Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Darbandi had left his wife and two children in Stockholm this trip, with a mind toward bringing them back soon if things looked good. He wanted to come home to Kirkuk, but the mess around him started looking like a hard sell for his children, ages six and eight, who knew only European living. He was torn, and a bit hesitant in his manner, trying too hard to like being back. Having left Kirkuk in 1985 to avoid serving in the Iraqi army, he had fled across the mountains to Iran, where he stayed less than a year—including a six-month prison term for talking politics a little too loudly. After smuggling himself to Sweden, Darbandi joined the thousands of Kurds in the European diaspora.* He had spent nineteen years in Sweden, marrying another "Swedish Kurd" and raising his kids bilingual, always with the hope of returning. During that time his older brother died in the 1991 Kirkuk uprising. Darbandi's blood was calling him back to Kirkuk.

  "This is my father's city, my hometown. It's not about oil—not for us," Darbandi said, but he knew that the oil was what would bring the outside world to Kirkuk, and perhaps to Kurdistan. "One thing I learned in my years in Sweden—America and Europe want business. And if we lose Kirkuk to the Arabs, there will be no business here for the Americans. That's why the Kurds here are so much better off than the Kurds in Turkey: they have no oil," he said.

  Not a member of either party, Darbandi felt the same ambivalence as many independent-minded Kurds. When Talabani and Barzani went to Baghdad, he wanted them fierce and maximalist; when they came home to Kurdistan, he wanted them to keep their peace and share their power. He hoped for an American-enforced truce that would help Kurds start to finally enjoy some of the wealth of Iraq. But if you asked Darbandi whether he preferred Iraq or a free Kurdistan, it was no contest. He wanted Kurdish independence, and Darbandi realized that it would require the return of many people like himself—foreign-educated and relatively wealthy—if Kurdistan were to have a chance. After the elections, Darbandi went home to Sweden and asked his wife to pack up their house.

  EVEN AS THE Kurds got out the electorate for a new government in Baghdad, most Iraqis suspected that they would rather have been voting to separate and form their own country. If there had been any doubt, it disappeared on Election Day, when volunteers sitting at tables outside all the polling stations across the north presented voters with an informal ballot asking them if they wouldn't rather secede. Karwan Kader, one of the founders of the Kurdistan Referendum Movement, a group of Kurdish activists formed one year before the elections, presented it as a matter of setting right the errors of 1919.

  "When Kurdistan was attached to Iraq, no one ever asked us if we wanted to stay or not," he said. Kader and his colleagues, in a remarkably short time, had gotten some 1.7 million signatures on a petition to hold a referendum for Kurdish inclusion in Iraq. If Iraq was being created anew, Kader said, this time it should be done with the consent of the Kurds. "Saying what the Kurds really want is the best means to keep not only Iraq but the whole region safe and stable. It's not violence; it's the most peaceful and democratic thing," he said.

  Kader's statements were more than a little coy—he knew what the result of the referendum would be, and that it would throw more dynamite onto the short-fused geopolitics of Iraq, since Kurdish politicians had to spend so much time in Baghdad persuading people that the Kurds could be trusted to work for a unified Iraq. At the same time, Kader's arguments were hard to refute; instead the Americans ignored them, refusing to see him when he brought a petition for a vote on Kurdish secession to the CPA in Baghdad. Bringing the same list of signatures to the United Nations got a more pleasant brush-off, since the U.N. had hardly any say in Iraq. The Kurdish parties, on the other hand, didn't mind seeing the volunteers with their makeshift ballot boxes outside the official voting centers. Both the KDP and PUK publicly disavowed any connection to the Referendum Movement, but the organizers would never have been able to set up without the blessing of the parties. Kader said his movement was neutral and saw this as a beginning of reform with the two entrenched parties.

  "They shouldn't keep all their meetings in the dark," said Kader. "They can't exist without the people. We don't know if what we are doing serves them or not, but we'll continue our struggle."

