Blood lust in Kirkuk

Sydney Morning Herald ^ | 4/17/2003 | N/A

[a_Turk]

Kirkuk is liberated from Saddam's rule, but old ethnic tensions threaten to engulf it in new horrors, writes Ed O'Loughlin.

Nobody knows how many people live in Kirkuk. The size of the population and its ethnic breakdown are so sensitive that every census since 1957 has been rigged or suppressed.

Three races claim this town as their own - Arab, Turkoman and Kurd - and the oil fields on its fringe make it a prize worth having. Each of the three is armed, each is frightened of the others, and each believes it can call on outside forces.

Don't let anyone tell you that the war in Iraq is over.

The view from the roof of the town's highest building, the Kirkuk Hotel, reveals a low, straggling city of mud walls, concrete and date palms. At its heart a crumbling Turkish fort stands on a low artificial hill, the product of six millenniums of building, destruction and building again.

Both the Kurds and the Turkomans claim the city as their historic capital, both basing their arguments on that old nationalist premise of having been there first and in greater numbers.

Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, tried to cement the oil-rich city to the rest of Iraq by "Arabising" it, systematically dispossessing and displacing local Kurds, Turkomans and Christians. At least 120,000 are estimated to have been displaced from the town since 1991.

Until last week, resistance was futile, ethnic grudges were bottled up and stored away. Then America's Kurdish irregular allies swarmed into town and old evils are now free to slither out into the open.

The biggest losers so far have been the Arabs transplanted by Saddam from the south. The Arab suburbs on the southern edge of Kirkuk looked almost deserted this week, as most of those who had not fled stayed, prudently, indoors.

Many abandoned houses had crude writing painted on their walls, claiming them as headquarters for various Kurdish organisations. There were occasional explosions as Kurdish fighters "made safe" abandoned Iraqi ordnance by playing with it.

"They are shooting in the air all the time just to frighten people," complained Sabiha Abbas, after a particularly violent nearby explosion sent her young daughter fleeing to the kitchen.

"It's like a carnival for the Kurds," said her husband, Mohammed Muhsen Abdulatif, "but the children are very afraid."

He looks pretty frightened himself. One of the few ruling Ba'ath party officials not to flee Kirkuk, Abdulatif has just been visited for the second time by fighters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

"Everyone knows I am Ba'ath, it is no secret. Last week they came and took my registered personal weapons, a pistol and a Kalashnikov. They gave me a note saying they had taken them. Now these others say they want the weapons, too.

"They bang on my door and put a gun in my face. When they come you don't even know if they are from the KDP [Kurdistan Democratic Party] or the PUK at all. They are just men with guns."

Now that Saddam is gone, Kirkuk's Arabs are adamant that they never really liked him. Abdulatif says he only joined the Ba'ath because it was the only way to get promotion as a medical laboratory technician.

"All the Ba'ath people have run away but I stayed because I never hurt anybody here," he said. "For 14 years I was Ba'ath representative in a Kurdish quarter - Iskan - and if they knew what was happening to me now they would come and protect me."

In Iskan, Younis Abdulla Mohammed remembers Abdulatif well. As local Ba'ath area boss, Abdulatif was responsible for keeping detailed records on every man, woman and child in his 250-house subsection, and it was he who deported Younis and his six brothers and had their father briefly jailed.

"He came to the house saying that two sons would have to join the Saddam fedayeen or we would all be deported to the Kurdish zone," said Younis. "It was about four years ago. We all refused, so we were deported to Chamchamala. My father was locked up for 21 days."

But Younis says he bears no real grudges.

"He said that the decision to deport us came from higher up, and if that's the case, why should I hate him? He didn't behave rudely or arrogantly towards us. He just gave us the order and we had to go."

Younis is a Kurd, and for the moment Kurds are the only people in Kirkuk who are talking freely. When the Kurdish militias entered the town last week thousands of cheering Kurds came onto the street and joined them in a feast of celebratory looting. The Turkomans watched grimly and the Arabs stayed at home.

Today the Kurdish peshmerga are still in the city, a week after the US promised Turkey it would replace them with its own forces. Ankara is worried that a powerful Iraqi Kurdish homeland will destabilise its own restless Kurdish region, and also claims the right to protect its Turkoman cousins in Iraq.

Mindful of Turkish threats of invasion, the dominant (in Kirkuk) PUK is making soothing noises even as its troops, soldiers and officials tighten their grip on the town. On Tuesday this week Rizgar Ali Hamatan, the PUK's governor-in-exile for Kirkuk while it was under Iraqi "occupation", stood on the main street surrounded by bodyguards, greeting petitioners and issuing orders.

"The first day we came to the city there were no police or officials or judges," he said.

"The Americans weren't ready or able to control the situation or take over government buildings. These are our people, and we couldn't leave it like that. We had to bring our police here from Sulaimaniya. We'll stay as long as we're needed and when they don't want us we will go." As for ethnic conflict, "I don't think that's likely, unless members of the Ba'ath who are still hiding here make trouble between us."

The town's Turkomans see things differently. Their community has provided the town with its first post-Saddam political murder victim, an 11-year-old boy shot dead by Kurdish gunmen. Human Rights Watch staff, who saw the boy's bullet-torn body and interviewed his father shortly afterwards, say the child was killed when Kurdish gunmen fired on their car after an ethnic altercation at a petrol station.

The angry men outside the offices of the Iraqi Turkoman Front party in Kirkuk this week told a different story. According to them, the boy was inside their party headquarters when it was machine-gunned by the Kurds.

Whichever version is true, Turkoman activists took his body, wrapped it in Turkish flags, photographed and filmed it and then paraded it before foreign journalists in a nearby hotel.

"It's worrying," said a foreign human rights monitor. "Already this kid's death is being appropriated by the Turkoman Front not only to blame the Kurds, but also as an ethnic symbol to call the Turks to come and save them."

The response of the Kurdish authorities to the crime is just as worrying. "There was an investigation," said the PUK's Rizgar Ali Hamatan. "He was hit by a car."

The Turkomans feel that they are the most threatened by the newly ascendant Kurds.

This week armed and grim-faced youths stood guard around Turkoman Front offices across the region, amid feverish talk of a looming Kurdish assault.

"We expect that if it goes on like this there will be a great conflict between all sides," said Sabah Kara Altun, a Turkoman Front activist and former police general. "We want the Americans to control the situation.

"If they don't now, soon nobody will be able to. Our people are afraid and they are ready to defend their houses. We want the Americans to find a solution quickly."

[Steven W.]

Mass deaths & burials at the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein OK in media's eyes, newly freed Iraqis taking out their former Baathist opressors bad.

[Khepera]

Registration leads to confiscation.