23 July 2004

1. "Turkish court rejects trial for former PM on procedural grounds", Turkey's constitutional court Friday rejected a parliamentary decision to try former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz and another ex-minister over corruption allegations, citing procedural flaws, Anatolia news agency reported.

2. "Turkey Doing Little to Protect Women's Lives", up to half of all Turkish women may have been victims of family violence. But as the European Union hopeful makes some major reforms, little progress has been made to strengthen women's safety and legal rights.

3. "Turkey, EU discuss Cyprus customs union", EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy met Turkish officials here Thursday in a bid to overcome Cyprus' exclusion from a customs union between Turkey and the pan-European bloc caused by the absence of Turkish-Cypriot diplomatic ties.

4. "New Government Frustrates Iraq's Kurds", the decision to hand the top jobs of president and prime minister to Iraqi Arabs has alarmed the country's Kurdish minority, reviving old suspicions across ethnic lines and setting the stage for a divisive political battle over a new constitution.

5. "Arab and Kurd", if the Israeli link is dangerous for the Kurds, it may prove hardly less so for the Americans in Iraq.

6. "The Sarajevo of Iraq", worsening Kurdish-Arab Friction Threatens the Region.

1. - AFP - "Turkish court rejects trial for former PM on procedural grounds":

ANKARA / 23 July 2004

Turkey's constitutional court Friday rejected a parliamentary decision to try former prime minister Mesut Yilmaz and another ex-minister over corruption allegations, citing procedural flaws, Anatolia news agency reported.

Legislators earlier this month voted to put Yilmaz and former economy minister Gunes Taner on trial over a 1999 banking scandal in which the mafia was allegedly involved.

Yilmaz is accused of determining in advance who should win a tender for the privatization of the state-owned Turkbank and resorting to the services of a mafia leader to scare off unwanted bidders.

The deputy head of the court, Hasim Kilic, said the judges unanimously rejected the case because parliament had decided in favor of putting the two ministers on trial in a single vote, whereas separate votes should have been held for each of them, Anatolia reported.

Citing the same procedural flaw, the court Thursday rejected a parliamentary decision to try two other former ministers accused of causing giant losses to a public bank.

Parliament may now reconsider the issues after it returns from summer recess in September.

The case against Yilmaz is part of a parliamentary investigation into alleged large-scale fraud in tenders, sell-offs, banking reforms and energy projects over the past decade that have reportedly cost Turkey billions of dollars (euros).

The Turkbank scandal surfaced when tapes of phone conversations between the businessman who obtained control of the bank and a mafia boss were leaked to the media.

It led to the collapse of Yilmaz's government after a no-confidence vote, but the center-right politician was cleared in a parliamentary investigation in 2000 and was never prosecuted.

Yilmaz left politics after his Motherland Party failed to win a single parliamentary seat in the November 2002 election which swept Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power.

The current anti-corruption drive was launched by the AKP which has pledged to stamp out chronic corruption in EU-hopeful Turkey, seen by many as one of the core reasons for the economic woes that have plagued the country.

2. - Womens News - "Turkey Doing Little to Protect Women's Lives":

Up to half of all Turkish women may have been victims of family violence. But as the European Union hopeful makes some major reforms, little progress has been made to strengthen women's safety and legal rights.

ISTANBUL / 23 July 2004 / by Yigal Schleifer*

Guldunya Toren wasn't even safe lying in a hospital bed.

An unmarried 24-year-old from Turkey's impoverished and conservative southeast region, Toren was sent to live with an uncle and her brothers in Istanbul when her family discovered she was pregnant in 2003. In Istanbul, though, Toren's brothers presented her with a stark choice: Kill yourself to save the family's honor or we will kill you ourselves.

Toren ran away from her uncle's house, asking the police to protect her. Her request was refused and a few weeks after she gave birth last February, Toren was shot in the street and left for dead, her brothers considered the most likely suspects. As Toren was recovering in the hospital--again without any police protection--someone entered her room and shot her to death.

