In the rest of Iraq, by contrast, nearly a thousand civilians and insurgents have been killed in the same period, along with more than 70 American soldiers. There are no American forces in Iraqi Kurdistan, bar a handful guarding a small American diplomatic compound outside Erbil. The only sizeable foreign military presence is a South Korean force of around 1,200, which spends much of its time helping with construction and IT. In short, Iraqi Kurdistan is a haven of peace in a sea of turmoil.
Travellers arriving at Erbil airport jostle with Lebanese bankers, Norwegian oilmen and Dubai traders sniffing for business; most now give bomb-ridden Baghdad, 250 miles (400km) to the south, a wide berth. At the eight or nine security checkpoints through which you pass on the road from Erbil to Sulaymaniyah, the two main cities of Iraq's Kurdistan Region, as international documents officially call it, you never spot the name of Iraq on a military or police badge.
Arabic is used hardly at all; few Kurds under 25 understand more than a smattering of it. Schools are starting to teach English as much as Arabic as a second language. Increasingly, you are expected to call Erbil by its Kurdish name, Hawler (pronounced, roughly, “How-lair”). Above all, the Iraqi flag, in a region where flags matter mightily, flutters nowhere. It has no place at the airport or over any official building, such as the Kurds' lively parliament.
The issue of maps (above) is just as toxic and tricky. Where, indeed, are the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan (let alone those of the parts of Turkey, Iran and Syria, where another 21m-plus Kurds reside, alongside 4.6m Iraqi ones)? The Iraqi Kurds' standard map that hangs nowadays on ministry walls, in restaurants and for sale in kiosks shows Iraqi Kurdistan stretching a lot further than the area currently under the Kurds' control.
It sweeps in an arc from Sinjar and Zakho, in the north-west, near the border with Turkey, brushes Mosul's once largely Kurdish east side, then runs down the east bank of the river Tigris, taking in the whole of the contested province of Kirkuk (which Arab maps call Tamim), then runs on along the Hamrin mountains north-east of Baghdad, all the way down to a sliver of land east of the Iraqi capital, abutting the Iranian border near the town of Badreh.Even the most acquisitively nationalist Kurds do not take this maximal map seriously. For one thing, some of it is inhabited predominantly by Arabs ��' who would not be trusted in Kurdistan. But most Kurds do demand fat chunks of extra territory, especially but not only in Kirkuk province, which they were deprived of by Saddam when he Arabised Kurdish lands by expelling Kurds and bringing in Arab settlers from Iraq's south and centre.
It is hard to say exactly where Kurdish influence or control now extends, though a “green line” has roughly demarcated their zone since the end of the first Gulf war in 1991, giving Kurds an area in which they could safely govern themselves. But after the American invasion of 2003 they extended their zone of influence, marked by their own checkpoints (technically manned by the Iraqi army but actually by Kurdish units of it), in predominantly Kurdish areas west and south of the green line, which has become blurred and sporadically shifts.
The Iraqi Kurds' standard map tactfully omits to paint the Greater Kurdistan where their ethnic brethren predominate in neighbouring Turkey (14m of them), Iran (some 6m) and Syria (1m). It certainly does not lay claim, as dreamers of a unified Greater Kurdistan do, to a fantastical spur of land that would jut across south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria to reach the Mediterranean, plus another tongue of territory stretching south-eastwards to let Kurds dip their toes in the Persian Gulf beyond Basra. That would be going too far.
But for every Iraqi Kurd, Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution that was endorsed in an Iraq-wide referendum in late 2005 is a national mantra repeated in almost every political conversation. That article provides for a further referendum, following a census and a supposedly voluntary exchange of populations known optimistically as “normalisation”, to determine whether people in Kirkuk province “and other disputed territories” want to stay as part of the Arab-ruled part of Iraq or join Kurdistan or perhaps, in the case of Kirkuk, live in a specially administered region.
That census, due to have been completed by the end of July, has barely begun. Most Kurdish politicians still insist publicly that the December 31st deadline for holding the referendum will, as the constitution says, be met. In private, most admit it will not. What they dread most is an open-ended postponement which may, they fear, let Kirkuk, with some 5% of the world's oil reserves, slip out of their grasp.
