The terrible bombing in northern Iraq on Sunday, which left at least 101 people dead and hundreds wounded, was most likely a calculated attempt by insurgents to thwart Kurdish cooperation on the governance of Iraq and widen tensions on the nation’s delicate political front.
Among the dead were party officials of two rival Kurdish political groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The parties in recent months have made peace and are working in an uneasy detente to craft the Kurdish role in the new Iraq.
Kurds make up nearly 20 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people. They endured torture and other atrocities under Saddam Hussein. To protect them, the United States and Britain set up a semiautonomous region in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.
As the rest of Iraq suffered under the brutal hand of Hussein, Kurds thrived while embracing Western commerce and culture. They supported the U.S. invasion by providing militias and allowing troops to pass through their territory. Kurdish leaders insist that as part of the deal for their cooperation, they were to pretty much have final say over the fate of their territory, something the Bush administration denies.
Since the end of the war, Kurds have been in an expansionist mood. Kurdish forces moved south into oil-rich Kirkuk and some border areas previously outside their purview. In recent weeks Kurdish activists have been gathering thousands of signatures calling for a referendum on establishing a Kurdistan federation.
Complete sovereignty for the Kurds is politically unrealistic. Turkey fears that it would fuel a campaign among Kurdish separatists in its midst. The Shiite Muslim majority, which dominates southern Iraq, and Sunni Muslims in central Iraq are not about to cede to the Kurds political power over a large swath of the country or control of Iraq’s huge northern oil reserves.
As they buried their dead this week, the Kurdish parties officially vowed to stay the course and continue in the dialogue over Iraq’s future. Still, they want to remain as separate from the rest of Iraq as possible, ceding only defense, finance and foreign policy to Baghdad.
After bathing in near autonomy for more than a decade, many Kurds are not about to accept limits or abandon their dream of statehood. They see a Kurdistan loosely confederated with the rest of the nation and not as a “United States of Iraq.” They do not particularly trust the Bush administration to look after their best interests nor will they accept Shiite-dominated rule.
Compared with much of the rest of the country, the Kurdish territory has been peaceful, even thriving. But a delicate political balance still must be achieved there.
The task is to convince the Kurds not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. They will not gain independence, but they can have broad power to govern their land and their people and to continue the economic progress they have made–without the threat of Saddam Hussein hovering on their doorstep.
