26 January 2004

1. "Kurds Await Iraq's Embrace, and Hope It's Not Too Tight", a world of possibility and freedom is what this younger generation of Kurds is desperate to preserve, as their elders meet with other Iraqi politicians in Baghdad to mesh the Kurdish north once more with the Arab south.

2. "UN in accord on voluntary return of ethnic Kurdish refugees from Iraq to Turkey", Turkish and United Nations officials have agreed on the modalities for the voluntary return to Turkey of up to 13,000 ethnic Kurds who have lived in exile in Iraq since the early 1990s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced today.

3. "In debate over Turkey, Europe defines itself", Switzerland European executives, politicians and other dignitaries gathered here the other day to mull the forthcoming expansion of the 15-member European Union to embrace 10 new members along an arc stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Malta in the Mediterranean.

4. "Turkey PM to Seek U.S. Backing on Iraq, Cyprus", Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan heads to the United States Sunday to seek the Bush administration's support on two issues of strategic importance to Turkey -- Iraq's future shape and the fate of divided Cyprus.

5. "Turkey, Turkish Cypriots agree on push for Cyprus deal", Turkey and Turkish Cypriots are united in seeking a solution to the division of Cyprus, their leaders said, in a new push for peace talks to end the protracted conflict threatening Ankara's bid to join the EU.

6. "Island of stability in volatile Iraq", autonomous Kurds seen as example, cause for worry.

1. - The New York Times - "Kurds Await Iraq's Embrace, and Hope It's Not Too Tight":

SULAIMANIYA / 26 January 2004 / by Neela Banerjee

For the last 12 years, Chope Hamed has lived in Iraq without living in Iraq.

Ms. Hamed's home is the capital of the Kurdish northeast of Iraq, a region that gained de facto independence from the rest of the country in 1991, after the Americans established a no-flight zone to keep Saddam Hussein's forces at bay.

So while young people farther south grew up within the cloistered repression of the Baathist rule, Ms. Hamed, a 24-year-old college student, enjoyed new freedoms and saw the bigger world through satellite television and the Internet. While Muslim women elsewhere in Iraq veil themselves in ever-increasing numbers, Ms. Hamed and most other women in Sulaimaniya walk with their thick, dark hair tumbling over their shoulders.

"Here I'm equal with guys," Ms. Hamed said, as she sat with friends at the Sulaimaniya University student center. "I say, `I'm just like you, I study, I work, I go out.' "

Her friend Paiman Ahmed, 23, said, "That's the difference between us and them," referring to Iraqi Arab women. "We have freedom. Our families gave us the chance to say what we want, to dress how we want, to be what we want."

A world of possibility and freedom is what this younger generation of Kurds is desperate to preserve, as their elders meet with other Iraqi politicians in Baghdad to mesh the Kurdish north once more with the Arab south. Already, Kurdish politicians recognize their youth as an independent-minded force to be reckoned with, a politically sophisticated group that regards the rest of Iraq as a foreign — and backward — country.

"The Arabs from other parts of Iraq are starting from zero, but we've been through all that already," said Brwa Abdulrahman, a 26-year-old who works in the city's youth center. Joining with Iraq, he said, "is like putting a sixth grader in a class with first graders."

The most startling thing about Sulaimaniya now is its vibrant normalcy. While foreigners work in Sulaimaniya, American soldiers are nowhere in sight. Thunderstorms, rather than gunfire and bombings, interrupt the city's sleep. In the evenings, young people go to restaurants, tea shops and Internet salons. The women, unlike those in Baghdad, have no fear of abduction. Young Kurds often study and work several jobs, their main demands being serious economic development and greater political representation.

"Before, people like my dad, they all talked about independence, even just for one day," said Mr. Abdulrahman, nattily turned out in an ivory parka, leather pants and well-applied hair gel. "It was a dream for them. But now the reality is, we have independence. The question is, what kind of independence? We want to talk now about the details."

The word independence makes other Iraqis very nervous. As the American-led civil administration and the Iraqi Governing Council negotiate the path to Iraqi self-rule by July 1, Kurdish parties have united to demand a federalist system under which the north would function as one large, semiautonomous province. Many Iraqi Arabs see this as the first step to a breakup of their country along ethnic and sectarian fault lines. Kurds see this as the bare minimum needed to preserve the life they have built in the north and to protect themselves from possible future repression by the majority Arabs.