Nor has it been decided just what questions would be asked, nor whether the people's wishes would be assessed district by district or province-wide. Officially, the Kurds want the whole province. In fact, many realise it would be more sensible to take just those districts where they are a large majority rather than incorporate slices of territory full of sullen Sunni Arabs who might make Kurdistan unworkable. At the least, the Kurds would take back the large chunks of Kirkuk province that Saddam gerrymandered out of the old Kurdish region. But the blanket of stability covering the area of Iraqi Kurdistan recognised by the government in Baghdad emphatically excludes Kirkuk city, now sealed off from the rest of Kurdistan by a series of intrusive checkpoints.
Indeed, the tinderbox city at the heart of the matter is fizzling ever more menacingly. Per head of population, acts of violence are now more frequent there than in bloody Baghdad, according to a Western diplomat who monitors the score. Moreover, in some nearby towns in Kirkuk province to the south and west of the city, such as Arab-dominated Hawija, al-Qaeda and Saddam loyalists have established a brooding presence.
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Talabani and Barzani, pals for the cause |
Though the Kurds' line of influence (if not control) extends into some two-thirds of Kirkuk province, there are plenty of blurred areas. Kurds control the towns of Chamchamal, Kifri and Kalar, to the east of Kirkuk city, and hold sway over Khaniquin, near the border with Iran. But other towns, such as Tuz Kurmatu, which has a strong and twitchy Turkoman populace, and Dubus, where Arabs predominate, resist what they see as the Kurds' expansion into Kirkuk province's southern half.
The oil factor is important but not crucial: if Kurdistan stays part of a federal Iraq, the Arabs in non-oil-rich parts of Iraq would still get a fair share of oil revenues, whether or not Kirkuk is run by the Kurds. The Kurds have agreed that they would get 17% of Iraq's oil income from fields already in operation. But they are still arguing with the authorities in Baghdad over the management, exploration and contracts in unexploited or not-yet-discovered fields.
Several oil companies, mostly mid-sized and small independent ones, have signed deals with the Kurdistan regional government, and a dozen more are in negotiation, all waiting impatiently for the government in Baghdad to give the green light. The Kurds say they can dish out export permits, though the authorities in Baghdad disagree. More to the point, the Kurds do not control the existing pipelines for export. So they want to build their own “feeder” pipelines to join the national one just before it reaches the Turkish border. Several Western firms hope to get in on this act.
Plainly, the Kurds are seeking to be as independent in economics as a landlocked country can be: a huge challenge. From 1991 until 2003, when the Americans invaded, the Kurds depended on smuggling, minimal trade with neighbouring countries, foreign handouts and a share (often stingily and belatedly distributed) of the UN's corrupt and maladministered oil-for-food programme. In the past few years they have tried valiantly to create an economy of their own. But they are starting almost from scratch.
Farming was virtually destroyed by Saddam. According to today's planning minister, the percentage of Kurds in agriculture has dropped from some 60% to around 10% in the past generation. During his Anfal (Spoils) campaign to suppress the rebellious Kurds in the late 1980s, Saddam's forces destroyed more than 4,000 villages and killed tens of thousands of civilians ��' 180,000, according to the Kurds.
There is no banking (“We have no access to money,” says Osman Shwani, the planning minister), no insurance, no postal service and in the past few years the Kurds' budget has entirely lacked public scrutiny. Commercial law is less than rudimentary. There is a gaping lack of statistics. Mr Shwani freely admits he does not know the size of Kurdistan's GDP
There is virtually no tax system. In theory, income tax of between 3% and 10% is paid by salaried earners. “But no one has ever paid taxes,” says Mr Shwani. One of the biggest brakes on the economy is the vast proportion of people on the public payroll, which gobbles up about three-quarters of the budget.
But things are starting to move in the right direction. Parliament, elected five times since 1992, has had vigorous debates over Kurdistan's own oil laws��"on how, for instance, to handle contracts with foreign investors. But even they will depend to a degree on harmonisation with the oil laws still not passed by a dismally weak and divided central government in Baghdad.
