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With vote, Kurds look to take back their city

How the city of Kirkuk handles the elections could be a microcosm of the results for the country.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published January 30, 2005

	[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
	Kurdish boys tape a campaign poster on their bicycle at a refugee camp in Kirkuk, Iraq. The camp is in a soccer stadium that has been converted into housing.

KIRKUK, Iraq - As Farhad Ali stepped up to the rusty metal door for the first time in almost a decade, the memories flooded back.

Memories of growing up in this house that his father had built in 1979. Of that terrible day in 1995 when the family had been ordered to leave so an Arab who worked for Saddam Hussein's regime could move in. Of the years wondering whether the Alis - like thousands of other Kurds - would have to spend the rest of their lives in virtual exile.

But now Hussein was gone, and the Kurds were determined to reclaim the city they felt was rightfully theirs.

So one day, Ali knocked on the door of #61/721 near the center of Kirkuk. An Arab man answered.

"This is my house," Ali told him. "You should get out."

About 150 miles north of Baghdad, Kirkuk looks like most other urban areas of Iraq, with squat, dun-colored buildings, broken pavement, a few noteworthy mosques and memorials.

But Kirkuk sits near one of Iraq's richest oil fields. In today's elections, Arabs and Kurds will be vying for political control of the city - and potentially, control of the oil wealth. What happens in Kirkuk may be a harbinger of what happens in the rest of the country.

"Without sorting out the case of Kirkuk, we will not have peace in Iraq," says Dr. Mohammed Ihsan, minister of Human Rights in the Kurdistan Regional Government.

For much of its modern history, Kirkuk was mostly inhabited by Kurds, a non-Arab people who settled in a quadrant formed by Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. The Kurds have their own language, customs and dress, and their fierce independence has often put them at odds with the leaders of the countries in which they live.

In the 1980s, Hussein, who saw himself as the pillar of Arab nationalism, began a campaign to make his own country as Arab as possible. Kurds in Kirkuk and elsewhere were banned from most jobs unless they spoke Arabic and took Arab names.

By the late '90s, as many as 100,000 Kurdish families had been forced from Kirkuk, many winding up in squalid refugee camps farther north. There they stayed until Hussein's regime was deposed in 2003.

Thousands of Kurds began pouring back into Kirkuk.

"It is our home here," says Salah Muhammad, his portly frame clad in the traditional baggy pants and broad waist sash. "This is the place we were born and spent happy childhoods. We are not strangers here."

But like many poorer Kurds who had only rented in Kirkuk, Muhammad's family of six had no real home to return to. They are among 2,000 people living in Kirkuk's Olympic-size soccer stadium, where dressing rooms and VIP boxes are now jammed with sleeping mats, cook stoves and vegetable oil containers.

Days of rain have formed a muddy moat around the stadium, and the Muhammads step from rock to strategically placed rock to reach their "house." Using concrete blocks mortared together with mud, they have walled off an area between two of the stadium's giant outside support columns to form a kitchen, a living room/bedroom and tiny cubicles to shower and use the toilet.

Like other families, the Muhammads have tapped - illegally - into the stadium's electric lines. That gives them sporadic power for their TV and DVD player. Muhammad's wife does the laundry in a metal tub and drapes it over bleacher railings to dry.

Every other week, Muhammad and his 18-year-old son work as guards for an aid organization in Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish city north of Kirkuk. Many of the stadium's residents have jobs, including Katan Majeed, who earns $70 a month cleaning floors in a hospital. She has not seen her husband since 1988, when Hussein's troops hauled the whole family off to prison.

"I don't like this life," she says. "People from outside come to play (soccer) in the stadium and we feel shy."

The unusual living conditions have forged a strong sense of community. Ismail Faraj, who runs a minuscule convenience store tucked under the bleachers, lets many of his customers buy on credit because he knows they have no money.

When one family's dwelling caught fire, other residents donated blankets and clothes from their own meager belongings. The 430 families who live in the stadium have elected a mayor who, on a recent day, was passing out a flier for the Kirkuk Brotherhood List, a slate of candidates for Kirkuk's provincial government.

