A new Middle East state in the making?

It is ten years since Iraq's northern provinces threw off the yoke of Saddam Hussein to become the Western protected enclave of 'liberated' Kurdistan. Of all the unfinished business of the Gulf War, writes David Hirst from Northern Iraq, this could be its most important legacy
The Kurds have a national flag of their own. The tricolour of red, green and white, with a sun at its centre, is the emblem of a people who, up to 40 million in number, are the Middle East's fourth largest ethnic group. Their mountainous heartland describes a great arc through some of the richest and most strategic regions of the four states, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, among which they are divided. In 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres recognised their right to statehood. But the rise of Ataturk and, in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, put paid to their dreams; since then, they have been rising in revolt after bloody, uncoordinated, unavailing revolt. In 1946, the flag flew in the small and short-lived "Mahabad Republic" before it was suppressed by the Shah. But nowhere has it officially flown since -- not even here, in "liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan.
It is now ten years since the Iraqi Kurds, or a large segment of them, acquired a sort of self-mastery. It was the fruit of a long struggle and great suffering whose climax came with the chemical weapons onslaught that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed on them in the 1980s. But, in the end, and typical of the Kurdish experience, it was great upheavals beyond their control that finally brought their self-ruling enclave into being: Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the great Kurdish and Shi'ite uprisings, the panic flight of an entire people, the creation of the Western-protected "safe haven," subsequently expanded, which persists to this day.
This juridical no-man's land was to have been a strictly provisional affair, pending a final settlement of the whole Iraq question. But, of all the still unfinished business of the Gulf war, "liberated" Kurdistan now looks like being its most important legacy: the longer it endures, the harder to undo. True, the Kurds dare not fly their flag, but, in this swathe of territory the size of Switzerland, a community which, at 3.6 million, outnumbers many UN member- states, is surreptitiously acquiring the attributes, functional, political, cultural and economic, of independence.
It adds up to the greatest success in the annals of pan-Kurdish struggle. Yet it remains a deeply vulnerable one. Iraqi Kurds are a people-in-waiting, suspended as never before between ultimate triumph and renewed calamity. For they know that, just as their curious entity came into being by a geo-political accident, another such volcanic eruption could just as easily extinguish it.
The ultimate triumph would, of course, be formal, internationally recognised independence. "That," said Nerchivan Barzani, one of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) two prime ministers, "goes with the self-determination which is the natural right of all peoples. Ask any Kurd if he wants a state." They virtually all do. "It's time," said Saedi Barzingi, president of Erbil University, "to correct the injustices of the post-World War I settlement. We are not Arabs, Turks or Iranians. Why shouldn't we have the same rights as a string of Gulf tribes who declared themselves states?"
"Liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan is self-consciously pan-Kurdish in its ultimate aspirations. "We could be a model for all other areas of Kurdistan," said Barham Salih, the KRG's other prime minister, contrasting its moderate, gradualist, democratic approach to self-determination with the all-or-nothing violence of Abdullah Ocalan and his PKK's failed attempt to achieve independence for Turkey's Kurds. "Politically," said Karwan Akraye, director of a Kurdish satellite channel, "we concentrate on Iraqi Kurdistan, but strategically, the national cause is one." On the channel's popular, live phone-in programmes, listeners from all over the Middle East and Europe debate the question of pan-Kurdish emancipation and statehood.
Yet independence is the official aim of no Kurdish party. "In spite of our right to our own state," said Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), "we don't raise this slogan. We only seek federation within a democratic Iraq." What one official called "the lousy hand dealt us by history and geography" dictates this caution. For the Kurds have no access to the sea, or to any neighbouring state without a potentially secessionist Kurdish minority of its own.
Saddam's Iraq remains the most ever-present, if wholly unpredictable, menace. Having lost his northern provinces, Saddam does not hide his ambition to re-establish his gruesome tyranny over the Kurds. Their now "stagnant waters" he said last month, will one day rejoin "the pure sea of Iraq." Every day, new families trickle into Kani Sheitan refugee camp, victims of a slow-motion campaign to Arabise oil-rich Kurdish regions still under Saddam's territory. Ba'athist officials had mocked them with the choice: "become Arabs, and join the fight for Palestine -- or get out." "They [the refugees] represent the possible fate of all of us daily made manifest," said Salih, "a regiment of tanks is only half an hour away; they could sweep into Kurdistan at any time."
Nor will any regional powers, however much at odds with Saddam and each other, connive at the emergence of an independent Kurdistan in another's territory. The most they will tolerate is the perpetuation of the current status quo -- until the day of reckoning, likely to be triggered by Saddam's removal, which opens the way for a new Iraqi order. All the Kurds can do in the meantime is profit from the self-mastery they now enjoy, so as to be as strong placed as possible when it arrives.
They are steadily forging a distinct Kurdish polity, even if it still lacks the international recognition, the passports, or airports that would make it whole. Erbil, the "capital", has become Hawler, and everywhere Kurdish signs have eliminated Arabic ones. They are kurdicising school curricula, and their version of geography and history has replaced the Ba'athist-Arab one. Their leaders are regularly received by foreign states. They have developed a reasonably efficient administration, with an elected parliament and municipal councils. They have internal freedoms unimaginable in Baghdad, with fifty-odd newspapers, and unlimited access to satellite television; in the remotest villages, digital and analogue dishes sprout from every other mud-and-wattle rooftop. They have NGOs and human rights organisations and, whatever their political differences, they infuse their discourse with a real concern for those ideals -- democracy, pluralism, tolerance -- from whose absence they suffered so grievously in the past. Of the regions' three universities, two were established since 1991; starved of books and periodicals by Iraq and the UN sanctions regime, students now pore over the Internet denied their Iraqi counterparts, through hundreds of computers whose import, by hook or by crook, the KRG has made a top priority. They are resettling the 4,500 villages destroyed by Saddam, rebuilding a decimated livestock and re-cultivating a fertile, well-watered soil that remains the backbone of their economy. In Suleimaniyah, a new oil refinery stands testimony to the self- reliance of which Kurdish technicians are capable. With no foreign help, they constructed it entirely from the cannibalised parts of a soft-drinks, a sugar, and a cement factory, and from pipes left behind by the Iranian army. From Iraqi minefields they contrived explosive devices to open a well in the proven but hitherto unexploited Taktak oil field: they have turned Kurdistan into the world's latest oil-producer.
There are two great threats to all this. One is the deep rivalry between the two main parties, Massoud Barzani's KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The KRG is really composed of two geographically separate administrations, the KDP's centred on Erbil, the PUK's on Suleimaniyah. They share the same general orientation, and collaborate harmoniously in many ways. There has been no fighting between them for four years; and a "peace process" is making steady headway. But, on the day of reckoning, a divided Kurdistan could be a fatally weakened one.
The other threat is the machinations of regional powers, Turkey above all. Its good will is vital, because of its intrinsic weight and its pro-Western credentials. But it is also the most congenitally hostile to the very notion of a Kurdish identity, more even than Saddam himself. It is the main reason why the Kurds fly no flag; they took it down in the one, official place that it did fly, flanking a portrait in parliament of the late Mustafa Barzani, legendary hero of the Kurdish national struggle, when a Turkish delegation visited.
"For the Turks," confided a top KDP executive who regularly negotiates with them, "we are more dangerous than Saddam. They have a paranoid suspicion that our self-government is a conspiracy to which the West is a party; they hate anything that smacks of Kurdish progress, that we have such things as traffic lights, or wear suits and ties. The more progress we make, the more they must sabotage it. And they will use any means to do so, such as the exploitation of our Turcoman minority. In effect, they are saying that if we Kurds are to have an entity of our own, this community of 10,000 people should have an equivalent one. They sponsor the Turcoman Front, a puppet body with no following; Turkish officers control it and train its militia. We have given the Turcomans their own schools, radio and language teaching. We offered them seats in parliament, but the Turks told them to refuse. On his last visit to Ankara, Massoud Barzani told them: 'why don't you give your Kurds what we give our Turcomans?'"
But what, at the moment, really alarms the Kurds is the so-called "second passage." Under this scheme, already agreed in principle between Iraq and Turkey, the two countries would jointly establish a new crossing point in the northwestern tip of "liberated" Kurdistan where Iraq, Syria and Turkey meet, by-passing the lucrative business that comes their way from the internationally tolerated "smuggling" of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi army would re-occupy a narrow strip of territory. It could only do so with Turkish connivance. "It would be a strategic blow, a noose around our neck," said a KDP leader, "and we would fight it by any means. Fortunately, the US has made known its disapproval to the Turks."
Which goes to show that, ten years on, Western protection, and the northern "no-fly zone" that embodies it, remains the linchpin of the Kurds' security and well-being. So long as that holds, they see themselves in a potentially win-win situation: building their quasi- independent polity on the one hand, and, on the other, taking comfort from the knowledge that the longer they have to build, the better off they will be when the reckoning comes. It creates a contradiction in the Kurdish soul: They fear no one like they fear Saddam, yet they are in no particular hurry to expedite the reckoning, or turn Kurdistan into the indispensable platform for any US-backed insurrection to unseat him. Ever mindful of past US betrayals they would demand cast-iron guarantees about the outcome, and their own place in the post-Saddam order.
