The tortuous path to the Kurdistan Regional Government

Part One – 1947-79

By Mufid Abdulla:

Following the defeat of the Mahabad republic – the first independent Kurdish state – in 1947 the Iraqi government copied Tehran’s brutality by hanging four Iraqi Kurd army officers who had accompanied Mustafa Barzani into Iran. Barzani himself refused to surrender to the Iranians and led a band of his warriors on a legendary long march through the border regions of Iran, Iraq and Turkey and into Soviet territory where he lived in exile for more than a decade.

In 1958 Barzani was invited to return to Iraq following a coup d’etat by Brigadier Abd al Karim Qasim and his Free Officers which overthrew the Hashemite monarchy. Qasim was influenced by Nasser in Egypt and he pledged the establishment of a democratic republic and extended a hand of friendship to the Kurds. Article 3 of the provisional constitution proclaimed: “Arabs and Kurds are partners in the Homeland, and their national rights are recognised with the Iraq entity”. Barzani was given a hero’s welcome in Baghdad and a government post along with the perks of the office. He was happy to accept this because it reinforced his position as the leader of the Kurds. Qasim wanted the cooperation of Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) as a counterweight to the growing influence of Arab nationalists and Baathists who favoured Nasser’s pan-Arab unity project and the absorption of Iraq into a United Arab Republic. For a while Barzani supported Qasim, even getting the KDP to drop its commitment to Kurdish autonomy and deploying KDP fighters to crush a revolt by Baathist officers in Mosul.

However, Qasim alienated Barzani by allying with some of his tribal rivals and Barzani joined an armed revolt which ended when Qasim was overthrown by an alliance of Arab nationalist and Baathist officers which was in turn replaced by another, non-Baathist, regime led by Abd al Salam Arif. By now Barzani was facing a considerable challenge within the KDP from elements from the urban intelligentsia led by Jalal Talabani who opposed his capricious and tribalist style of leadership and his hostility to land reform in Iraqi Kurdistan. He signed an accord with Arif that spoke of Kurdish national rights but made no mention of autonomy but the agreement broke down and Barzani was soon at war again with the regime. At one stage he was also fighting the forces of the KDP faction led by Talabani which had decided to support the regime in opposition to his landlord-backed insurgency. This bloody clash of factions was a microcosmic reflection of the Cold War, with Barzani securing support from the pro-American Shah of Iran while Talabani was allied to the Soviet-backed Iraqi regime.

Baathists seize power

In 1968 the Baathists seized power in Baghdad and they pursued friendly relations with the KDP Talabani faction. Talabani wrote that the Baathists were “the first ruling Arab political party to extend its hand to the Kurdish people directly sincerely and hopefully” (1). Initially Barzani rejected overtures from the regime arguing that, “all they want today is to gain time to consolidate the basis of their regime” (2). However he shifted his stance when the then vice-president Saddam Hussein travelled to Kurdistan, put two blank sheets of paper in front of him and told Barzani to write down his demands, saying and that he would not leave until they had reached a mutually acceptable agreement. Their meeting laid the basis for the Peace Accord of March 1970.

This made provision for the Kurdish language to be the official language in Kurdish areas, the unification of areas with a Kurdish majority as a self governing unit, and the involvement of Kurds in the central government at a senior level including as one of the vice presidents.

“History will bear witness”, declared the accord, “that you did not have and will never have as sincere a brother and dependable an ally as the Arab people”.

However Barzani’s earlier scepticism proved well-founded because the accord soon began to crumble over a number of disagreements including Baathist efforts to change the ethnic balance in Kirkuk and other towns. Barzani tilted back towards his pro-Western allies, renewing links with Israel and Iran and openly courting the USA. In 1973 he declared in the Washington Post: “We are ready to act according to US policy if the US will protect us from the wolves. In the event of sufficient support we should be able to control the Kirkuk oilfields and confer exploitation rights on an American company” (3).

The US policy was to undermine the Iraqi regime but not to ensure a victory for Kurds. As an official put it:

“Both Iran and the US hope to benefit from an unresolvable situation in which Iraq is intrinsically weakened by the Kurds’ refusal to give up their semi autonomy. Neither Iran nor the US would like to see the situation resolved either way” (4).

The US was simply using the Kurds as a pawn in its foreign policy. It did not want to alarm neighbouring states which had restive Kurdish minorities – Turkey, Iran and Syria – by helping the Iraqi Kurds to establish their own state.

Barzani did not realise this and, confident of US backing, he increased his demands on the Iraqi government, now calling for the Kurds to be granted self rule within a federal rather than unitary state with oil-rich Kirkuk as the Kurdish capital. In 1974 Baghdad published a new autonomy law, on paper even more favourable to the Kurds than the 1971 accord and gave Barzani two weeks to respond and join the National Front government. War ensued in which Barzani’s peshmerga (guerrilla) forces were backed by Iranian Kurds and by Iranian regular forces dressed in Kurdish clothes.

However Saddam had opened secret negotiations with the Shah of Iran leading to the signing of an agreement in which Iraq conceded to Iran’s demands in relation to the Shatt al Arab waters and Iran promised to close its border to the peshmerga and cut off military aid. The US knew that this agreement was in the pipeline but failed to warn Barzani that his campaign was doomed.

‘Arabisation’

In the wake of Barzani’s defeat Bagdad stepped up its repression and ‘Arabisation’ of Kurdistan. Over the next three years around 1,400 Kurdish villages were razed to the ground and up to a million Kurds were deported to resettlement camps. Anyone caught returning to their homestead was executed. The governorate of Kirkuk was split so as to ensure an Arab majority and Kurds were forbidden to purchase property in the city.

When a British ‘Save the Children’ worker reported the plight of the Kurds to the Foreign office he was told by an official that: “We depend on Iraq for £500 million of contracts each year – no government would let us sacrifice these for the sake of a disadvantaged minority” (5).

Following this debacle Barzani withdrew from the day-to-day struggle. He died in 1979 and the leadership of the KDP eventually passed to one of his sons, Masud Barzani. In June 1975 the KDP experienced a major split and the formation of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani. Nawshiran Mustafa Amin brought his clandestine Komala group into the fold and became deputy leader of the organisation. In its first public statement the PUK blamed “the inability of the feudalist, tribalist, bourgeois rightist and capitulationist Kurdish leadership” for the collapse of the latest Kurdish revolt (6). In the coming years the Kurdish national movement was bedevilled by bloody factional divisions, primarily between the KDP and PUK but also involving smaller parties.

References

1. The Kurdish Question in Iraq, Edmund Ghareeb, Syracuse University Press, 1981, p. 75

2. Le Monde, 12 October 1968

3. A Modern History of the Kurds, David McDowall, IB Taurus, 2004, p. 33

4. The Pike Commission Report to the House of Representatives, 19 January 1976

5. McDowell, p. 340

6. ‘Revolution in Kurdistan’, PUK pamphlet