Iraq passes crucial election law for 2010 - washingtonpost.com

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Agreement sets 2010 vote, allows U.S. troop drawdown to proceed

By Ernesto Londoño and Qais Mizher
Monday, November 9, 2009

BAGHDAD -- Iraqi lawmakers passed an election law Sunday night, overcoming a weeks-long impasse and averting a constitutional crisis that threatened to delay the U.S. troop drawdown.

The vote was held during a rare evening session preceded by intense lobbying efforts by U.S. and U.N. diplomats, who had grown increasingly frustrated by the sluggish pace of negotiations and the acrimony that characterized them.

"This was amazing for me," Kurdish lawmaker Ala Talabani said after leaving the session. "There was a lot of discussion, a lot of arguing, but we finally were forced to listen to each other. It's a nice feeling -- that we're on the path of real democracy."

To address the most contentious issue, Kurdish and Arab lawmakers agreed that votes cast in the disputed province of Kirkuk would be examined closely for months after the election.

The yearlong review period was established to determine how dramatically the influx of Kurds to Kirkuk since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion has altered the province's demographics.

The assessment could ultimately change the outcome of the election in that province, and the process could exacerbate a bitter, decades-long fight over ancestry, oil and control of the city.

Sunni Arabs in the city accuse Kurds of artificially boosting their population in an effort to eventually control the oil-rich city and annex it to their autonomous region in northern Iraq.

Saddam Hussein expelled Kurds from Kirkuk and neighboring cities and villages in northern Iraq during his tenure.

Despite opposition from the Kurdish bloc, lawmakers agreed to use an open-list system, which will give political parties and factions less flexibility to distribute seats. Advocates of an open-list election hope it will make Iraqi politicians more transparent and more responsive to constituents.

The law passed by a comfortable margin, with 141 of the 195 present lawmakers voting in favor. There are 275 Iraqi lawmakers. The Iraqi presidency council is expected to ratify it within days.

President Obama, during remarks Sunday afternoon in the Rose Garden, congratulated Iraqi leaders for passing the law. "Their flexibility and commitment to their country sends an important signal to the world about Iraq's democracy and national unity," he said.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill said the election will probably be held Jan. 23, a few days later than originally scheduled but within the timeframe mandated by the constitution.

Hill said U.S. officials are heavily engaged in the process, and sought to assure lawmakers that the language of the election law would not be binding to future negotiations over control of Kirkuk.

Sunday's session and the preceding weeks of tense discussions about the election law underscored the deep divisions and suspicion that characterize Iraqi politics. Several closed-door meetings and sessions ended abruptly amid shouting matches and walkouts -- a potentially ominous sign of how difficult building a new government will be.

A months-long dispute over who would get top positions after the 2005 election contributed to a state of virtual anarchy amid rising violence -- a scenario American officials hope will be avoided next year. In a sign of the waning leverage of the U.S. government, some lawmakers said they pushed back aggressively on what they saw as American meddling, and U.S. officials were often scrambling to learn what had transpired at closed sessions and private meetings in recent days.

Some Sunnis were visibly angry after the session. They decried the resolution over Kirkuk, and said the bill does not do enough to give Iraqi refugees a stake in the political process.

Iraqis overseas can vote for seven slots, but Sunni lawmakers said they deserve more robust representation.

"This law is an injustice," prominent Sunni lawmaker Salih al-Mutlak said after the vote.

Kirkuk at the Heart of Iraq Election Law Deadlock - NYTimes.com

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BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraqi politicians have been turning up their rhetoric over Kirkuk, the oil-rich city that both Kurds in the north and Arabs in the south want to control.

The dispute has caused a deadlock over the country's election law, threatening to delay Iraq's nationwide elections set for mid-January. Any vote setback could, in turn, disrupt American plans to withdraw troops from Iraq, scheduled to ramp up after the vote.

''We are getting to a crisis,'' said Marina Ottoway, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ''They have been trying for over a year to reach a compromise on Kirkuk.''

''Now,'' she warns, ''it is becoming a problem for the United States.''

For years, tensions have simmered over Kirkuk and its surrounding province of about 1.3 million people, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad. Boasting an ancient citadel, it is in many ways an ordinary, if somewhat shabby, Iraqi city.