  Barzani and Talabani clearly had an idea that the Referendum Movement would serve a purpose, even if both leaders knew that the dream of an independent Kurdistan was a long way off. On Election Day, nearly two million Kurds stopped at the little tables outside their polling stations and picked up ballots with an Iraqi flag on the top half and a Kurdish flag on the bottom. Ninety-eight percent of them passed over the flag that had "God is great" written in Arabic script. Below it they circled the yellow sun of the Kurdish flag, the same flag that Mulla Mustafa Barzani flew briefly in the Mahabad Republic of 1946. The next time the Kurdish leaders went to Baghdad, they would have another fresh bargaining tool to pressure the Arabs with—the documented fact that only 2 percent of Kurds wanted to stay in Iraq.

  THAT EVENING SPORADIC gunfire sounded across Kirkuk, but the party resumed at Mam Rostam's house, with old friends stopping in to congratulate him on the Kurds' presumed election victory in Kirkuk. "I've been facing death for thirty-five years for the sake of democracy, for the right to vote," said Rostam. "Anybody against democracy should be dropped in acid."

  Two weeks after the elections, the results confirmed predictions, with massive turnout for the Shi'ite Arabs, especially the religious parties. The Kurds pulled in nearly 80 percent of their eligible voters. In Kirkuk the Turcomans had a very small turnout, suggesting that the number of Sunni Turcoman voters in the entire country was in the low hundreds of thousands, though some of them may have voted for the Kurdish list, which included a few Turcomans. Shi'ite Turcomans probably supported the Shi'ite Alliance, which had come away with 60 percent of the vote—a powerful majority but not the two thirds needed to select the president. For that they would need to woo the Kurdish leaders, who came to Baghdad commanding 26 percent of the vote, enough to make them the decisive minority. The deal was obvious: the Shi'ites would support Talabani in the ceremonial position of president in exchange for the Kurds' support in picking a Shi'ite Arab as the more powerful prime minister. But the procedure was front-loaded for endless bargaining, since the minority's only real power came at the moment of naming the prime minister. Every detail would have to be worked out before Talabani could take office and implement the deal. Candidates for each ministry were weighed for their qualifications, but much more for their ethnic and sectarian alignment. The horse trading began and seemed never to end.

  Washington's clock was ticking much faster than Baghdad's, as February turned to March with no Iraqi government. One major dispute was the apparent Shi'ite choice for prime minister, Da'wa party leader Ibrahim al-Ja'fari. The Kurds would have preferred Adel Abdul-Mahdi, whom they thought of as more friendly to a secular Kurdistan—in fact more friendly all around. Ja'fari's long exile in Iran had taught him the trick of holding endless conversation without any discernible substance. Ja'fari had led the opposition to the Kurds' key veto provision in the TAL, and they expected him to continue doing so in the upcoming negotiations over the constitution. As the haggling dragged through the month of March, the Iraqi power vacuum fed the insurgency, and Condoleezza Rice phoned both Kurdish leaders personally to push for action in filling the posts. But Iraqis could have easily asked her to do the same thing in Washington. Inexplicably, for at least the second time since America launched the most ambitious foreign policy venture since World War II, no one sat in the driver's seat in Washington.

  In February, Ambassador Negroponte accepted the newly created job of director of national intelligence, the "intel czar" position designed to orchestrate all of America's competing spy agencies. Negroponte's zeal to leave Baghdad after about six months on the job wasn't unusual—the entire American operation seemed to be running like a temp agency. James Jeffrey took over as charge d'affaires, but he soon found that Condoleezza Rice, having moved from the White House to th
e State Department in the second Bush administration, wanted a direct hand in Iraq policy. Rice was a Soviet expert, and her migration to a Middle East focus had been reluctant and slow—she brought weight but little understanding. Her crucial failure in the national security advisor's role had been an inability to synchronize the Pentagon and the State Department, and she still appeared unable to get them together for the Iraq effort.*

  America needed a new ambassador on the ground quickly, and the logical choice was Zalmay Khalilzad. He belonged to the core group of neo-con true believers, but all his time on the ground showed him to be pragmatic and free of the head-on arrogance that had bothered so many Middle Easterners. Khalilzad had just stage-managed a constitutional process in Afghanistan and left on excellent terms with the Afghan leadership. But there was a snag—Khalilzad made a diplomatic faux pas sometime in 2004, being a little too frank about American policy with the U.N.'s Lahkdar Brahimi. Somehow the need for leadership on Iraq didn't trump the White House's need to slap Khalilzad's wrist, and the administration held him out for a few months as punishment.6 Washington finally named him ambassador in April 2005, but Khalilzad didn't arrive in Iraq until the third week of June, and even then he returned to Washington for a round of meetings before finally settling in Baghdad at the end of July—in all, a four-month gap in leadership at, arguably, the world's most important embassy.

