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Summary
Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari traveled to Turkey on Feb. 28, drawing strong condemnation from Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who accused him of making unilateral state visits without consulting the government. Talabani is well aware that Jaafari's discussions in Ankara will center on the issue of containing Kurdish aspirations for regional autonomy. And as the chief representative of Iraq's Kurdish population in the central government, Talabani's response to Jaafari's visit has revealed a widening breach between the Shia and Kurds as negotiations toward the formation of the Iraqi government intensify.
Analysis
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Feb. 28 that he deeply regretted interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's unilateral decision to make a state visit to Turkey. He added that the Iraqi government is not committed to any agreement reached between the prime minister and Ankara.
Talabani is slightly more than perturbed that Jaafari is acting on his own accord before even being reconfirmed as Iraq's prime minister. Moreover, Jaafari's visit to Turkey will be followed within days by a visit from radical Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Jaafari and al-Sadr are widely perceived by Kurdish leaders as the Shiite leaders least friendly to the Kurds in the government-formation talks. Jaafari's trip to Turkey has jabbed a sharp thorn into these negotiations, providing an opportunity for the Sunnis and Shia to serve their mutual interest by using the talks to contain the Kurds.
The Kurds are responding to the talks by pointing out that as outgoing interim prime minister, Jaafari does not yet have the authority to carry out negotiations with the Turks, even though he is prime minister-designate of Iraq's new full-term government. Talabani's remarks, in fact, underscore a deep rift between the Shia and the Kurds at a time when the Shia are also experiencing tenser-than-usual relations with the Sunnis.
The Turkish government will primarily address the Kurdish question in its talks with the Iraqi Shiite leaders. Turkey's concerns are clear. Like Iran, it does not want Iraq's reinvigorated Kurdish population to encourage Kurdish separatist movements within Turkish territory. Ankara also wishes to keep the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk out of Kurdish hands to deprive Iraqi Kurds of a key asset that would help finance their long-term goal of independence. Ankara also wishes to safeguard the interests of Kirkuk's Turkomen population. Also on Turkey's wish list is a guarantee that the peshmerga, or Iraqi Kurdish militia, will be disbanded under the new government.
The Kurds, on the other hand, are playing their cards carefully to ensure the advances they have made since the 1991 Persian Gulf War are not lost in the web of negotiations with the Shia and Sunnis. The Kurds opted for a more gradual approach in securing their autonomy in northern Iraq, realizing that an aggressive push for independence in the post-Saddam Hussein era would only have invited a messy reprisal from Turkey.
Thus, even though it is a priority for the Kurdish delegation to keep Kirkuk under the control of the Kurdish regional government, the Kurds are willing to offer the concession of allowing current oil revenues to filter through the central government in Baghdad. Displaced Kurds who were driven out of Kirkuk by Hussein's forces in his bid to "Arabize" the city are now returning; the Kurdish leadership hopes they will constitute a majority in the December 2007 census, so that a proposed referendum in the city will allow them to keep Kirkuk part of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region legitimately. And Kurdish leaders do not plan on disbanding the peshmerga, but will gradually integrate its guerrilla forces into the state security apparatus.
Washington likely will not endorse the Kurdish strategy fully. Kurdistan faces the dilemma of having its territory spread across four countries -- Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey -- each of which has a core interest in repressing its Kurdish minority to dampen any separatist tendencies. For its part, the United States has complex relations with each of these countries, and so cannot afford to promote the existence of an independent Kurdistan in the region.
Washington's main goal in the negotiations for the formation of Iraq's full-term government is to bring the Sunnis into the political fold. This is aimed at quelling the Sunni nationalist insurgency and bringing pressure to bear on the Sunni jihadists. And if containing the Kurds can be used as a lever to bring the Shia and Sunnis to the negotiating table, the United States will discreetly use that lever.
For the Kurds, this means a considerable number of obstacles lie in their path to regional autonomy. Not only must the Kirkuk issue be addressed within the framework of the Iraqi government, the method of carving up Iraq into federal regions or provinces must also be worked out among the factions. Earlier, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim -- who leads the main Iraqi Shiite political party, the United Iraqi Alliance, as well as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- loosely supported the Kurds in the idea of regional federalism during the referendum negotiations. At that time, the prospect of securing a Shiite enclave in the south looked promising.
While SCIRI, an Iranian creation formed in Tehran in 1982, saw federalism as being in its interest, Jaafari's Hizb al-Dawah and the movements of al-Sadr and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are much more centered on a strong central government. Thanks to the Shiite failure to achieve a consensus on the notion of federalism, the Sunnis won a chunk of the government in the December 2005 elections. When Sunni participation in the election decreased their influence, Shiite leaders joined al-Sadr's call for a strong central government. They also openly opposed the Kurdish preference for a regional federal structure, which essentially provides for an autonomous Kurdish region in the north that would include all the provinces with sizable Kurdish populations.
Given the complexity of the negotiations, the most the Kurds can hope for at this juncture is a political framework containing as many loopholes as possible to allow for their continued evolution into a sovereign entity. Moreover, for Kurdish aspirations to be met, the United States must maintain its military presence in Iraq to keep regional forces in check. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Washington's interests in Iraq do not clearly align with Kurdish interests.