Revealingly, it features the colors of the Kurdish flag and a picture of an oil well.

Kurdish leaders insist they want to reclaim Kirkuk because it is part of their homeland, not because it has an abundance of oil. Iraq's oil wealth, they say, is a resource to be shared by all Iraqis.

That doesn't ring true with the city's other residents, mostly Arabs and Turkmen. They see the Kurds' resettlement drive as a brazen effort to control Kirkuk's government and ultimately the oil.

Arabs have threatened to boycott today's provincial elections because of a controversial decision to let 100,000 Kurds who no longer live in this city of 600,000 vote here anyway. Kurds had earlier threatened their own boycott if those forced from Kirkuk during Hussein's era were not allowed to vote.

"I think resolution of the Kirkuk issue was a wise solution," Iraq's interim foreign minister, Hosyar Zebari, said last week.

Zebari, himself a Kurd, noted that the Brotherhood List has candidates from all of Kirkuk's ethnic groups, including Arab and Turkmen.

"Many people have speculated that Kirkuk is the powder keg of Iraq, and that the minute it blows up the whole country will blow up. That has not happened - Kirkuk should be a city of true brotherhood of all communities."

Farhad Ali is all for brotherhood. But that's not what he had on his mind when he walked up to his house in Kirkuk that day.

In 1995, the family was ordered to leave immediately, taking only their clothes and bedding. The local government confiscated the house and assigned it to a member of Hussein's Baath Party. As an incentive to move to Kirkuk and help "Arabize" the city, the newcomer also got a large cash grant.

Ali's family eventually settled in Sulaymaniyah. Unlike many displaced Kurds, they found good jobs and lived in relative comfort.

After Hussein's regime fell and Kurds flooded back into Kirkuk, the new government in Baghdad wrestled with what had become a potentially explosive issue. It created an Iraq Property Claims Commission, a supposedly impartial panel of judges and lawyers, to settle disputes over property ownership.

"Unfortunately, the people who started it were Arabs who were part of the former regime," says Ihsan, the Kurdish human rights minister. "It became part of the corruption - not a single claim has been settled."

In June 2004, Ali's father filed a claim for his house, providing documentation that his family had been evicted. Nothing happened, so two months ago Ali decided to act.

The Arab who answered the door was the same Arab who had been living there since 1995.

"I didn't insult him, I didn't call him names, I didn't threaten him - I just told him, "This is my house.' " Ali recalls.

"He said, "It is your right to come back and you are right, I should go.' "

Ihsan says Kurdish officials have tried to stop Kurds from reclaiming property without legal authority.

"We weren't happy to fix an injustice by another injustice," he says. "But put yourself in their position - the government kicked you out of your home and now you have a chance to get back the house you grew up in, the house you worked hard to get."

Ihsan thinks the Claims Commission should be reconstituted as a truly impartial body that quickly settles property disputes. Arabs who moved to Kirkuk because of Hussein's "Arabization" campaign should be sent back where they came from, given a piece of land and other incentives.

"Kirkuk is the key to the stability of Kurds and Iraq in general," he says.

Although the local government still legally owns Ali's house, he, his wife and five children have settled in. On a recent afternoon, an AK-47 was propped against the living room wall. A black Glock pistol hung at Ali's waist.

A handsome man of 35, he works as a policeman in an Arab part of Kirkuk. All of the city's police stations have a mix of officers - Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen - with Kurds in the majority. As a result, the city has not seen as much violence as Mosul, where police in 25 of 28 stations "abandoned their posts because they were all Arabs and gave up as soon as the insurgents came in," Ihsan says.

Along with the rest of Kirkuk's police force, Ali will be working today to make the election as safe as possible. Kurds are counting on a huge turnout to ensure they win a large number of seats both in Kirkuk's provincial government and in Iraq's Transitional National Assembly.

As for the Arab who once occupied his home, Ali doesn't know where he now lives.

"The last I heard, he was serving tea."

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at http://sptimes.com

[Last modified January 30, 2005, 00:11:11]