The inability of the two sides to understand one another, despite the suffering of both Arabs and Kurds, some say, is a troubling legacy of the old Baghdad government. "There's no trust between people," said Darya Ibrahim, a 22-year-old student, who is also a photographer and a colleague of Mr. Abdulrahman. "Saddam Hussein broke it, on the levels of individuals and families, and of peoples, too."

The role of Islam in a new Iraq threatens to be a flash point between the increasingly devout south, including Baghdad, and more secular places like Sulaimaniya. Most young people here see faith as a private matter, not the basis of an overarching political system.

"In the south, you see demonstrations for gasoline, for jobs, and they always hold up signs that say, `There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet,' " said Ms. Hamed. "What's the connection between that and jobs or gasoline? We're all Muslims, but their thinking is old."

The challenge for Kurds and Arabs alike will be to integrate into a new Iraq people who have no affinity for Arab Iraq. If young Kurds have grown up in the modern world of cellphones and the Internet, so too have they been shaped by the memories of brutal repression by successive Iraqi governments.

Most young Kurds remember the uprisings in 1991, when rebellions by the Shiites and the Kurds were brutally suppressed by Mr. Hussein. Most are also old enough to have lived through events like the killing of civilians with chemical weapons in the village of Halabja in March 1988, or the mass deportation and killings of villagers in the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988.

"I'm very angry at Saddam Hussein, but who was his regime?" argued Steven Fouad, a 23-year-old Kurdish Christian, at an Internet shop in the town center. "Who was his party? They weren't from a foreign country."

Mr. Fouad, who lost his father and brother in clashes with the Baathist government, added about Iraqi Arabs: "They wanted us to ask for mercy because they consider us guests on their soil. They wanted to rule us with the sword and the Koran."

The different sets of memory that Iraqi Arabs and Kurds have and that often govern their attitudes toward one another reside within Soleen Muhsen, a university student with an Arab father and a Kurdish mother. She lived in Baghdad until three years ago but continued to visit the north for a few weeks every summer after 1991.

In Baghdad, she said, people did not know of the suffering of Kurds, and the knowledge she had crushed her. Still, she sympathizes with the Arab Iraqis, who lived in an ignorance enforced by Mr. Hussein's police state.

"There is a huge difference in memory with those in Baghdad," Ms. Muhsen said. "But we were outside the ring" of state terror for the last decade, she explained. "They were inside the ring, and it was terrible for them."

2. - UN News Centre / AP - "UN in accord on voluntary return of ethnic Kurdish refugees from Iraq to Turkey":

23 January 2004

Turkish and United Nations officials have agreed on the modalities for the voluntary return to Turkey of up to 13,000 ethnic Kurds who have lived in exile in Iraq since the early 1990s, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced today.

Under the agreement reached yesterday in the Turkish capital, Ankara, the Iraqi authorities will ensure that the return is voluntary and that the refugees are not subjected to pressure. The accord stipulates that UNHCR will have full and unhindered access to the refugees both on Iraqi territory and once they have gone back to Turkey.

The Turkish authorities are to ensure that the refugees who volunteer to go back are free to return to their former places of residence or any other places of their choice within Turkey, UNHCR spokesman Kris Janowski told a news briefing in Geneva.

An estimated 9,200 refugees have been living in Makhmour Camp, near Erbil, while others are living in Dohuk and Erbil areas of northern Iraq.

Turkish Kurds allowed to return home

ANKARA / 23 January 2004

Officials agreed Friday on terms for repatriating thousands of Turkish Kurds who fled to Iraq in the early 1990s during fierce fighting between Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels.

Officials from the United States, Turkey, Iraq and the U.N. refugee agency agreed to let the refugees start voluntarily returning to their Turkish villages in the next two months. Many, however, are likely to stay because their Turkish villages no longer exist.

There are some 13,000 Turkish Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. An estimated 9,000 of them live in the Makhmur refugee camp, southwest of Irbil, which is run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.

Raymond Hall, European director of UNHCR, said the refugees in Makhmur camp would be notified about the conditions of their return to Turkey once the agreement was signed in the coming weeks.

The existence of the camp has been a flash point between Turkey and the UNHCR. Turkey has accused the refugees of indoctrinating children in the camp to become rebels.

Iraqi authorities are to ensure that the refugees are not pressured to return, while the UNHCR is to have full access to the refugees once they have returned to Turkey, the agreement says.

Human rights groups say more than 2,000 villages in southeastern Turkey were burned to the ground or evacuated during the fighting to deny logistical support to the rebels, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Turkey says villages were evacuated for security reasons and Kurdish rebels burned those that refused to support their cause.