  With no other knowledgeable voice in Washington, Khalilzad essentially took over the entire Iraq policy and left for Baghdad. Other neocon planners had moved on: Wolfowitz to the World Bank and Feith to academia. Robert Blackwill left the National Security Council when Rice went over to the State Department. After Secretary Rice picked Ambassador Richard Jones as her Iraq advisor in the State Department, he stayed only two months in the post. I did a brief poll of Iraq watchers in the capital that summer, asking who was in charge of overall Iraq strategy, and the consensus was "Tell me if you figure it out." Eventually the thirty something Meghan O'Sullivan, by then a scarred veteran of the State Department Iraq desk, ORHA, and the CPA, would become the last person standing on the Bush Iraq team and take over the issue for the National Security Council. But for the time being, it was all "Zal," and the Kurds were delighted.

  Before Khalilzad's confirmation hearing in Washington, Hoshyar Zebari and Barham Salih had lunch with him at the Ritz-Carlton on M Street, and the three friends discussed their concerns about Iraq and about Kurdistan.7 The two Kurdish envoys also let Khalilzad in on a practical joke they had played on his predecessor.

  "When Negroponte called them in to tell them I'd been appointed, they'd both told him it was completely unacceptable!" recalled Khalilzad. "Negroponte was startled, and they put him on for a while before they let him know it was fine, we were all old friends."

  After Khalilzad was appointed, Salih met with him again, at a low-key Italian restaurant along with their wives. It was like 1991 all over again, but both men had grown powerful in the previous fifteen years. They focused their discussion on the Iraqi constitution, the Bush administration's key goal. Not only would it be a legitimate legal framework, but if Iraq had a constitutional democracy, no matter how weak, it would also really mean something of a "mission accomplished" for the White House. Salih had been made planning minister in the new government, but he also laid out the Kurds' concerns, knowing full well they now had a friend in charge. Khalilzad, Salih said, "knows the culture and understands the geopolitics better than anyone I know. If [he] had been there earlier, maybe some of the mistakes never would have happened."

  THE NEW IRAQI transitional government was finally sworn in at the beginning of May, more than three months after Election Day. Talabani became president and, following the hard-fought bargain, named Ibrahim al-Ja'fari as prime minister. Hoshyar Zebari remained in the post of foreign minister, and Kurds held five of the thirty other ministries and one deputy prime minister position. In Kurdistan the event unraveled a Mexican stand-off of internal politics. The Kurds had waited for the final deal in Baghdad before they could go ahead and inaugurate the new Kurdistan Regional Government—which would be calibrated perfectly to keep the KDP and PUK in balance. Until Talabani was in for sure, Masoud Barzani had to wait to stand up as president of the KRG in Erbil. His nephew Nechirvan took office as Kurdish regional prime minister, with the PUK's Omar Fattah as his deputy and Adnan Mufti as speaker of the parliament. Just as in the greedy madness of the 1992 government, the rival parties needed balance down to the number of tea boys in the lobby. Parties representing Turcomans, Christians, Yazidis, and Islamists also held a few seats and smaller ministries.

  Despite their internal competition, the Kurds preserved a unified position toward Baghdad, and the natural tension between the two capitals, Erbil and Baghdad, got a kick start when Condoleezza Rice came to Iraq on May 15. Contrary to any protocol, she stopped first in Kurdistan to talk with Masoud Barzani before flying south to meet with Prime Minister Ja'fari in Baghdad. The snub might have bothered Ja'fari, but it positively incited the Turks, who still opposed the idea of a federal system in Iraq and persisted in hoping the Kurdistan Regional Government was just a bad dream they would soon wake their way out of. And if Ja'fari resented the mirror government to the north, it was nothing compared to how much he disliked working with Talabani.

