Elections coming up in Kurdistan..

There seems little interest in these in the mainstream western press. There is a new reform party that seems to be gaining conisderable momentum but it remains to be seen whether it can make much headway against the two traditional rivals anchored in different tribal groups. The two groups have managed to field candidates jointly and this will make it even more difficult for the many opposition groups to make much headway.' One thing all the parties agree on and that is for the extension of Kurdish control over disputed areas around Kirkuk and Mosul. Most Kurds are thankful for the relative peace and prosperity in Kurdistan over the last years so this may be enough to return the old guard parties.

This is from the Economist.


An election in Iraqi Kurdistan

Change in the air?

Jul 16th 2009 SULAYMANIYAH

A new movement is trying to break an old duopoly

AS IRAQ’S Kurds prepare to vote on July 25th for a regional assembly and a president, the buzzword is Goran, meaning change. It is also the name of a new movement that is trying to defeat—or at least to dent—the two parties that came into their own when the Kurds won self-rule in 1991, after the Americans and their allies chased Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the south and then prevented him from beating up the Kurds in the north. The elections promise to be the most hotly contested during the Kurds’ current golden era of autonomy. As Change’s campaign gathers pace, its name and logo, an orange candle on a dark-blue background, is emblazoned on buses, taxis, T-shirts, baseball caps and balloons. The movement is on a roll. Whether this translates into votes in a society where patronage and clan loyalties still largely hold sway is not yet clear.

...... It castigates the corruption and cronyism of the two main parties: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), long a fief of the Barzani clan in the north and western parts of the region around Dohuk and Erbil; and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), run by the Talabani clan in Sulaymaniyah province to the east and in the disputed lands to the south around Kirkuk.

Change also says the two established parties have done a poor job at defending Kurdish interests in the federal parliament in Baghdad. Kirkuk, the fiercely disputed city and province which the Kurds claim as theirs, is still in administrative limbo; the Arabs who run the national government in partnership with the KDP and PUK refuse to let it go or hold a promised referendum, though the Kurds control most of the area. Change says it agrees with its Kurdish rivals on territorial goals but would be better at achieving them.

........There are 24 lists in all, with 11 seats reserved for minorities such as Turkomans and Christians.

Change’s leader is Nawshirwan Mustafa, aged 65, who for many years played second fiddle in the PUK to Jalal Talabani, now Iraq’s national president. But two years ago Mr Mustafa broke away, saying that a KDP-PUK stranglehold over every aspect of life had bred corruption, cronyism and nepotism to the detriment of ordinary Kurds. A host of senior officials and thousands of PUK rank-and-file have followed Mr Mustafa; many have been expelled for sympathising with him.

Popularly known as Kak Nawshirwan (Kak being a term of respect for an elder brother), Mr Mustafa uses the Wusha Foundation, a media outfit that runs a daily newspaper, a popular website and a satellite TV station, to spread his message. “It’s time for pluralism, accountability and transparency in Kurdistan,” he says. “If we want to achieve our goals in Baghdad, we must sort out our own house first.”

The old two-party establishment has responded by drafting in Barham Salih, a widely respected PUK man who is Iraq’s deputy prime minister, to head its list. If the duopoly survives, he may replace the Kurdish region’s incumbent prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, a KDP man who is a nephew of the region’s president, Masoud Barzani, the clan’s undisputed leader. Under an agreement between the KDP and PUK, the prime minister’s job was supposed to rotate every two years but turmoil in the PUK meant it failed to produce a candidate, so the younger Barzani has stayed put for four years. A row over the issue could well break out after the election.

No one seems to think that the position of the senior Barzani is under threat as the region’s top man. He heads the most powerful Kurdish clan unchallenged, as his father did before him. In a separate ballot on the same day as the assembly vote, Kurds are likely to re-elect him.

In general, they still appreciate the longest period of peace they have enjoyed for many years, especially compared with the continuing bloodshed farther south. Prosperity has grown. The infrastructure has improved. New oil wells are being sunk. But dissatisfaction with administrative shortcomings—in essence, corruption—has been growing too. If Change gets going, the old establishment may not last for ever.





Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Iraq faces a new war as tensions rise in north.

This is from the Independent.

So far the south and central Iraq have remained relatively calm although there are still tensions between Sunni and Shia. In the districts bordering Kurdistan however things are heating up rather than cooling down. These areas are being fought over by the central govt and Kurdish forces. Also, what is left of the Al Qaeda groups in Iraq seems to be concentrating around Mosul.



Iraq faces a new war as tensions rise in north
Violence between Iraqi Kurds and Arabs is threatening an all out conflict that could complicate US plans to withdraw troops
By Patrick Cockburn in Mosul
Monday, 23 February 2009

A new war is threatening Iraq just as the world believes the country is returning to peace. While violence is dropping in Baghdad and in the south of the country, Arabs and Kurds in the north are beginning to battle over territories in an arc of land stretching from Syria to Iranian border.
A renewal of the historic conflict between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, which raged through most of the second half of the 20th century, would seriously destabilise the country as it begins to recover from the US occupation and the Sunni-Shia civil war of 2005-07.
The crisis between the government of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and the Kurds, who make up 20 per cent of the population, is coming to a head now because a resurgent Iraqi army is beginning to contest control of areas which Kurds captured when Saddam Hussein fell in 2003.
There has been a mounting number of clashes between predominantly Arab Iraqi army units and the Kurdish peshmerga forces along a 260-mile line that stretches diagonally across the northern third of Iraq, from Sinjar to Khanaqin in the south.
The tensions underpinning the conflict have always attracted less international attention than the US-Iraqi war or the Shia-Sunni conflict.
Yet if the conflict develops into a full-scale war it will complicate President Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw 142,000 US soldiers from Iraq over 16 months and redeploy many of them to the US military effort in Afghanistan.
In some respects, the Arab-Kurdish war has already started. Kurdish leaders say that in Nineveh province, Sunni Arab gunmen have killed 2,000 Kurds and 127,000 Kurds have turned into refugees over the past six years.
Baghdad and Basra have become safer in the past year but Mosul, the capital of Nineveh and Iraq’s third largest city, remains one of the country’s most violent places.
Khasro Goran, the Kurdish deputy governor of Nineveh province, who operates from heavily-fortified headquarters in Mosul, said it was “not acceptable” for non-Kurdish military units to move into disputed areas. “If they try to do so we will stop them.” On the streets outside Mr Goran’s office, once a Baath party office and now the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, an array of competing military forces holds power.
His immediate guards are tough-looking Kurdish peshmerga in uniform. As we left their compound, they fired a shot to deter a driver who got too close. The driver promptly slewed his car across the road.
Two hundred yards further on, we passed a small Iraqi Arab unit covering a crossroads with a light machine gun mounted on a cream-coloured Chevrolet pick-up truck.
Close by, a policeman in a blue uniform held an AK-47 assault rifle. He was part of a mostly Sunni Arab force recruited in Nineveh which changed sides during an insurgent offensive in 2004 and joined the anti-government guerrillas. The rebels captured 31 police stations.
Mosul is majority Sunni Arab but on the east bank of the Tigris river which flows through the city, there are large Kurdish districts that are overlooked by a mosque on a small hill, where the Prophet Jonah is reputedly buried.
Most of the Kurds living west of the Tigris have fled or have been killed. The Christian community was driven out by attacks last year, although some Christians are now returning.
There have been so many bomb attacks in Mosul that in many places damage is no longer repaired. Pieces of smashed concrete lie where they landed after blasts several years ago.
The city is al-Qa’ida’s last stronghold in Iraq. Earlier this month, a bomb killed four US soldiers and an interpreter while gunmen killed two prominent local politicians. The police also come under frequent attack. Shortly before we arrived in Mosul, one officer was killed by a roadside bomb, the sound of which echoed across the city.
Yesterday, US and Iraqi government forces said they had launched a new military campaign to eradicate al-Qa’ida in the province, although US troops were being used only for back-up.
The Kurds in the oil province of Kirkuk and in Diyala province have also often been targeted by suicide bombers. For their part, Arabs in these areas accuse the Kurds of launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing against them.
The Kurdish regional prime minister, Nechervan Barzani, says that if the disputes are not settled by the time the Americans withdraw, “it will be war between both sides.”
Another Kurd, who did not want his name published said: “This is the day the Kurds were always afraid of. As the Americans leave, once again we are left isolated and face to face with Baghdad.”
What makes the situation so explosive in Nineveh and across the north is that over the past year the balance of power has been changing in favour of the Arabs and against the Kurds.
Minority Kurds had dominated the provincial government in Nineveh and Mosul after Sunni Arabs, despite being the majority of the population, boycotted the local elections four years ago. But new polls last month reversed the balance, sweeping an Arab Iraqi party, Al Habda, to dominance in the provincial council.
The Iraqi army is also becoming stronger. It contains both Kurdish and Arab units but it is the non-Kurdish units that are being sent north.
“The 12th division was sent to near Kirkuk without any consultation with us,” said Safeen Dizayee, a senior official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
“There is an effort to move away Kurdish officers above a certain rank. Eighty per cent of the army in the north is Arab, including senior staff.”
Iraqi Kurds: Unwilling citizens
*Iraqi Kurds, who speak their own language and have their own identity, did not want to be part of Iraq when its borders were drawn after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. They often rebelled in pursuit of independence or autonomy and suffered terribly under Saddam Hussein. During the Kuwait war they rose up but were defeated. They created an autonomous zone outside Baghdad’s control and since the US invasion have had autonomy through the Kurdistan Regional Government, but they control a much larger area where Kurds are the majority – this is the area now disputed. The Kurds are also an essential part of Iraq’s coalition government.