But it sits on a political and cultural fault line among ethnic Kurds and smaller groups of Arabs and Turkomen, or ethnic Turks. Vast oil fields, dotted with flaming smoke stacks, lie just to the north and west, raising the stakes.

Kurds consider Kirkuk a Kurdish city and want it part of their self-ruled region. But during the rule of former dictator Saddam Hussein, tens of thousands of Kurds were displaced under a forced plan by Saddam to make Kirkuk predominantly Arab.

Regaining control of the city is thus extremely symbolic for Kurds and many Kurds have returned since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But other groups claim Kurds have packed more Kurds into the city than before.

The population breakdown remains in dispute but U.S. officials estimated last spring that Kurds make up 52 percent of Kirkuk and its province, with Arabs at 35 percent and Turkomen about 12 percent.

The Arab-led central government vehemently opposes anything that would remove Kirkuk from its control. A referendum on the city's future -- required by the Iraqi constitution -- has been repeatedly postponed. The Turkomens have generally sided with Arabs, believing they'll be treated better than under the Kurds, a longtime enemy of their Turkish supporters.

The immediate dispute centers on voting rolls listing who can vote in Kirkuk in the January national election. While many proposals have been discussed, Kurds have favored using the 2009 voter registry, which likely reflects the Kurdish growth, while Arabs generally prefer the 2004 voter registry, when the Kurdish population wasn't so large. That has delayed the necessary deal on the election law.

Long term, money also plays a role. Because of the surrounding oil, whoever controls Kirkuk stands to benefit enormously.

The Kurdish-Arab dispute over Kirkuk is different from Iraq's main political dispute between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, which plays out more in the capital of Baghdad and surrounding areas.

The Sunni-Shiite split has less relevance in Kirkuk where both Kurds and Arabs are mostly Sunni Muslims. There, the fear among Arabs -- both Sunnis and Shiites -- is that Kurds will gobble up all jobs and government benefits if Kirkuk joins Kurdistan.

The United States has been watching the debate intensely for any repercussions it may have for the American military withdrawal.

Under a plan by President Barack Obama, all U.S. combat troops will be out of the country by the end of August 2010, leaving about 50,000 trainers and support troops in Iraq. Those remaining troops would leave by the end of 2011.

U.S. military commanders say the majority of the troop departures would come about 60 days after the planned Iraqi election -- the idea being to get the country on stable footing before making any major troop changes.

Any delay in the election date could possibly push back the troop withdrawal. U.S. officials have said that they are still hoping the Jan. 16th date will go forward, but say their troop drawdown plan is not set in stone.

As the election approaches, tensions have increased with Arab lawmakers saying Kirkuk is an Iraqi city and Kurdish lawmakers boycotting a parliament session last week over the issue.

Iraq's central government should have tried to resolve the underlying Kirkuk issue long before now, asserts Mohammed Ihsan, the former Minister of Disputed Territories, who is now in the Kurdistan regional government.

''They forget that without sorting out this issue, you cannot develop a serious partnership throughout the country,'' Ihsan said.

But a Turkomen lawmaker, Abbas al-Bayati, said Iraq's parliament has not given up hopes of a deal on the election law. ''Delaying the elections is a red line. Elections must not be postponed at any price.''

The tensions over Kirkuk -- already high -- rose last week after Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, said in a speech: ''We refuse to give Kirkuk a special status in the election.''

The wording refers to an April U.N. report recommending giving Kirkuk such ''special status'' with oversight by both the near-autonomous Kurdish region and the central government in Baghdad. Kurds reject that.

The controversy over Barzani's words was further complicated, at least initially, by a mistranslation of his remarks on Iraqi state television, which inaccurately quoted him as saying he pledged to ''annex'' Kirkuk -- a more hardline position.

A regional official with state-owned Iraqiya TV, Evan Nasir Hassan, said Saturday the station made the translation error inadvertently when translating from Kurdish to Arabic. The Associated Press used Iraqiya's Arabic translation in its original story on the speech Wednesday, but subsequently ran a correction describing Barzani's comments accurately.

The mistranslation aside, emotions run high.

Fawzi Akram, a legislator in radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc, who listened to Barzani's speech in the original Kurdish, called his comments provocative.

''We must contain the situation, not make it more complicated,'' he said. ''Kirkuk is an Iraqi city.''