Turkey's military has been battling Kurdish rebels seeking autonomy since 1984, a fight that has left some 37,000 people dead. Most fighting subsided in 1999 after the capture of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, but sporadic clashes continue.

3. - The International Herald Tribune - "In debate over Turkey, Europe defines itself":

A Christian club vs. geopolitical union

DAVOS / 26 January 2004b / by Alan Cowell

Switzerland European executives, politicians and other dignitaries gathered here the other day to mull the forthcoming expansion of the 15-member European Union to embrace 10 new members along an arc stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Malta in the Mediterranean.

But rather than concentrate on what it might mean for lands such as Poland or the Czech Republic to join much richer neighbors like Germany in one of history's most ambitious political and economic experiments, the talk turned predominantly to a more distant land - Turkey, which wants to become the European Union's first Islamic member country.

And that focus on Ankara's oft-stated ambitions, European diplomats said, reflected the perception that while the broadening of the EU on May 1 will denote its biggest single expansion, Turkey presents the Union with a yet more daunting political challenge to its ability - and readiness - to expand in a new and uncharted direction.

"It will not be an easy decision," said Javier Solana, the EU's chief foreign policy official and former secretary general of the NATO alliance, who favors Turkish membership in the Union. "But we are ready and willing to take difficult decisions."

The European Union has pledged to decide this summer whether to allow Turkey to negotiate for full membership. The fault lines are evident enough. Although the modern Turkish state has been secular since its founding by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey's almost 70 million people are predominantly Muslim, and the EU's largely Christian members are already uneasy about immigration from Islamic states. Indeed, said a Northern European diplomat, many societies are profoundly divided about Turkey's admission, particularly since the debate over unwelcome immigrants has become entwined with worries about Islamic extremism and terrorism, as well as the larger question of Islam's relationship with the West.

Turkey has been knocking on the European Union's door for decades, but has had to take its place in line behind the former communist nations of eastern and central Europe. Romania and Bulgaria are due for membership of the Union in 2007, bringing the EU's expansion to Turkey's doorstep.

The United States has long tried to persuade the Europeans to accept Turkey, a NATO member and close ally whose prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is set to visit Washington this week. Just on Saturday, when Vice President Dick Cheney addressed the World Economic Forum in this Alpine resort, he said, "Turkey deserves our support, including for its European aspirations."

But although Turkey has a customs union with Europe, its arguments for EU membership have been countered over the years by doubts about its human rights record, its recurrent political and economic crises, its occupation since 1974 of northern Cyprus, and its heavy-handed record in quelling Kurdish separatism. Outsiders have also worried about the back-stage power of the country's generals, who regard themselves as the custodians of Ataturk's secular values, and about the strongly Islamic political constituency that brought Erdogan to power.

Within Europe itself, moreover, politicians and commentators remain divided on the central question of Europe's identity: Is it a closed club of largely Christian nations? Or is it a more elastic concept that will permit Europe's slow economies and aging societies to draw on the more youthful dynamism of a land like Turkey?

"I belong to those who are very skeptical," Angela Merkel, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic opposition party, said recently, urging European politicians to be honest enough to tell Turkey it has little chance of joining.

Other politicians, such as the Spanish foreign minister, Ana Palacio, said the European Union had promised to begin negotiations with Turkey if it met a checklist of criteria on human rights and other reforms.

"If we want to keep our credibility, this agreements counts," Palacio said. "There is no inevitability in the clash of civilizations."

For its part, Turkey has set about reforming its inflation-prone economy, cleaning up its human rights record and striking a conciliatory position on Cyprus, which is one of the 10 countries set to join the European Union on May 1. After a meeting here on Saturday with Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, Erdogan said Ankara would exert influence on the Turkish Cypriot regime in northern Cyprus to reach a settlement, and would accept the idea of Annan filling in the final details of a settlement.

"We are not going to be the ones walking away from the table," said Ali Babacan, Turkish minister of state of the economy.

As Turkish officials argue their case, an unequivocal "no" from the European Union would be the worst of all outcomes, leaving them prey to an anti-European and anti-reform backlash.

"Starting negotiations is the key for us," Babacan said. "But I don't think it's assured or guaranteed."

