Posted on 02/16/2004 6:57:51 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Today: February 16, 2004 at 12:50:13 PST
SANGOOR, Iraq (AP) - In a quiet mass migration, Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq and Kurds are moving back in, reversing Saddam Hussein's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and effectively redrawing the demographic map.
At the same time, politicians in Baghdad are trying to negotiate a formula for the future of Iraq, ahead of the July 1 planned transfer of power to Iraqis and the end to the U.S.-led occupation.
The United States and some Iraqi leaders are pushing for a federal system they hope will maintain the country's unity while satisfying Kurds, who want to preserve the autonomy they have held for years in the north.
That would mean eventually defining the frontiers of a Kurdish federation. And with more Kurds moving back into their ancestral lands, Kurdish leaders' claim over a larger area in a future federal division is strengthened - raising tensions with Arabs.
Amid the bitterness and suspicion, even the concept of federalism is poorly understood in a country accustomed to centralized rule from Baghdad. Many Arabs see it as code for Kurdish aspirations to split from Iraq.
With Saddam's regime crumbling in April, Mohammed Abu Khomra, an Arab, fled his home in the village of Daqouq fearing Kurdish revenge.
"Federalism amounts to ethnic cleansing," said Abu Khomra, 29, who now lives in Tuz Khurmatu, 20 miles south of Daqouq. "Kurds are now staying in our house and say they will not leave."
Like Abu Khomra, thousands of Arabs are moving out of formerly Kurdish villages in which they were settled in a campaign by Saddam to "Arab-ize" Kurdish regions.
Saddam's military destroyed more than 4,000 villages in a 1987-1988 campaign to crush Kurdish rebels. The operation included the bombing of some of the Kurdish areas with chemical weapons.
Saddam's forces killed some 182,000 Kurds, by human rights groups' estimates, and tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes. Since then, the regime moved Arabs into Kurdish villages. Abu Khomra, for example, was given a furnished house when he moved into Daqouq in 1997.
Now, as Arabs pull out, Kurds are moving back to the towns and hamlets they fled over the past decades, bringing the ethnic makeup closer to what it was before Saddam's campaigns.
Soon after Saddam's fall, Mohammed Abdullah Salehi, a Kurd, returned to his home village of Sangoor. He and his family now stay in a house first owned by a Kurd but then occupied by an Arab family that fled in April.
Salehi said he wasn't interested in settling scores. All he wanted was to farm his land and tend his goats. "Now I am at peace. I've come back to my home," he said.
Kurds are insisting on retaining - or expanding - the system of self-rule they enjoyed under U.S. protection after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, fought alongside U.S. soldiers last year and now expect a political payoff for that support.
Creating a federal system in Iraq will be messy. Some officials have spoken of using the 18 existing provinces as the basis for federal regions.
Those political boundaries don't match up with the ethnic lines, however - particularly in the complicated case of the Kirkuk region.
Kurds consider oil-rich Kirkuk the heartland of a Kurdistan but it also has Arab and Turkoman populations and is not in the Kurdish autonomous region.
In his attempt to keep Kirkuk province firmly in Arab hands, Saddam detached four largely Kurdish districts - out of an original seven - and attached them to the neighboring Sunni Arab provinces of Salaheddin and Diyala.
Drawing the federal borders along current provincial lines would keep them out of the Kurdish-run areas. But the more Kurdish returnees come back to those districts, the stronger Kurdish leaders' claim to them will be.
Kurds regard the Hamreen Mountains as the natural borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. The range runs across the country from the Mosul area in the northwest to meet the Iranian border nearly as far south as Baghdad.
In Ya Tagh, a village some 75 miles south of Kirkuk, about a dozen Kurdish families have returned, finding most of the houses dismantled. Before fleeing, Arab occupants pulled down roofs, windows and other parts of their homes - apparently so they could rebuild elsewhere.
Joma Ahmed, 74, was delighted to have his land back, after living in the Samood camp as a refugee and having to pay for his goats to graze in nearby villages.
"We want Kirkuk," he said. "This is a Kurdish region."
He also said he would not live with the Sunni Arabs who dominated Saddam's regime. "After this, how can we live with them?" he said, waving an Arab newspaper with a photo of Saddam.
The mood is even less compromising in the Kurdish cities, where for many activists, federalism means the first step to full independence.
"Now is not the right time to call for independence," said Ferhad Pirbal, a writer and university professor in Irbil. But "federalism is the means to reaching that goal."
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All by July? I don't think so.
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