“For us, the Kurdistan Region is not just a red line. It is also a death line” roared Iraqi Kurdish nationalist leader Masoud Barzani last week as he blasted the decision by the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad to restrict the autonomous region’s control over its finances.
“It’s Kurdistan or death,” he said.
The former guerrilla chieftain who has sought to lead the Iraqi Kurds to independence from the rest of the country described the Iraqi political factions whose members voted for the decision contained in Iraq’s new budget as “chauvinistic” and accused them of renegading on their pledges in agreements made prior to the formation of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani in October.
Barzani’s thunderous remarks came amid a bitter divide in Iraq’s federal legislature over the share of the Kurdistan Region in the national budget, which was voted for along factional lines as has been the case since the overthrow of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
But Barzani’s unprecedented lambasting of the federal parliament for allegedly “undermining the constitutional rights of the Kurdistan Region” also underscores an uneasy alliance between the Iraqi Kurdish leaders and the Shia groups that have controlled Iraq’s politics since Saddam’s ouster.
The crisis has also highlighted the Kurdish Question that has long haunted modern Iraq, reflecting the complex national-ethnic conflict that has given rise to the Kurdish resistance and independence movement.
The Kurds in Iraq have been seeking statehood since the inception of the Iraqi state in 1922 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Over time, their separatist movement has developed on a greater scale and moved from ideological mobilisation to military struggle.
The Iraqi Kurds under the leadership of their two major parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), launched an armed rebellion against the central government in Baghdad with multiple ceasefires and political agreements broken and leading to a protracted conflict.
In 1991, fighters from the two Kurdish factions succeeded in taking control of large chunks of the northern Kurdish enclave, seizing on the political and security vacuum in Iraq following Saddam’s defeat in the war with a US-led international coalition after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The turning point came when the KDP and PUK established a separate administration in northern Iraq after a “No-Fly Zone” was set up by the US, Britain, and France in the region to protect the Kurds against Saddam’s reprisals.
The wind seemed to be at the Iraqi Kurds’ back, with the wings of destiny looking to carry their national cause aloft. For the first time in their turbulent history, the Kurds’ struggle for rights, autonomy, and even an independent Kurdistan was forging new national and geopolitical realities.
The drastic change in the Iraqi Kurds’ lot in 1991 was so overwhelming that questions were asked about the errors committed by the Kurdish leaders that later saw them squander the political momentum brought about by this finest hour in the Iraqi Kurds’ history.
With a wide swathe of northern Iraq under their control for the first time, KDP leader Barzani and PUK leader Jalal Talabani turned down Saddam’s offer for Kurdish autonomy with the introduction of democracy in Iraq.
After several rounds of negotiations in Baghdad, various issues remained unsolved, including international guarantees and the borders of the proposed autonomous region, especially whether they would include the oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
For the Saddam regime, which had granted limited autonomy to the Iraqi Kurds in 1970, the priority was to preserve Iraq’s unity by preventing them from forming the nucleus of a future Kurdish state.
Its bet was that the Kurdish leaders would fail to remain unified and would fail to change the long-term regional and international objections to Kurdish statehood.
However, instead the Kurdish leadership, driven by their mistrust of Saddam and buoyed up by Western protection in the No-Fly Zone, opted to remain outside of Baghdad’s control and build their own governing space in the hope that the new status quo would enforce the case for future Iraqi Kurdish statehood.
It was another missed opportunity by the Iraqi Kurdish leaders to resolve the conflict not only peacefully but also realistically by showing that they understood that autonomy was just one among others in a series of challenges.
They succumbed to their hope that Saddam’s fall would pave the way for their dream of independence to come true.
After the US-led invasion of Iraq and the collapse of the Saddam regime in 2003, the two main groups that had consolidated their grip on the Kurdish enclave in Iraq worked with the US Occupying Authority and Shia political allies to enshrine a federal Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq’s post-2003 constitution.
But behind the façade of federalism, the two parties sought to build a semi-independent administration with foreign representation and turn the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters into an effective military force. They sought to enlarge their territorial control by annexing Kirkuk and hundreds of towns and villages in several other provinces.
The ambitions of the Kurdistan Region’s federal setup were so vast that it surpassed the large-scale land grabbing, control of the borders and energy resources, and extra constitutional powers its leadership gave themselves.
The deliberate enhancement of the federal status of the region illustrated the path the Kurdish leadership had chosen – which was eventually to leave Iraq.
In order to pursue that goal, the Kurdish leadership, particularly the KDP, took the rest of Iraq into grinding conflicts with the aim of ultimately falling apart. A stable, democratic, prosperous and strong Iraq carries the potential of a costly and prolonged struggle for Kurdish independence.
The Kurdish leadership then fought with Shia and Sunni factions in Iraq over the terms of sharing power and wealth in the new federal system. The formation of central governments became protracted and subjected to hard bargaining to ensure that the Kurds remained kingmakers.
Annual federal budgets became venues for wrangling over the KRG’s allocations and deal-making to avoid federal oversight.
The Kurdish political groups in Iraq have not only remained party to many national conflicts, but their representatives in the central government in Baghdad have also failed to act effectively to stop the ruinous path of corruption, dysfunction, and cronyism taken by their political partners in the capital.
These are all signs of Iraq’s decay and it is difficult not to find much for Kurds to be hopeful about in the country’s bleak future which could justify their breakup from the country.
As the Kurds’ political leaders have kept reimagining the domestic, regional, and international purpose behind their federal entity, they have continued to do so on their own terms and not for the sake of besting Iraq.
The lingering financial and political disputes with Baghdad have made the country more fragile and have undermined its stability, leaving political turmoil and security voids increasingly exposing it to terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) group.
Worse still, while government forces and volunteers were fighting IS terrorists who had seized several towns in Iraq in a major offensive, the Barzani-led administration in the Kurdish Region sent in Kurdish Peshmerga forces to drive Iraqi army units out of Kirkuk.
They took full control of Kirkuk and its oil fields and of other Kurdish-populated areas outside the official territory of the KRG.
The series of miscalculations by Iraqi Kurdish leaders culminated in a decision by Barzani, then the KRG’s president, to hold an independence referendum in October 2017, which was rejected by the Iraqi government as unconstitutional.
The US and other Western nations and governments in the region also did not recognise the unilateral referendum.
Errors, misjudgements, and arrogance have not only created mistrust of the Kurdish leadership’s relationship with the rest of Iraq and doubts about their genuine belief in federalism, but they have also undermined any unity of purpose among the Kurds themselves.
Since an autonomous Kurdistan government was established in the 1990s, it has been mutating into a rentier entity. The KDP and the PUK have been locked into a cycle of mutual recrimination and have established “a state within a state” in the areas under their control and fought for shares of revenue and power.
The two parties have turned the two areas under their control into fiefdoms ruled by the Barzani and Talabani families. Corruption and nepotism have marked their reign, as they compete, and even fight, over revenues from oil, customs duties, taxes, and kickbacks from foreign businesses, leaving ordinary Kurds battling hardships or seeking refuge abroad.
It is a painful irony that one political slogan that the Iraqi Kurdish parties have propagated since the inception of their insurgency against the government of General Abdel-Kareem Qassim in 1960 has been “democracy for Iraq and autonomy for Kurdistan” in order to avoid being accused of being separatists.
But over more than six decades, the Kurdish leadership has made alliances with Iraq’s most anti-democratic political forces, regional autocrats, and foreign powers with vested interests in order to consolidate their grip on the Kurdish Region and throw into doubt any intention to help build a democratic Iraq.
Such flaws were laid bare in the three years state budget, which was passed by the Iraqi parliament last week. The Kurdish parties fought fiercely over allocations for the KRG but legitimised the ruling elite’s funneling of billions of dollars to their own groups in the rest of Iraq.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 June, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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