s oil wealth.

Despite his list’s gains, Ali said voting in Kirkuk was not perfect, because many areas that were part of the city before Arabisation were not allowed to vote in the Taamim election.

Anwar Hamid Berqdar, head of the Turkoman Justice and Salvation Party, said his party will find peaceful ways to oppose Kurdish dominance over Kirkuk’s political affairs.

He said his party, which joined the Turkoman Front, will learn from its mistakes and try not to repeat them in the next election. Berqdar said he hopes the December ballot will be supervised by the United Nations and free of fraud and irregularities.

“This is not the first election and it won’t be the last one,” he said.

Samah Samad and Ameera Bakir Muhammed are IWPR trainees in Kirkuk.