  The Shi'ites and Kurds still shared compatible goals—each wanted to dominate their own regions—but the goal of federalism always fit better with the larger Shi'ite Party in southern Iraq, SCIRI, which could easily see itself in charge of a huge autonomous "Shi'istan" spanning from Basra to Karbala.8 Ja'fari's Da'wa party was smaller, however, and beholden to the parliamentary support of another Shi'ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, who opposed federalism as well as anything else the Americans expressly supported. Politics aside, Ja'fari's and Talabani's personalities were like chalk and cheese. Ja'fari soon proved as inactive as he was untalkative; Talabani, by contrast, a busybody at his quietest moments, couldn't stand for a second of dead air coming from Baghdad. Within minutes of taking office, he began making pronouncements about plans for employing factional militias to help the security situation, about the time frame for the constitution, and about addressing the issue of Kirkuk. Talabani held security meetings that Ja'fari, indignant, refused to let his ministers attend. By mid-summer the two were hardly speaking.

  The dispute went public for the first time during the August funeral of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd. Talabani flew to Riyadh as Iraq's head of state, and the Sunni vice president Ghazi al-Yawar, believing he was filling in for Ja'fari, went by separate plane. Unbeknownst to either, Ja'fari decided he would attend after all and came on a third plane from Baghdad. However, Iraq had only an embarrassing two seats in the pavilion. Ghazi al-Yawar graciously yielded his seat to the older Talabani. A similar dispute saw two separate delegations go to the U.N. General Assembly, and the two camps fought for physical turf inside the Green Zone. At one point Talabani's pesh merga drew guns on partisans of Ja'fari's Da'wa party in an argument over who would get to use one of Saddam's palatial buildings. Khalilzad intervened before shots were fired, and Talabani came away with the building.9

  Besides the petty arguments, the Kurds had a real objection to Ja'fari's government, concerning the only piece of Iraq they wanted that remained south of the green line—Kirkuk. Through the period of Iraq's interim government and now into the first elected term, both the Kurds and Baghdad selectively observed the transitional administrative law that Bremer's people had labored over. Within months of Ja'fari's inauguration, Kirkukees were complaining that he had blocked funds for the "normalization" of Kirkuk. The Kurds had fought hard to get control of the oil ministry but failed, and as a result the Northern Oil Company, based outside Kirkuk, still had almost no Kurds among its twelve thousand employees. The Kurds' overriding goal was to make sure that enough of them would be officially returned to Kirkuk, so that in an eventual referendum, the city would vote to join the Kurdish region. To the rest of Iraq this looked like a program of "Kurdification
" was taking the place of the old "Arabization."

  Ramadan Rashid, Kirkuk's underground resistance leader, was disgusted with the stalemate. The new government in Baghdad, he said, had pledged two hundred million dollars to help with Kirkuk, but Ja'fari wouldn't let any of the money come north. What's more, Ja'fari kept sending his own party members up to the city to take key jobs, a reminder of the way Saddam had sent Baghdad Arabs up to work in the oil company. Kirkuk's city council, dominated by Kurds after the election, refused to work with Ja'fari's appointees, and nothing got done. Rashid blamed both sides.

  "If the Kurdistan Regional Government were serious, they could have easily implemented the normalization without a penny from the central government. But they say KRG funding needs to stay only in the Kurdish region," said Rashid, observing a construction boom in Kurdish cities like Erbil and Sulimaniya.

  The Iraqi property claims office set up by the CPA had managed only about twenty-five hundred settlements since its creation, and had more than thirty thousand pending. Even for those adjudicated, no money arrived for Kurds to return or for Arabs to resettle elsewhere. Before one side had clear ownership over Kirkuk, it seemed, no one was going to put up the money to rebuild it, and into the vacuum poured Iraq's growing chaos. Insurgents found fertile ground among Kirkuk's nervous Arab population, and soon much of the city became a red zone, connected directly to the hotbeds of Tikrit, Samarra, and Baquba. The Kurdish parties did send as many Kurds as they could into Kirkuk's safer outlaying areas, where the pesh merga could still protect them. Along the wedge of land between the roads to Erbil and Kirkuk new houses sprung into new neighborhoods, with the clear blessing of the Kurdish authorities. Kurds even tried to lay their claim as far away as Tal Afar—a predominantly Turcoman city near the Syrian border—resulting in more charges of expansionism. As usual in Kirkuk, everyone had their own set of numbers and their own form of math.