In Iraq, Showdown Looms Over Self-Rule for Kurds

Vice President Ibrahim Jafari, a Shiite Muslim of the Dawa party, said in a recent interview that the rights of Kurds must be respected in the new Iraq. The history of their oppression must be taken into account in whatever arrangement is worked out, he added. But he also emphasized that Iraq must remain a unitary nation, true to its history and traditions, and said the rules of democracy must be followed.

Behind his comment lay a tension that has run throughout the debate over what to do about the Kurds and the north. For Iraq's Shiites, long overshadowed by the Sunnis who dominated the Baath Party, representative democracy is a way to gain a measure of power proportionate to their majority share of the population. There is no reason, in their view, for the country's Kurdish minority to oppose majority rule now that Hussein's tyranny has been eliminated.

Quasi-Independence

For more than a decade, U.S. warplanes flew regular patrols to prevent Hussein's forces from venturing north of the 36th parallel and into the 17,000-square-mile Kurdish-controlled zone of northeastern Iraq. Left alone for the first time in generations, Kurds constructed a flourishing quasi-state, with democratic elections and institutions to underpin the traditional leadership of Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party, and his rival to the east, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

Along the road north from Baghdad, what they built is readily apparent. Northward from Kirkuk, the Iraqi flag has disappeared, replaced by the green, white and red colors of Kurdistan, with a blazing yellow sun in the center. The Arabic language has withered away, replaced by the Kurds' own tongue.

Security checkpoints to control traffic have been erected by Kurdish fighters, called pesh merga, only a few of whom wear uniforms of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Guard. Barzani's headquarters, atop a steep bluff just outside Salahuddin, is guarded by his party's militia.

"We will not agree to having the Iraqi army here," said Mohammed Sharif Ahmad, dean of the law and political science department at Salahuddin University. "We have our pesh merga. They are organized like an army."

Together, Barzani and Talabani field more than 70,000 armed men, twice the planned strength of the Iraqi national army and several times its current roster, according to a U.S. tally. Each of the two Kurdish leaders has built his own military academy to turn out officers in two-year courses.

A decree issued by Iraq's interim government in Baghdad banning militias has had no noticeable effect here. For Kurds, making the pesh merga illegal would be like trying to reverse generations of history and undo the emergence of a new national entity over the last dozen years.

"This is my land," said Goran Nuri, who runs a bookstore in the shadow of a fortress built by Salahuddin, a Kurd, after his conquest of Jerusalem.

Nuri has laid in stocks of dictionaries, English language courses and science texts, scattered haphazardly around his narrow little shop. But what his customers really want and buy, Nuri said, are Kurdish-language modern novels, literature of their own.

The only Arabic-language tome that attracts buyers, he said, is the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Fearing the Future

The word that has come to dominate the debate over Kurdistan is federalism. Kurds and Arabs alike have suggested that reorganizing Iraq in an association of states could give Kurdistan room to retain self-rule while staying within a unified Iraq. The Kurdish parliament has voted to forgo total independence in return for loose federalism.

But there is little agreement on how Kurdistan should be defined in the new constitution. Ahmad, the jurist, said putting off the debate is the best idea, to give the new Iraq time to jell. Meanwhile, he suggested, Kurdistan would retain its semi-independence.

But Barzani said the Kurds can wait only so long and that writing the new constitution will force a decision. "My approach is to put all these issues on the table and solve them as much as possible," he said.

Much will depend on how the United States comes down when the crunch arrives, probably next year, he said. Two recent decisions by the Bush administration have inspired doubts.

The first was rejection of a Kurdish demand for the post of either president or prime minister in the interim government, reflecting the Kurdish contention that Iraqi society is divided into Arabs and Kurds. The second was refusal to put into the Security Council resolution underpinning the new Iraqi government a condition that any important decision must be agreed on by consensus among Iraq's political and ethnic factions.

At the Kurds' insistence, U.S. occupation authorities included such a proviso in the Temporary Administrative Law governing Iraq pending its new constitution. But Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, objected that this amounted to a Kurdish veto, frustrating majority rule. Eager for votes at the United Nations, the Bush administration dropped the language from the resolution.

Kurdish leaders repeatedly said they would never forget U.S. help in setting up the quasi-independent Kurdistan they have had since 1991. But they also have not forgotten what happened in 1975, when the United States, along with Iran and Israel, withdrew support for an earlier secessionist revolt and stood by while Iraqi troops crushed the pesh merga, who were then commanded by Barzani's late father, Mustafa Barzani.

"We have every right to have fears about the future," Barzani said.