Now It’s a Census That Could Rip Iraq Apart

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — When Iraqis were drafting their Constitution in 2005, the parties could not agree on who would control Kirkuk, the prized oil capital of the north. They couldn’t even agree on who lived in Kirkuk, which is claimed by the region’s Kurds, but also by its Turkmen minority and Sunni Arabs. For that matter, they couldn’t even agree on where Kirkuk was — in Tamim, Erbil, or Sulaimaniya Province.

So the Iraqis punted, inserting Article 140, a clause that called for a national census, followed by a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, all to be held by the end of 2007. What followed were a succession of delays, against a backdrop of sectarian violence and warnings that Kirkuk could blow apart the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that has governed Iraq since the Americans invaded.

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, warned two years ago that if “Article 140 is not implemented, then there will be a real civil war.” He’s still waiting.

But so is the threat of civil war, which lurked quietly in the polling places this weekend as residents of Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated areas voted for their regional president and Parliament. Until the status of Kirkuk is clear, nobody really knows how much power those regional officials can wield within the national government, or even whether the Kurds will want to remain part of Iraq.

The problem with settling that is the Kirkuk referendum. There can’t be a referendum until Iraqis figure out who is eligible to vote in Kirkuk, which they can’t do until there’s a census. And any attempt to hold a census in this country may well end up, all by itself, provoking a civil war.

Even now, Sunnis don’t agree that they’re a minority of the nation, and that the Shiites are the majority, though it’s patently obvious. And in Kirkuk, everyone is in denial, one way or another.

Ethnically mixed and awash in oil, Kirkuk has always been something of a numbers game. There are 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — 6 percent of the world’s total and 40 percent of Iraq’s — all within commuting distance of downtown Kirkuk. Its fields, though half destroyed, still produce a million barrels of oil a day.

Both Turkmen and Kurds claim to be in the majority; the last reliable estimates, from a 1957 census, gave Turkmen a plurality in the city and Kurds a plurality in the surrounding district, with Arabs second in the countryside and third in the city. In the Saddam Hussein years, the Kurds declared Kirkuk part of their autonomous region of Kurdistan, but the dictator sent the army after the Kurdish guerrillas, known as pesh merga, and held onto the prize. He then set about Arabizing it, forcibly relocating families from the south while evicting Kurds and Turkmen alike.

After 2003, pesh merga troops quickly took control of Kirkuk as the Iraqi Army collapsed. Some local Arabs revolted, nurturing an insurgency that still festers. Others simply remained. Meanwhile, Turkmen appealed to powerful patrons in Turkey that they were undercounted and ignored by everyone, and Turkey came to their aid to make sure the Kurds didn’t get Kirkuk, which supplies much of Turkey’s oil. Only the presence of American troops has kept a lid on things; a brigade is still kept in Kirkuk.

And still there is no census. “The Iraqi government for the last three years, every year they say it will come this year,” says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament.

A date for a census is on the calendar — Oct. 24. But it is subject to ratification by Iraq’s cabinet, the Turkmen have announced that they will boycott it and Arabs in Kirkuk may well do the same.

One proposal for getting past this problem would be to hold a census everywhere but in Kirkuk. If that happened Kirkuk could end up, in effect, a disenfranchised province when the next general national elections are held in January.

Another suggestion is to hold a referendum on Kirkuk without a census, but that would invite a dispute about the validity of the results.

And then there’s the Lebanese solution, the one that so far seems likeliest: just do nothing. The last census in that sectarian hodge-podge of a country was in 1932; no one would dare hold one now, since the groups who would almost certainly lose representation — Maronite Catholics, Druze and Sunni Muslims — would simply go back to war rather than get counted out.

Already, the Kurdish regional government has been defying Baghdad and issuing contracts to develop its oil fields, including some in Kirkuk. The Iraqi government showed its displeasure by moving its 12th Division, some 9,500 troops, up to Kirkuk; there they have been provocatively patrolling into pesh merga-held areas and setting off a series of minor incidents recently.

“It’s very worrisome that these incidents continue to happen,” said Joost Hilterman, of the International Crisis Group. “Perhaps they will be contained, but the stakes are huge.”

For the moment, there are still plenty of American troops around to do the containing, but all American combat troops are due to pull out by next summer. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to broker an agreement, especially when no one is likely to really want it.

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting.