BBC - South Sudan leader urges split

Image by Vít Hassan via Flickr

Southern Sudan leader Salva Kiir has made his strongest call for full independence when the region's status is decided at a referendum due in 2011.

He said voting for unity with northern Sudan would make southerners "second class citizens" in their own land.

A referendum in the now semi-autonomous oil-rich south was part of the 2005 deal that ended decades of civil war.

A BBC correspondent in Sudan says Mr Kiir's comments are likely to add to tensions between the north and south.

Previously officials have been careful in public to at least promote the unity between north and south, as the peace deal stipulates, says the BBC's Peter Martell in the South Sudan capital Juba.

'Respecting choice'

Salva Kiir was speaking at a special church service to pray for peace, timed to mark the start of voter registration for multi-party elections due in April 2010.

"When you reach your ballot boxes the choice is yours. You want to vote for unity, so that you become a second-class [citizen] in your own country, that is your choice," he told the congregation at St Teresa's Catholic Cathedral in Juba.

"You would want to vote for independence, so that you are a free person, in your independent state, that will be your own choice. And we will respect the choice of the people."

In October, South Sudan said it had achieved a breakthrough in talks with the north over terms for the referendum.

Vice-President Riek Machar said the vote would require a simple majority as long as two-thirds of those eligible took part.

In the past, the Khartoum government had insisted that 75% of voters must agree to independence.

Mr Machar said all southerners would be allowed to vote, including those in Khartoum and those outside Sudan.

Iraq May Hold Vote on Early U.S. Withdrawal

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

BAGHDAD, Aug. 17 -- U.S. troops could be forced by Iraqi voters to withdraw a year ahead of schedule under a referendum the Iraqi government backed Monday, creating a potential complication for American commanders concerned about rising violence in the country's north.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's move appeared to disregard the wishes of the U.S. government, which has quietly lobbied against the plebiscite. American officials fear it could lead to the annulment of an agreement allowing U.S. troops to stay until the end of 2011, and instead force them out by the start of that year.

The Maliki government's announcement came on the day that the top U.S. general in Iraq proposed a plan to deploy troops to disputed areas in the restive north, a clear indication that the military sees a continuing need for U.S. forces even if Iraqis no longer want them here.

Gen. Ray Odierno said American troops would partner with contingents of the Iraqi army and the Kurdish regional government's paramilitary force, marking the first organized effort to pair U.S. forces with the militia, known as the pesh merga. Iraqi army and Kurdish forces nearly came to blows recently, and there is deep-seated animosity between them, owing to a decades-long fight over ancestry, land and oil.

If Iraqi lawmakers sign off on Maliki's initiative to hold a referendum in January on the withdrawal timeline, a majority of voters could annul a standing U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, forcing the military to pull out completely by January 2011 under the terms of a previous law.

It is unclear whether parliament, which is in recess until next month, would approve the referendum. Lawmakers have yet to pass a measure laying the basic ground rules for the Jan. 16 national election, their top legislative priority for the remainder of 2009.

Before signing off on the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement last year, Iraqi lawmakers demanded that voters get to weigh in on the pact in a referendum that was to take place no later than last month. Because it did not happen, American officials assumed the plebiscite was a dead issue.

U.S. officials say they have no way to know how the referendum would turn out, but they worry that many Iraqis are likely to vote against the pact. Maliki billed the withdrawal of U.S. forces from urban areas at the end of June as a "great victory" for Iraqis, and his government has since markedly curbed the authority and mobility of U.S. forces.

Senior Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Odierno probably will make an announcement later this week or early next week the accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. forces, which now stand at 130,000, by one or two brigades between now and the end of the year. Each brigade consists of about 5,000 troops. Odierno said Monday that he has not decided whether to speed up the plan, which he said remains on schedule.

The acceleration would still be much slower than if the referendum nullified the agreement.

Still, senior Pentagon officials played down Maliki's announcement, saying it was an expected part of Iraq's political process. Senior Iraqi officials did not raise the possibility of the referendum with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates when he visited the country earlier this month, Pentagon officials said.

Bahaa Hassan, who owns a mobile phone store in Najaf, south of Baghdad, said he would vote for a speedier withdrawal.

"We want to get rid of the American influence in Iraq, because we suffer from it politically and economically," he said. "We will vote against it so Iraq will be in the hands of Iraqis again."

But many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis and Kurds, consider the presence of the U.S. military a key deterrent to abuses of power by the Shiite-led government.

"After six years of Shiite rule and struggle, we still have no electricity, so what will happen if Americans leave?" said Dhirgham Talib, a government employee in Najaf. "The field will be left to the Shiite parties to do whatever they want with no fear from anybody."

A poll commissioned by the U.S. military earlier this year found that Iraqis expressed far less confidence in American troops than in the Iraqi government or any of its security forces. Twenty-seven percent of Iraqis polled said they had confidence in U.S. forces, according to a Pentagon report presented to Congress last month. By contrast, 72 percent expressed confidence in the national government.

Zainab Karim, a Shiite lawmaker from the Sadrist movement, the most ardently anti-American faction, said she was pleasantly surprised that the government is backing the referendum.

"I consider this a good thing," she said. "But we have to wait and see whether the government is honest about this or whether it is electoral propaganda."

As the Iraqi government took steps to force U.S. troops out earlier than planned, Odierno said Monday that he would like to deploy American forces to villages along disputed areas in northern Iraq to defuse tension between Kurdish troops and forces controlled by the Shiite Arab-led government in Baghdad.

"We're working very hard to come up with a security architecture in the disputed territories that would reduce tension," Odierno told reporters. "They just all feel more comfortable if we're there."

Scores of Iraqis have been killed in recent weeks in villages along the 300-mile frontier south of the Kurdish region. U.S. military officials say the attacks bear the hallmarks of Sunni extremists, but local leaders have traded accusations to bolster their positions on whether specific areas should be under the control of Baghdad or the autonomous government of Kurdistan.

The pesh merga currently controls some villages that are nominally outside the three-province Kurdish region. The expansion of Kurdish influence in northern Iraq has prompted Maliki to deploy more troops loyal to Baghdad to northern provinces south of Kurdistan. The new provincial leadership in Nineveh province, the most restive among them, has made curbing Kurdish expansion its top priority and has called for the expulsion of pesh merga forces.

The tension, Odierno said, has created a security vacuum that has emboldened al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group that he said was almost certainly responsible for recent sensational bombings in the province. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq has increased since the urban pullout, Odierno said, largely as a result of attacks in the disputed territories.

"What we have is al-Qaeda exploiting this fissure between the Arabs and the Kurds," he said. "What we're trying to do is close that fissure."

Staff writers Greg Jaffe and Scott Wilson in Washington and special correspondents Zaid Sabah and Aziz Alwan in Baghdad, Saad Sarhan in Najaf, and Dlovan Brwari in Mosul contributed to this report.

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.