Another huge problem for Iraqi Kurdistan is the fact that it has been run, since 1991, by two rival administrations. In the provinces of Dohuk and Erbil, the Barzani family, which runs the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), has called the shots for generations. To the east, the province of Sulaymaniyah has been run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), run by Jalal Talabani; this, too, has become something of a family affair. In the late 1990s, the two outfits fought a vicious civil war, in which at least 3,000 people ��' some put the figure at more than 10,000 ��' were killed.
To a large degree, the party and the union are tribal fiefs, with power, money and even land distributed from the top by the ruling families. While Mr Talabani is currently president of federal Iraq, Massoud Barzani is president of Kurdistan; his nephew, Nechirvan Barzani, is its prime minister; Massoud's son, Masrur Barzani, heads the powerful intelligence service. At the end of the year, one of Mr Talabani's men is supposed to take over as Kurdistan's prime minister. No one is sure whether that will happen smoothly.
Moreover, the notion that Iraqi Kurdistan is a haven of democracy is far-fetched. The two fiefs control virtually all public activity, including the media, hitherto with remarkably little scrutiny; outright opposition has invariably been squeezed out, often amid accusations of betraying the sacred cause of Kurdistan. Patronage ��' some call it corruption ��' is the norm. The Islamists, with a reputation for honesty, are the third force, small for now, but waiting in the wings. If Kurdistan is to thrive, its own politics must loosen up and become more open, if not a Western-style free-for-all.
Yet on both scores ��' democracy and unity ��' there has been progress. The two administrations are undergoing a merger. All but three ministries have joined up (the last to unite being the most awkward: defence, interior and finance). On the democracy front, parliament, which includes four small blocks of opposition parties with the Islamists to the fore, has lively debates and is making government more accountable. A decent constitution for the region is set to enshrine an array of rights, including for Christians, Yazidis (a sect of their own) and other minorities in Kurdistan.
Two small but plucky opposition newspapers give an airing to the peccadillos of the party duopoly. And even some of the party-owned media outlets��"for instance, Kurdsat TV, owned and run by Mr Talabani's modernising wife, Herro ��' occasionally broach topics that were once taboo.
Especially compared with the rest of Iraq, Kurdistan has been making strides on every front. But this does not mean it will survive as a fledgling nation.
The Iraqi Kurds depend, in the end, on three main things: their hardened fighting men, known as the Peshmergas (“those willing to die”), technically a “regional protection force” within Iraq; their neighbours, especially the Turks; and the mountains (“the Kurds' only friends”, as their centuries-old saying goes).
The Peshmergas are probably Iraq's best fighting forces in terms of discipline, morale and motivation. According to Jafar Ali Mustafa, the Kurds' minister of state for Peshmerga affairs (in fact, the PUK's defence boss), they number some 200,000; half are loyal to his union, half to the Barzanis'. A merger is proceeding steadily, he says.
The Kurds' relations with their neighbours are just as critical. Turkey, with its 14m-odd Kurds of its own (many of them well assimilated) in a population of 75m, has frequently issued threats to invade Iraqi Kurdistan and clobber its Kurds if they make a grab for Kirkuk, where Turkey considers itself the guarantor of the rights of the Turkomans, their ethnic kinsfolk from the days when the area was part of the Ottoman empire. It also threatens to invade if Iraq's Kurds do not oust or corral the 3,000-plus guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), who hide in the remotest mountains of northern Iraq, where they plan and train for their lethal operations in south-eastern Turkey.
The Iraqi Kurds consider the PKK a nuisance, but are unlikely to spill the blood of their ethnic brothers. They argue, instead, that the Turks should negotiate with them. The Iraqi Kurds' laders may, however, turn a blind eye if the PKK is attacked within Iraqi Kurdish territory, perhaps even with the complicity of the Americans, who sorely need to improve their relations with Turkey, a rare and crucial Muslim ally of America in the Middle East. But many rank-and-file Kurds would be furious.
