A City With 3 Chips on Its Shoulder

By JAMES GLANZ
August 10, 2005 KIRKUK, Iraq
The fate of this hard-bitten northern city of roughly a million people was supposed to remain in the balance until after Iraq's politicians had finished polishing the elegant phrases in the nation's constitution. Instead, Kirkuk has thrust its ungainly mix of money, power and ethnic rivalry into the negotiations over Iraq's future as a democracy.
Iraq was supposed to ratify its constitution before settling disagreements among the Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs in Kirkuk, according to decrees handed down when the American occupation ran the Iraqi government. Those decrees still have the force of law, but Kirkuk and those who claim it are refusing to wait.
"We want our main demands included in the constitution," said Mahmood Othman, a Kurdish independent on the committee writing the document. If the disputes cannot be ironed out, he said, "we'd prefer to delay the whole constitution."
Kurds want the city and its oil riches to be the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkmens insist that they have historical rights to Kirkuk and a majority in the central city. And many of the Arab families that Saddam Hussein forcibly moved here during his "Arabization" program - often after taking homes from people in the first two groups - believe that they should have a substantial political voice and be allowed to remain.
Mr. Othman and other Kurdish leaders are demanding timetables for the return of Kurds to Kirkuk and a decision on whether it will be a part of Kurdistan. The Kurds also want a formula for sharing revenues from the extensive oil deposits around the city and a census they believe will show that they, not the Turkmens, hold a majority.
In this city that many see as a potential flash point for a wider conflict, the Kurdish demands are more than matched by the opposition.
"We are encouraging our people to claim their rights peacefully," said Ali Mehdi, a local Turkmen leader. But if talks with the Kurds break down, Mr. Mehdi said, "that will be the beginning of the civil war."
Arab grievances are just as sharp. And unfortunately for anyone who would like to see a rainbow coalition of ethnic groups rule Kirkuk in harmony, the local Kurds see any such arrangement as pointlessly complex.
"Those people who consider Kirkuk a complicated city are the ignorant people of history," said Rizgar Ali Hamazan, a Kurd on the Kurd-dominated Kirkuk Brotherhood list, which won 26 of 41 seats on the local provincial council in January elections.
As with so much else in Iraq, the conflicting views on Kirkuk are rooted in conflicting readings of the same history. A Turkmen garrison town during the Ottoman Empire, Kirkuk was dominated by that ethnic group until after World War II, said Joost R. Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, who has done extensive human rights work in northern Iraq.
Ayub Unus Ali, 73, a Turkmen who worked in the oil industry, said the city was much more homogeneous in his youth. "Frankly, there was just Turkmens," Mr. Ali recalled, though he also remembered scattered Arab tribesmen.
Reminiscences like that are not welcomed by many Kurds, who now claim Kirkuk as an ancestral capital. Still, the oil industry did draw people from Kurdish villages around the city, and the Turkmens had only a slight majority by 1957, Mr. Hiltermann said.
The Kurdish presence continued to grow in the 1960's, and although the Arabization programs reversed some of the trend, thousands of Kurds have returned, many of them to shantytowns around the edge of Kirkuk as they wait for their property cases to be resolved. Now, Mr. Hiltermann believes, the best measure of the ethnic mix in Kirkuk is the elections held in January, which indicated a clear Kurdish majority.
"Turkmens have a completely inflated sense of their own size," Mr. Hiltermann said.
This spring, the Brotherhood List carried out a power grab after negotiations with the Turkmens and Arabs on forming a joint government broke down, using the Kurdish majority to secure nearly every top administrative post in the local government.
The move set off demonstrations among the Turkmen and Arab populace. Not until Aug. 1, after interventions by American officials, did the Kurds finally agree to give more council seats to the Arabs and Turkmens.
But the agreement remains to be carried out, and just two days after it was struck, the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, set off a new round of anger, this time among the Kurds. During a visit to Kirkuk, Mr. Khalilzad said that he would not support the deportation of Arabs whose families were relocated under Mr. Hussein's program, prompting Kurds to claim that he was helping to marginalize them.
Not everyone sees Kirkuk as worrisome. Brig. Gen. Alan Gayhart of the 116th Brigade Combat Team acknowledged the American involvement in the negotiations but said that all the agreements had been made freely by the Iraqis.
"We have been like a manager, or a guy in the corner in a boxing match," General Gayhart said. He added that the ethnic tensions "are predominantly between the political groups" rather than ordinary citizens.
Still, in interview after interview, those citizens bitterly complain that they find it difficult to win jobs from ethnic groups beyond their own.
It is unclear how far the Kurdish demands for timetables and a census go beyond the current law, which states that a permanent resolution on the city's status should wait until after the constitution is ratified and property claims stemming from Mr. Hussein's Arabization program are settled.
But members of the constitutional committee are considering formulas for sharing the oil wealth from provinces, like the one surrounding Kirkuk.
"Part of it will go to the federal government and part to the governorate which produced the resource," said Thamir Ghadban, a member of the committee who is a former oil minister.
But Mr. Hamazan, the Kurdish official, made it plain with an analogy that the Kurdish claim on Kirkuk goes beyond oil. "One day the oil of Texas will run out," Mr. Hamadan said.
"And then the Americans will not love Texas?" he said, driving home his point with a bit of sarcasm: "They will give it to another country."
Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and an employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.