4. - Reuters - "Turkey PM to Seek U.S. Backing on Iraq, Cyprus":

ANKARA / 25 January 2004 / by Gareth Jones

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan heads to the United States Sunday to seek the Bush administration's support on two issues of strategic importance to Turkey -- Iraq's future shape and the fate of divided Cyprus.

Erdogan, on his first visit to Washington since taking office nearly a year ago, will also be keen to reaffirm Turkey's traditionally close ties with its NATO ally after a period of tension sparked by the war in Iraq.

Erdogan meets President Bush in the White House on Wednesday and can expect warm words for his drive to improve Turkey's human rights record, reform its battered economy and win a date from the European Union to open entry talks.

"We see this as a very important year for Turkey, and for Turkish-U.S. relations," said one U.S. official, who asked not to be identified.

The United States, struggling to restore order in postwar Iraq, has said it wants Turkey, the region's main economic and military power, to play a bigger role in the reconstruction.

But Erdogan will want to stress Turkey's opposition to any ethnically based federation which would award northern Iraq's Kurds wide-ranging autonomy and control of oil-rich Kirkuk.

Turkey, along with Syria and Iran, fears such a move could stoke separatism among their own Kurdish populations. Ankara's security forces battled Turkish Kurdish rebels from 1984 in a campaign that cost some 30,000 lives. Fighting has mostly subsided since rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan was captured in 1999.

To Ankara's dismay, Washington has not discouraged the Iraqi Kurds' talk of autonomy and expanding their territory, saying only that it is for Iraqis to decide how they will be governed.

"There are ethnic elements demanding a federal structure, but we think this is wrong," Erdogan said Saturday while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The U.S. official tried to assuage Turkish fears.

"We are committed to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq... We all want an Iraq that has good relations with its neighbors," he said.

CYPRUS HOPES

The other key theme of Erdogan's five-day U.S. trip is Cyprus, where Ankara now says it backs a resumption of peace talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots with a view to reaching a settlement before the island joins the European Union in May.

In Davos Saturday, Erdogan urged U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint a new "impartial" mediator on Cyprus but drew a cool response. Turkey has signaled in the past that it would like Washington to play such a "mediator" role.

The United States, like the European Union, strongly backs the Annan blueprint for reunifying the island, which the Turkish Cypriots rejected last March. The plan envisages a loose federation with broad autonomy for the two ethnic communities.

Without a deal, the Union will admit only the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government, a step that risks cementing the island's division, increasing the Turkish Cypriots' isolation and harming Turkey's own EU aspirations.

Secretary of State Colin Powell -- mooted by Turkish media as a possible mediator -- welcomed Turkey's commitment to a deal and he urged the Greek side also to show flexibility.

Cyprus has been split on ethnic lines since Turkish troops invaded the north of the island in 1974 after a brief Greek Cypriot coup backed by Greece.

5. - AFP - "Turkey, Turkish Cypriots agree on push for Cyprus deal":

ANKARA / 25 January 2004

Turkey and Turkish Cypriots are united in seeking a solution to the division of Cyprus, their leaders said, in a new push for peace talks to end the protracted conflict threatening Ankara's bid to join the EU.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to have cajoled Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash into accepting renewed negotiations with rival Greek Cypriots on a UN peace plan, which the hardline nationalist had rejected last March.

"We saw that we have a common understanding... There is no problem," Erdogan said after talks with Denktash.

In an unprecedented move for peace in Cyprus, Erdogan asked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) Saturday to relaunch talks between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, following a landmark agreement between Turkey's civilian and military leaders on the need to resolve the 29-year conflict.

The National Security Council -- Turkey's top advisory body where the army has an influential say -- had called Friday to revive talks.

More notably, it endorsed the UN peace plan, which Denktash has portrayed as an international plot against the Turkish Cypriots, as a "reference" in any future negotiations.

Erdogan also met on Sunday with Turkish Cypriot Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat and his deputy Serdar Denktash, both of whom are in favor of settling the dispute.

Greece has warmed to the proposal for new UN-sponsored talks, but said Sunday that it refused to support a specific timeline regarding possible referendums.

"Greece and Cyprus are ready to start negotiations based on the (UN) plan but we are not prepared to commit beforehand to a calendar... particularly on the question of referendums," foreign ministry spokesman Panos Beglitis told Athens radio on Sunday.

For Turkey, which has held the northern third of Cyprus since 1974, the island's reunification would be a major boost to its decades-old dream of joining the European Union (news - web sites).

Brussels has warned Ankara that a failure to reunify the Mediterranean island by May 1, when it is set to join the EU, will undermine Turkey's own membership aspirations.

EU leaders will decide in December whether to open accession talks with Ankara, the only candidate which has so far failed to do so.

International pressure has focused almost exclusively on Turkey and the breakaway Turkish Cypriots since UN-sponsored talks broke down in March, with Denktash taking the blame.

Observers here said Sunday that Erdogan's initiative could finally shift attention to the internationally-recognized Greek Cypriot government, which has never wholeheartedly endorsed the UN blueprint either.

"Even if a settlement is not reached in the end, this initiative aims at proving that this is because of the intransigence of the Greek Cypriots and not the Turkish side," the Hurriyet newspaper said.

Ankara accuses the EU of encouraging intransigence on the Greek Cypriot side by promising it membership even if the island remains divided.

If settlement efforts fail, only the Greek Cypriot south will join the EU, while Turkey, which maintains some 30,000 troops in the Turkish Cypriot north, would technically become an occupier of EU soil.

Despite the appreciation Erdogan's peace bid won both from Annan and the United States, critics here said the move was belated and questioned whether Ankara could force Denktash to toe the line.

"If Denktash is left on his own and allowed to turn the process into a one-man show, we may face... a fiasco," the Radikal daily warned.

Both Cypriot sides have raised objections to the UN blueprint and are demanding amendments.

The plan envisages the island's reunification in a two-state federation, territorial adjustments in favor of the Greek Cypriots and the return of displaced Greek Cypriots to the north under certain restrictions.

Cyprus, which lies south of Turkey's Mediterranean coast, has been divided since 1974 when Ankara occupied the north in response to an Athens-engineered military coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece.

6. - Chicago Tribune - "Island of stability in volatile Iraq":

Autonomous Kurds seen as example, cause for worry

SULAYMANIYAH / 25 January 2004

A dozen winters ago, during the last great repression by Saddam Hussein's regime, Kurds in this mountainous region of northern Iraq stayed alive by eating grass. These days they shop in sleek new supermarkets for Pringles potato chips and Belgian chocolates.

It would be difficult to overstate the economic and political progress that has exploded across the swath of Iraq known as Kurdistan. While the rest of the country withered under Hussein's rule, Kurdistan, protected by a coalition-enforced no-fly zone, flourished.

Today, as insurgents in Baghdad and the region known as the Sunni Triangle fight a persistent guerrilla war against the American-led occupation, and Shiite clerics in the southern areas flex long-dormant political muscle, Kurdistan remains a relative island of Western-oriented stability.

In Sulaymaniyah, the provincial capital, merchants along Salim Street fill shops with wide-screen televisions, computers and the latest in mobile phones.

At night, a carnival display of Christmas lights illuminates the downtown area--and this well into the new year. Christmas is not usually observed in Muslim lands, but Kurds can't seem to get enough of the West and its commercial ways. Proud parents line up children for photos with shopping-mall Santas, known here as Baba Noels, and then take them for an ice cream sundae at "MaDonals."

The U.S. has long held up Kurdistan as an example of what can be achieved under Western-style democracy. And while the U.S. encouraged the autonomous Kurdish region during Hussein's rule, it now worries that an Iraq divided into ethnic cantons would seed instability throughout the Middle East.

But a quasi-independent Kurdistan appears to be the likely outcome of a process that threatens to slip from the Bush administration's control. Scrambling to meet its self-imposed June 30 deadline for the handover of power in Iraq, Washington faces increasing pressure to yield to the Kurds' key demands.

For once, the gods of geopolitics seem to be smiling on the Kurds.

The large measure of autonomy and the self-governing institutions already established in Kurdistan likely will be left in place during the transition period. After that, it will be hard to change the status quo, U.S. officials concede.

More problematic are Kurdish demands for a referendum that almost certainly would give them control of the oil-rich region around the city of Kirkuk, and for a security policy that would allow the main Kurdish political factions to maintain their traditional militias while barring the Iraqi army from entering the Kurdish territory.

Earlier this month, Paul Bremer, head of the U.S. occupation authority, curtly rejected those demands, but he has since taken a softer approach. The turnabout would appear to reflect second thoughts about alienating the only piece of Iraq that seems to be functioning well, and a recognition that the Kurds, the only Iraqis who actively and enthusiastically supported the U.S. in the war against Hussein, are owed.

"Right now, we are almost independent," said Barham Salih, a prominent Kurdish politician. "By seeking reintegration into Iraq, we are giving up things; we are not asking for more."