Though the official aim is federation, it is, said Massoud Barzani, the "content" of federation that counts. "We shall never give up our Kurdish characteristics, or allow the return of a totalitarian system. A generation is growing up that knows nothing of it." In fact, the longer self-rule persists, the harder it will be to imagine a return of Arab rule at all. So at the back of every mind is the hope that not just federation, but independence, internationally endorsed, might really come to pass -- though no one knows quite how. "After all," said Falih Bakr, a Barzani confidant, "who really foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of communism before it actually happened?"
But, at the back of every mind, too, is the knowledge that another calamity -- the suppression by its neighbours of a "liberated" Kurdistan that threatens them all -- would be more in keeping with Kurdish history. And that is why, forever watchful of events beyond their control, they view with such apprehension signs that the world is slowly wearying of the "containment" of Saddam and the UN sanctions -- whose lifting, without safeguards for themselves, they would deem a harbinger of calamity.
In "liberated" Kurdistan's two other main cities, Suleimaniyah and Erbil, public parks have replaced the hated army barracks of the departed Ba'athist regime. Here in Dohuk it is the Mazi supermarket. Vast, gleaming, air-conditioned, its shelves abound in all you could possibly need, and a good deal more: from cheap clothing to the trappings of middle-class affluence, from Calvin Klein jeans to Bruno Biondi shoes with price tags well in excess of $100; Hitachi fridges and Moulinex mixers; peanut butter and soy sauce; inflatable garden swimming pools, lawn-mowers -- and a passable selection of grandfather clocks.
At the checkout counter uniformed girls swipe bar codes with infra-red scanners. Judging by the large warning notice, Western-style modernity has bred Western-style shop-lifting: "high-quality monitors are in operation, so please beware not to fall into an embarrassing situation."
It can't be said that prosperity has come to Iraqi Kurdistan -- three months of a teacher's salary would go on those Italian shoes -- but it can be said that these northern provinces, which, till 1990, were the most backward, deprived, most savagely oppressed of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's domains, are now much better off than those where his writ still runs. The local currency -- still the same old, pre-1990 Iraqi dinar -- is now worth over 100 times its debased Saddam counterpart. All perks included, a university professor earns a minimum of $250 a month; in Baghdad he might get a tenth of that. There are Mercedes cars, even an occasional BMW, on newly paved highways. Hotels are opening, and open-air restaurants flourish beside mountain streams.
For yes, there's a tourist industry here too, mainly summer visitors from the ever-expanding Kurdish diaspora, or Iranians who cross the border for a weekend's dancing, drinking and veil-free relaxation. "This area," said Jamal Fuad, a minister of reconstruction, "is achieving a revival surpassing all countries in the region."
And achieving it in spite of what amounts to double sanctions -- those, of which Saddam himself complains, imposed by the UN, and those, within them, that he himself imposes on his lost northern provinces. The Kurds date their mini-boom from 1996, and the passage of Security Council Resolution 986, or "oil-for-food." This contained the crucial provision that 13 per cent of all UN-authorised "humanitarian" resources should go separately to the north. Although, within this UN mandate, the Iraqi government decides how the goods and services should be distributed throughout the country, in the north, unlike the south, it is the UN which actually administers the distribution programme, and pays for the operating costs.
The funds involved in "oil-for-food" in Iraq as a whole are larger than the UN's entire budget for the rest of the world. As for Kurdistan, its mountains and valleys are blue with the signs of nine UN "implementing agencies" which are not present in the rest of Iraq; and for each of them, this is their largest operation in the world. The sums at the UN's disposal are huge, and the way it spends them often hugely wasteful. "The attitude is: "so what?" said a former UN official now working in the north. "It's Iraq's money, after all."
In any case, "it was 986 that saved us," said Shafiq Qazzaz, Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) minister of humanitarian affairs. Overnight, every inhabitant had a 10-item monthly food basket which would previously have required a whole family income, or more, to pay for. The World Food Programme distributes it, with the willing collaboration of the KRG which, officially, the UN does not even recognise.
But WFP is the only UN agency actually able to utilise all the resources at its disposal. For manifestly, food qualifies as "humanitarian." But what Kurdistan now needs is "development," sustainable, income-generating growth.
"We're not an Afghanistan or Somalia any more," said Azar Barwari, an official of the Kurdish Democratic Party official. "We are a potentially rich country." It could do great things with its 13 per cent -- if only it could spend it. As Iraq's oil revenues have soared, the proportion of it going on food has fallen to less than a third. But all the rest is not going on "development." For, under sanctions, that remains a forbidden word in UN vocabulary -- though "reconstruction" and "rehabilitation" are often euphemisms for the same thing.
"When the US and Britain," said Nasreen Sikeek, minister of reconstruction, "formulated the Memorandum of Understanding [governing operation of 986] perhaps they assumed that the UN, being in charge in the north, would make things work properly, but the truth is that we are still at Baghdad's mercy." And for Baghdad, anything that smacks of development, of real progress, in the north is undesirable. And since Baghdad does not have to approve of UN-financed projects it doesn't like, Kurdistan has now accumulated a good $2-billion in unspent funds.
It is partly the UN's fault; its officials are very deferential to Baghdad, especially Arabs among them; they risk harassment or expulsion if they rock the boat, and -- the Kurds plausibly say -- self-interest dictates caution when you are on a tax-free salary of $10,000 a month instead of the few hundred dollars you might be earning at home. The 200 foreign UN officials in Kurdistan refuse even to talk to journalists -- "unless you have a visa from Baghdad," they add, in the knowledge that they never do. "It's hardly surprising," confided one of them who was about to resign over the whole sorry story of the UN in Iraq, "that the government, so anxious to discredit sanctions, should try to prevent the Kurdish economy from taking off in spite of them -- and thereby showing up its own performance."
The procedure is for the KRG to propose projects, "developmental" or otherwise. They go first to the UN office in Erbil, which passes them to its headquarters in Baghdad, which submits them to the government -- which then engages in systematic delay, evasion and obstructionism.
Having, since the early 90's, cut off all electricity supplies to the north, it now seeks to prevent it becoming self-sufficient in this field, either through the building of dams for hydraulic power or through oil- and gas-fired generation. Vast swathes of the country entirely depend on private generators.
In Saddam-controlled territory, it supplies sprinkler systems to Arabs newly installed on farmlands from which Kurds have been ethnically cleansed, but denies them to Kurds in Kurdistan; it impedes the growth of agro-industry -- weaving or fruit and vegetable canning -- in a region where 70 per cent of the population are directly or indirectly dependent on the land. It withholds authorisation for bridges, road extensions, hospitals, a slaughterhouse, spare parts for an existing cement factory; and, of course, the last thing it would ever dream of is permit the import of a drilling rig to raise production from the Taktak oilfield, from the paltry 14,000 barrels it manages today to the 500,000 barrels per day of which it would be capable.
Since, under sanctions, the UN is also forbidden to engage in local purchase, the Kurds have to buy their wheat, under oil-for-food, at a price of $200 a ton. They themselves grow better-quality wheat, and more of it than the 500,000 tons a years they consume, but end up trying to sell it -- also technically illegal under sanctions -- to Turkish and Iranian neighbours for less than $100 a ton. Nor can they persuade the UN to spend some of their huge surplus on, say, raising the salary of teachers to $50 a month, and boosting the local economy that way. But there is one field in which obstructionism patently hasn't worked. As a result -- in the eyes of Kurds and dissident UN officials at least -- Saddam would seem to have hanged himself by his own petard. He made sick and dying children the centrepiece of his anti-sanctions campaign. Yet how come they are not dying in doubly-sanctioned Kurdistan, not, at least, in anything like the numbers they are doing so in singly-sanctioned Iraq?
Before 1990, Kurdistan, then under central government control, fell well behind, with an infant mortality rate of 80 per 1,000 births compared with 56 for the rest of the country.
But by 1999, according to a UNICEF report, while the rate had risen to an appalling 131 per 1,000 in Saddam-controlled territory, in Kurdistan it actually fell slightly, from 80 to 72. Even, said a former UN official now working in the north, when allowance is made for the fact that Kurdistan never had a very sophisticated infrastructure, in water sanitation and the like, and could therefore never be so sorely afflicted, like the rest of the country, by its collapse, there is only one possible reason for such a remarkable discrepancy: Saddam himself.
"This," he said, "is an oil-rich country which spends -- is obliged by the UN to spend -- an astonishing nearly 75 per cent of its primary source of public wealth on ordinary Iraqis, a far higher proportion than it ever did before sanctions. The evil is not just sanctions, but sanctions plus Saddam."
The Kurds may not love sanctions, but they do love their 13 per cent. "Are you surprised," asks Azar Barwari, "that every time the UN discusses the possible lifting of them we get nervous?" This is not just for economic reasons, but for what they signify as a measure of the 10-year-old Western political commitment to Kurdistan. Would any weakening of them automatically imply a weakening of other ingredients in the "containment" of Saddam, and above all the northern "no-fly zone"?
Their lifting, without any compensating guarantees for the Kurds, would instantly raise the spectre of another 1991, another panic flight to the frontiers by an entire people fearing the tyrant's return and dreadful vengeance.
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