Iraq: Elections are latest weapon in Iraq’s north – Los Angeles Times
For decades, Arab soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas battled by gun, by mortar, by rocket. Now, elections are the latest weapon in the struggle for land and power in Iraq’s north.
The ballot box has become a battleground in Nineveh province, a high-stakes combat zone where Kurds and Arabs will face off over the future shape of the country — and confront each other over the past. The outcome could set the stage for another round of violence, which both sides insist that they do not want.
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How the struggle plays out here, where Arabs clearly outnumber Kurds, will go a long way toward determining the outcome in other disputed territories, such as the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, where no side has such an outright majority.
“If these problems are not solved, there will be some extremism here in [Nineveh], on the Kurdish side and Arab side,” Deputy Gov. Kharso Goran warned, sitting in his riverside office in the provincial capital, Mosul, flanked by the flags of Iraq, Kurdistan and his Kurdistan Democratic Party.
The entire issue of the Arab/Kurd claims to this region of Iraq, not to mention Kurdistan’s long-term direction, has long struck me as a issue that has largely been hanging in abeyance, but that at some point would erupt into a crisis. We may be reaching that point, as the elections will likely create a situation in which one of the two sides perceives itself as losing something (and it may not even be an issue of perception) and that loss will have the backing of a legal process (the election). The losing side may react badly to that loss, depending on its exact nature. And, to be clear, by loss I don’t simply mean losing elections. Rather, the elections are going to insert a new dynamic into the situation that could be quite inflammatory.
I have long thought that the lack of a plan to create local governance and elections early on in this process was a mistake. Instead of allowing the post-Saddam situation to transition to a new system that could start to consolidate, there was a conscious decision to let an institutional limbo emerge at the local level with the seeming attitude of “we’ll worry about local governance later.” As a result, new power arrangements have emerged, so not only are there the legacies of the Saddam regime in place, but new political constellations have emerged in the interim between the collapse of the old state and the current moment–a period of roughly half a decade.
At any rate, the whole piece is worth a read.
Also, on this subject, Matthew Shugart ponders the question of what electoral rules are going to be used, a question that is often difficult to answer, as press accounts of electoral rules tend to be rather poor.
January 25th, 2024 at 11:07 am
Why is it that so few stories about Iraqi Kurds and the so-called “Kurdistan” ever mention our NATO allies the Turks? I’m pretty sure that they’ve got their eyes fixed on that border region a la Sauron watching Rivendell (yes, I’m a nerd), watching for any moves or noises toward independence. Any Kurdistan problems would likely result in some level of unrest in southeastern Turkey with their own population of ethnic Kurds.
They would probably be grudgingly OK with an Iraqi “Kurdistan Province,” but unlikely to approve of anything more than that. They certainly don’t want a corner of their nation broken off by a possible civil war and absorbed into an independent Kurdistan. Realistically the Turks cannot, as a matter of policy, tolerate any extra obstacles to their EU aspirations — Cyprus is obstacle enough, thank you very much. That sort of internal unrest would be gleefully brandished by EU gamesmen and self-serving demagogues as Exhibit A against Turkish EU membership.
I don’t envy Obama and Clinton having to deal with that mess, among the many many others on the agenda. Even so, Turkey is historically and geographically the West’s bridge to the Middle East. I think that a serious effort at relationship-building there would have broader dividends throughout the region.