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Vol. 81/No. 30 August 14, 2017
Iraq: Kurdish independence referendum faces
US opposition
BY JIM BRADLEY
The leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq are pressing
ahead with plans for a Sept. 25 independence referendum, despite
opposition from Washington, Baghdad, Tehran, Ankara and other Mideast
capitals.
At the same time, the Kurdish Democratic Northern Syria Federal System
Constituent Assembly, whose armed forces are leading the drive to take
the city of Raqqa from the reactionary Islamic State, have called for
elections in communes, town and village administrations and for national
parliament from September to January.
This move was strongly opposed by the dictatorial Syrian government of
Bashar al-Assad, which declared them “illegal.”
The backdrop for these developments are the continuing wars in Iraq,
unleashed by Washington’s interventions and exacerbated by the bitter
social and political divisions based on religious privilege in Iraq, and
the seven-year-long Syrian civil war.
In 2011, Assad brutally crushed widespread popular mobilizations for
democratic rights in Syria and against his regime. Tens of thousands
were killed, or jailed and tortured.
Since then more than 400,000 people have been killed and over half of
Syria’s 22 million people driven from their homes, creating a
catastrophe for working people.
The unintended consequences of these developments have been the
emergence of strong, disciplined and well-armed Kurdish forces with
control over most of the Kurdish regions in both countries.
Lacking any other viable alternative on the ground, the Washington-led
anti-Islamic State coalition maintains a tactical alliance with both the
KRG’s peshmerga and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria
in the fight to push back IS and defend the imperial interests of the
U.S. rulers in the region.
Opposition to Kurdish independence or autonomy by the capitalist rulers
in Damascus and Baghdad is rooted is deep fears of the effects on their
rule, and fears in Tehran and Ankara of their inspiring renewed moves
for independence by Kurds under their rule.
Washington wants the KRG to put off any referendum, at least until
sometime in 2018 after the Iraqi general election.
“Having a referendum on such a fast timeline, particularly in disputed
areas would be, we think, significantly destabilizing,” Brett McGurk,
U.S. envoy to the U.S.-led Global Coalition against Islamic State
recently told the Kurdish newspaper Rudaw. One of the disputed areas is
the oil-rich city and region of Kirkuk, taken by the peshmerga in 2014
after Bahgdad’s forces fled in face of an IS offensive.
Speaking at his weekly press conference July 25, Iraqi Prime Minister
Haider al-Abadi said that the KRG referendum is “unconstitutional and
illegitimate,” and “we will not deal with it” or recognize the results.
Addressing a Washington conference July 28, Chancellor of the Kurdistan
Regional Security Council Masrour Barzani reminded the gathering of “all
these atrocities that the [Kurdish] people had been through, all these
chemical bombardments and the infamous Anfal operations.”
During the Saddam Hussein regime’s 1988 Anfal campaign tens of thousands
of Kurds in northern Iraq were slaughtered — many with chemical weapons.
At the time Washington was backing Saddam’s regime in its war against
Iran, seeking to do damage to the continuing legacy of mass
working-class radicalization that followed the overthrow of the
U.S.-backed shah in 1979.
The deadliest attack was in Halabja in March 1988, when Iraqi warplanes
dropped mustard gas and the deadly nerve gas sarin. Some 5,000 people —
mainly women and children — were killed and thousands more died from the
effects years later. Survivors of these attacks were driven from their
villages, which were burned to the ground while Washington looked the
other way.
“When is the right time?” Masrour Barzani said in Washington. “We think
the time has come,” referring to the scheduled referendum.
About 30 million Kurds inhabit a large contiguous region that spans the
borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the largest nationality in the
world without a state.
The Turkish government accuses the YPG of being terrorists allied with
the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought the Turkish rulers
for over 30 years in the name of Kurdish national rights. Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will never allow a Kurdish state
on Turkey’s border.
Moscow, which has had a consul in the KRG capital Erbil since 2007,
recently signed deals for Kurdistan oil — a 20-year-long deal with the
Russian state company Rosneft. It includes an investment of $3 billion
in KRG territory, added to a February deal to purchase up to a million
barrels of oil per day through 2019. Moscow, Washington and Ankara are
now all players in the Kurdistan oil market.
“We see the referendum as the expression of the ambitions of the Kurdish
people,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Rudaw in a July 24
interview. But, in no uncertain terms, Lavrov warns the KRG leaders
against taking any steps to transform that “expression” into actual
moves to independence.
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