Sworn into office after January's historic elections in Iraq, the new members of the local provincial council were expected to usher the ethnically mixed northern city of Kirkuk into a new era of political cooperation. Instead, they became bogged down in bitter accusations of fraud and power grabbing. A boycott by angry Arab and Turkomen members against their Kurdish colleagues ensured that a full council did not meet until early August.
The seven-month delay has laid bare the deep-seated divide between rival ethnic groups, whose long-standing grievances and open mistrust have erupted into a near-paralyzing impasse. In many ways, the provincial council's troubles seem reflective of the larger difficulties facing Iraqi leaders in cobbling together a new government as they try to avoid the real possibility of an ethnic conflict that could lead to a civil war.
"It's been very, very frustrating," said Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, who heads a team of U.S. military advisers to the Tamim provincial council. "If you can solve the problems here, you can do it anywhere because you have all the complications of getting this country together. It's all right here - a microcosm of Iraq."
The current problems besetting Kirkuk have roots in competing claims by different ethnic groups over who has dominance over the oil-rich city, 180 miles north of Baghdad. The Kurds and the Turkomen both say the city was historically theirs. The centuries-old city, with its motley mix of Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen and Assyrians, lies directly at the center of the ethnic "fault line." To the west is the Sunni Arab-dominated town of Hawija, while to the east is the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. During Saddam Hussein's era, the Baath Party forcibly evicted tens of thousands of Kurds and Turkomen from the Kirkuk area, confiscating their property and replacing them with Arabs in a campaign known as Arabization.
Since the Iraqi leader's ouster in April 2003, thousands of Kurds have returned home, with many living in refugee camps as they wait for their property claims to be processed. But many Arabs, who have been living in the city for several decades, have resisted their own removal.
Tensions have been exacerbated since the Kurds won a solid majority of Kirkuk's provincial council seats - 26 of 41 - in January's elections. Turkomen won nine seats while the Arabs ended up with only six. Similar results for nationwide elections left the Sunni Arabs largely without a representative political voice in the country - a result that Americans fear has only fueled the insurgency, which has been supported by the minority Sunni community.
Arab councilman Sheik Abdulla Sami al-Assi acknowledged that low voter turnout among Sunni Arabs contributed to the problem. But al-Assi, along with his Turkomen colleagues, also accused the Kurds of voter fraud, saying many of the Kurdish returnees to the area voted illegally. The current council "doesn't represent all the voices, especially the Arabs," al-Assi said.
Council chairman Rizgar Ali Hamajan, a member of the Kurd-dominated Brotherhood List that swept the elections and nearly all the top posts in the provincial government, said it boiled down to a matter of participation. "It's not our fault. Not one Kurd went to Hawija and told Arabs not to vote. Whatever we do with the Arabs, they complain," Hamajan said.
Wickham noted the initial momentum after the elections led to talks on a power-sharing deal, but negotiations quickly broke down in the wake of a series of incidents he characterizes as "comic opera."
First came the infamous "furniture debacle," as the Americans have dubbed it. After the elections, the committee put in charge of reassigning rooms and furniture at the government building was made up of Kurds, he said. When the choice rooms were doled out, a letter from the chairman said a majority of the committee had made the assignments. Already suspicious over election results, the Arab and Turkomen members charged the Kurds with trying to take control of the council and began a boycott that lasted until early August.
The Brotherhood list had its own share of problems, with members unable to decide among themselves who should become the new governor, resulting in more delays. Wickham met with council members on a near-daily basis, pushing them to resolve their differences. They finally agreed to come back to the table in early August after negotiations brokered by the U.S. State Department reallocated control of several key provincial posts to Arabs and Turkomen and guaranteed more equal representation on the Kirkuk city council. "They are still making painfully slow, but steady progress," Wickham said.
The provincial council's difficulties reflect the ethnic and religious tensions nationwide as Iraq faces a constitutional referendum in October and a general election two months later.
Councilman al-Assi said the Arab community is "very serious about participating in the next elections," adding they are undeterred by threats made by terrorist group al-Qaida in Iraq to target Sunnis who vote. "This next election is very important. It will decide the fate of Arabs citizens. If the next elections are clean, I believe Arabs will have a big role in the government," he said.
#1
Moose, the Kurdish list won an absolute majority in the election for Kirkuk. I would beware statements from other parties whining about what to me seems admirable restraint by the Kurds. If it were me I would have purge Arabs from positions of responsibility within weeks.
Were Assyrians, Turkmen, Yezidis Intentionally Locked Out of the Iraq Election?
The January 30 elections in Iraq were a historic breakthrough in the development of Iraq as a free and democratic society. Never before had Iraq had free, fair and transparent elections, with thousands of candidates and hundreds of political parties. Never before had the Christian Assyrians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) been allowed to participate in elections with their own independent parties.
Two lists represented the ChaldoAssyrians, the Rafidain list (204), spearheaded by the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), and the Assyrian National Coalition (ANC, 139). ADM was founded in 1979 and has worked since then for the Assyrians in Iraq; it opposed Saddam Hussein, who executed many of its members. ADM has significant membership and presence throughout Iraq and operates and administers various programs and schools, especially in North Iraq. The ANC was hastily organized for the election and has no significant presence in Iraq. Preliminary results show that ADM received most of the votes from Assyrians.
But on January 30 the vote was denied to 300,000 Assyrians, Yezidis and Turkmen in north Iraq, and to a significant number of the 500,000 Assyrians in the Diaspora. On January 30 voting boxes and supplies were not delivered to the districts of Al-Hamdaniya (Qaraqosh-Baghdeda), Karamlesh, Bartilla County, Bashiqa, Bahzani, and the district of Al-Shikhan (Ain-Safni), which have a population of 300,000. The voting boxes were to be delivered from Kurdish controlled Arbil. Abdul-Hussein al-Hendawi, head of the Iraqi electoral commission, was contacted early in the morning and he repeatedly gave assurances that the boxes would arrive soon from Arbil, but without any results.
An Assyrian government official, who wishes to remain anonymous, stated that no collaboration was received from the Mosul Governor and the Mosul City Council concerning the personnel who must open the centers in the Christian villages. Instead of having the Assyrians manning these voting stations, officials said they were "obliged" to bring Muslims from Karbala, Baghdad and elsewhere to carry out the responsibility in Mosul and the surrounding areas.
The Assyrian Democratic Movement protested the lockout in a January 31st communique.
The lockout also affected The Turkmen and Yezidi communities in North Iraq. The Iraqi Turkmen Front issued a lengthy document detailing Kurdish voting abuses. In an interview with Radio Free Europe, the leader of the Yezidis, Prince Tahsin-beg, asked for an investigation into the lockout of Yezidi voters.
Assyrians, Turkmen and Yezidis held protests on 2/5 and 2/6 in Detroit, Toronto, Stockholm, London and Baghdad regarding the Kurdish lockout of voters in North Iraq. On February 8, in a strongly worded statement, the Al-Rafidayn Democratic Coalition, the main party representing the Christian ChaldoAssyrians, rejected the Iraqi Independent Electoral High Commission's report on voting irregularities and lockouts in North Iraq. The statement specifically criticized the Commission's white-washing of the incident and blasted the decision to open only 93 of the 330 voting centers in the Nineveh governorate on election day.
There are an estimated 500,000 Iraqi Assyrians living outside of Iraq, with 350,000 in the US, 30,000 in Australia, 23,000 in Canada, 15,000 in France, 8000 in England and smaller communities in other countries. In the US Assyrians comprise 85-90% of the Iraqi expatriate community; this is because they have been persecuted in Iraq because they are ethnically, linguistically and religiously different, and as a result they have emigrated the most to escape ethnic and religious persecution.
The organization responsible for administering the vote for Iraqi expatriates is the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM set up a special website for the Iraq Out of Country voting program and established polling centers in fourteen countries outside of Iraq.
When the polling locations were initially announced Assyrians cried foul. The locations in the U.S. were limited to three: Washington D.C., Detroit and Los Angeles. There is a small Iraqi community in D.C., there are 30,000 Kurds and 5,000 Assyrians in Los Angeles, and there are 150,000 Iraqis in Detroit, with 120,000 of them being Chaldeans (Catholic Assyrians).
There are 90,000 Assyrians in Chicago, 10,000 in Phoenix; in California there 15,000 in San Francisco and San Jose, 25,000 in Modesto/Turlock and 25,000 in San Diego. There are 5,000 Assyrians on the East coast in Hartford, Boston and Yonkers.
The ChaldoAssyrian American Advocacy Council (CAAAC) notified the IOM about the Assyrian population centers and asked for polling centers to be added to the above mentioned cities. The IOM refused, stating that it did not have "time" to add these centers. This was not a satisfactory answer to CAAAC, since the IOM had known 11 months in advance the date of the Iraqi election. CAAAC pointed out that a combined population of 170,000 Assyrians were given no polling centers. In fact, only one polling center was available to serve all Iraqis west of the Mississippi...
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
