High_Gravity
Belligerent Drunk
Statehood for Kurds?
Iraqi Kurds may be on the brink of a statehood breakthrough - latimes.com
The Baghdad newspaper Sabah published a surprising article a few weeks ago. Its editor, Abd Jabbar Shabbout, suggested it was time to settle the "age-old problem" between Iraq's Arabs and Kurds by establishing a "Kurdish state." Never before had I heard such a once-heretical view so publicly expressed in any Arab quarter. And this was no ordinary quarter: Sabah is the mouthpiece of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Shabbout went on to suggest a negotiated "ending of the Arab-Kurdish partnership in a peaceful way."
He called his proposal Plan B, Plan A being the "dialogue" between Iraq's central government and the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq that emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
But Plan A, he said, was getting nowhere. Differences over power and authority, oil and natural resources, territory and borders were so deep that the dialogue repeatedly failed. In December the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga faced off in an atmosphere so tense, according to Shabbout, that hostilities could have broken out at any moment as a result of the slightest miscalculation.
And it wasn't only Shabbout, but Maliki himself, who warned that if war did break out it wouldn't be just a war between Kurdish rebels and Baghdad, as it used to be under Hussein, but an "ethnic war between Arabs and Kurds."
Could it be that the "Kurdish question" has reached another critical stage in its history, one that is intimately bound up with the region-wide cataclysm that is the "Arab Spring"?
The Kurds' destiny has always been shaped less by their own struggles than by the vagaries of regional and international politics, and the great Middle Eastern upheavals they periodically produce. With World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France promised the Kurds a state of their own, but then reneged. They fetched up as minorities, more or less severely repressed, in the four countries Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria among which their vast domains were divided. They repeatedly rebelled, especially in Iraq. But their rebellions were always crushed, the last one, under Hussein with the genocidal use of gas.
But the Kurds never ceased to dream of independent statehood. Their first breakthrough came after Hussein's megalomaniacal invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when an internationally protected Kurdish "safe haven" was established in northern Iraq, which enabled them to take their first state-building steps in the shape of a regional assembly and a degree of self-government.
Iraqi Kurds may be on the brink of a statehood breakthrough - latimes.com