However, the Turks and Iraqi Kurds have been getting on better, as the Kurdish government settles down and since Turkey's mildly Islamist government was re-elected in July, scoring notably well in Turkey's Kurdish areas. Moreover, Turkey is by far the Iraqi Kurds' biggest economic partner. Erbil's huge new airport, for instance, is a Turkish (and British) project. If Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan could come to an accommodation, which looks more feasible than before, it would vastly boost the chances of the latter's survival. To a lesser extent, the same goes for the Iraqi Kurds' relations with Iran and Syria, both of which are wary of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan but could probably live with it.
Kurds must plot their next move cunningly
Iraq's Sunni Arabs and Iraq's other Arab neighbours, mainly Sunni (as are most Kurds), both remain deeply hostile to the notion of an autonomous, let alone independent, Kurdistan. They see the Kurds as destroyers of an Arab nation and bent on undermining the Arabs' professed unity on a wider scale. They are enraged by the Kurds' refusal to fly the Iraqi flag, and ritually accuse them of being a fifth column for Israel and Zionists.
Without fail, say Kurdish ministers, visiting Arab journalists raise both topics. In response, the Kurds point out that several Arab countries have relations with Israel. “The chauvinist Arabs always call us a second Israel,” says Mr Jafar, the Peshmerga leader. He denies that Israel and the Kurds have military or intelligence contacts. “I wish we did,” he says breezily.
Kurdish leaders are as candid about their desire for the Americans to stay on in Iraq or, if they are bound to withdraw, to keep a military base in Iraqi Kurdistan as a guarantor of the Kurds' national safety. “We'd like the Americans to put their biggest base in Kurdistan,” says Mr Jafar.
But the Americans have so far been wary of too warmly embracing the Kurds, concentrating instead on trying to reconcile Sunni and Shia Arabs in Baghdad. “We love the Americans but they don't love us,” Nechirvan Barzani, the Kurds' prime minister, is said recently to have sighed.
Could the Kurds be satisfied with extreme autonomy in northern Iraq? An informal referendum in 2005 suggested that 98% of them would like outright independence if they could have it. But almost every senior Kurd in Iraq says he would accept extreme autonomy ��' provided there is a genuine federation and that the central government in Baghdad gives the Kurds a good deal, especially over the management and exploration of oil in the north. Getting back Kirkuk means a lot too; conceivably, a special deal could be arranged there to leave the city with a status of its own.
Is it possible to feel both Kurdish and Iraqi? A former long-serving minister in Iraq's Kurdish government, who is a noted historian, barely blinks. “Frankly, no.” Then, after a pause, he adds: “If Iraq ever became truly democratic, maybe.”
Masrur Barzani, the 38-year-old intelligence chief and possible future head of the Barzani clan, recommends a “three-state solution”, presumably meaning that Iraq, which he calls “the illusion of a country that doesn't really exist”, should one day be divided into a three-way confederation. To most Iraqi Kurds, the emergence of a kindly, federal, Arab-run Iraq in which they could have a comfy existence is an absurd prospect.
Briefly after the Ottoman Turks' empire collapsed, the Kurds seemed in reach of a homeland of their own-"only to be betrayed by the great powers, Britain to the fore. Now they are enjoying a golden age of not-quite-independence for longer than at any time in their modern history. So why would they risk a reversion to a past of subjugation by Arabs, Turks or Persians?
If they are sensible, the Kurds will not rush towards independence. To be landlocked and without permanently friendly neighbours is a pretty hopeless recipe for statehood. The outside powers on which the Kurds ultimately depend, especially Turkey and the United States, would not allow them to break away. The Turks could throttle them economically if not bash them militarily; the Americans may well turn their backs, reckoning that it is strategically more important to curry favour with Turks and Arabs.
But if the Iraqi Kurds can bed down quietly for, say, five or ten years, securing their borders, making their economy work, building a modicum of freedom if not full-fledged democracy, and staying out of the trouble swirling around them in the rest of Iraq, it will be increasingly impossible for the rest of the world to ignore their patently rightful claim to self-determination. They have at least a chance of getting it.