Not eager for independence

Given Iraq's grim history of persecution and genocide against the Kurds, during Hussein's regime and before, it is remarkable that the Kurds would want anything to do with Iraq.

But the general feeling among the Kurdish population seems to be that while separation and independence would be nice, that will never happen. Some of Iraq's neighbors--Turkey, Iran and Syria, with Kurdish minorities of their own--would create too many problems. There also is a feeling that despite the troubled history with Iraq, there are certain advantages to being part of an important Arab country.

"Iraq belongs to Arabs, Christians, Jews and Kurds," said Sabah Muhammed, 40, a currency dealer in the Sulaymaniyah money trader's bazaar. "I was born in Baghdad, and I have many Arab friends. If the Arabs respect my rights, I see them as my brother."

The money trader's bazaar is the economic nerve center of Sulaymaniyah. It is housed in a two-story, open-air stairwell in the middle of a dimly lit covered market. The stairs are packed shoulder to shoulder with traders clutching calculators and thick bricks of dinars, the Iraqi currency. There are wires running everywhere, some leading to computers, some to electric coils that heat water for tea, some to the dozen satellite dishes on the roof that link Sulaymaniyah to the global economy.

On this morning, the dinar was rising smartly against the dollar, and the men who do business here offered pragmatic views of why Kurdistan should remain part of Iraq. The consensus was that it would be good for business.

"Kurdish businesses will benefit if everywhere is free for Kurds," said Faisal Muhammed, 35, a poor cobbler until a few months ago, now flush as a currency trader. "When we were not able to trade with Baghdad, it was a little like being in a prison up here. But now we are free to trade everywhere . . . and everyone is happy."

Dubai is frequently invoked here. Most of the Western and Asian imports in Kurdish shops come via that gulf emirate. There also is a sense that if Dubai, which before the oil boom was an impoverished Arab backwater, can reinvent itself as an international trading and financial hub, why not Kurdistan, which sits astride some of the most storied trading routes.

While most of Iraq seems to be slipping into despair over the U.S. occupation authority's inability to make it secure, Kurds are among the few who see light at the end of the tunnel.

"Iraq is like a big man after you stop choking him. If you let him breathe, in time he will recover and grow strong," said Salam Salim, 45, the assistant manager at a hangar-size shopping center in Dohuk, another Kurdish city.

Region's progress

Most of the economic progress in the Kurdish north has occurred in the past five years, after the two main political factions, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, fought a brief civil war that led to a wary political settlement.

U.S. officials talk about Kurdistan's "democracy." It does have an elected parliament and elected local administrations, but it is effectively ruled by two tribal mafias, each jealously protective of its turf.

The KDP is headed by Massoud Barzani, a tribal chieftain who dresses and governs in the traditional, patriarchal manner. His father, Mustafa, founded the KDP and led a failed uprising against the Arabs during World War II. The rival PUK is headed by Jalal Talabani, who affects a more modern style. The two leaders loathe each other but, for the sake of political peace and profit, have learned the art of accommodation.

All the major economic projects in Kurdistan--the shopping malls and hotel complexes--have direct links to Barzani or Talabani. It would be a serious mistake to invest in a mall in KDP-controlled Dohuk, for example, without taking one of Barzani's nephews as a partner.

For the U.S. occupation authority and for Iraq's neighbors, the underlying fear is that autonomy for the Kurds will only whet their appetite for full independence. They worry that Kurdish politicians are playing a shrewd game, taking autonomy for now, keeping all options open for the future.

Not far from Sulaymaniyah's main market, an inconspicuous doorway opens into a cavernous cafe. Beneath chandeliers and slowly turning ceiling fans, men's chatter mingles with the clatter of backgammon games and the soft clinking of their tea glasses. Here, in the thin afternoon light filtered through a fog of cigarette smoke, long-frustrated dreams are sometimes given voice.

"I feel like I have lived my whole life for these last 10 years," said Muhammed Nergiz, 60, a renowned Kurdish folk singer. He wears the traditional checkered head scarf and baggy trousers of a Kurdish peasant.

"The other 50 years of my Kurdish life, either we are in prison, or in the mountains, or fighting or in sadness," he said. "In these last 10 years we have our freedom. . . . We felt for the first time that we are human."

He noted, as Kurds often do when they speak with foreigners, that Kurds are the largest ethnic group on the planet who do not have a country to call their own.

"People know what's behind the curtain," he said. "If they give it to us, I would dance."