Toren's murder made headlines in Turkey and is one of several disturbing examples in a recently released Amnesty International report about violence against women in Turkey. The report makes clear, though, that "honor killings" like that of Toren are only the most extreme and attention-grabbing examples of a far more widespread problem of domestic violence in Turkey.

Turkish women's groups say the June report--which estimates that up to half of all Turkish women may have been victims of family violence--points out another important problem: Turkey's difficulty in confronting violence against women and tackling the wider issue of women's equality.

While the country has been making major reforms in the human rights field as part of its bid to join the European Union, which could be given a green light this December, activists say the country's traditions and conservatism are holding back women's rights.

"Most of Turkish society wants reforms. But when it comes to women's issues, there is a lot of resistance," says Pinar Ilkkaracan, co-founder of the Istanbul-based organization Women for Women's Human Rights, which has been lobbying in Ankara for stronger laws to protect women's rights.

Death Penalty Abolished, But Few Gender Reforms

In order to improve its odds of getting into the European Union, Turkey has abolished the death penalty and reorganized the country's court system to eliminate what had been termed "black holes" in the country's judicial system. These changes were successfully passed by the country's parliament with little public discussion, Ilkkaracan points out.

Gender-related reforms, however, have been stalled. After a heated debate, members of parliament this past May blocked a constitutional amendment proposed by Turkey's opposition party that would have allowed for affirmative action in elections and government hiring. The country's ruling party--which holds an overwhelming majority--unanimously voted against it.

Meanwhile, a parliamentary committee preparing a draft law to reform the penal code has so far rejected a demand by women's groups that honor killings be defined in the new law as "aggravated homicide," which would lead to stiffer sentences for those who commit the crime.

Observers are also concerned that the draft bill fails to explicitly outlaw the practice of virginity testing, leaving various loopholes that would allow the practice--often used to determine whether a young woman has lost her virginity and thus her family's "honor"--to continue.

"Domestic violence and honor killings are yet to be understood in Turkey as violations of a woman's human rights," says Leyla Pervizat, a researcher who has written about honor killings in Turkey. "They are still considered as domestic and marginal."

Ilkkaracan, of Women for Women's Human Rights, says this attitude must be rooted out of Turkey's new penal code, which parliament will most likely vote on in September. "The philosophy of women's bodies and sexuality in the existing penal code says it belongs to their husbands, their families, their community, the state," she says. "This has to be changed."

"We want a complete reform of the penal code, a feminist reform," she adds. "If there are only a few reforms, it won't bring full equality to Turkey."

Failure to Protect the Rights of Victims

The Amnesty International report also points to Turkey's systematic failure to protect the rights--and even lives--of women who are victims of violence.

"Amnesty International is concerned that the government has failed to ensure the effective implementation of existing legislation and fears that further reforms will also be resisted by the courts and other parts of the criminal justice system," says the report, the first to be released as part of a new global consciousness-raising campaign about gender violence called Stop Violence Against Women.

"The police frequently fail to investigate or press charges against perpetrators of violence against women. Women are not encouraged to bring complaints against their attackers and receive almost no effective protection from vengeful husbands and relatives. Those responsible--including the heads of family councils--are rarely brought to justice."

Women's advocates also point the dire lack of shelters for abused and threatened women in Turkey, which has eight shelters and a population of 65 million. Sweden, by contrast, with a population of 8 million, has more than 120 shelters.

"In Turkey, where violence against women is so widespread, we need shelters because there are so many women's lives to be saved," says Canan Arin, an Istanbul lawyer who co-founded Purple Roof, Turkey's first shelter for women. It opened in 1990, but closed eight years later because of a lack of funding.

No Place to Go

Arin says efforts to reopen the shelter have failed because neither the Turkish government nor any other source has offered funding support. In the meantime, she says, threatened women have basically no safe place to go, especially since the police and the court system are often unsympathetic to them.

"Prosecutors and judges should be trained," Arin says. "The police should be trained very well and taught the most important thing is a woman's life. I'm not talking about her human rights but her actual life."

The European Union has sponsored human rights training programs for Turkish judges and prosecutors as part of the reform process, although these trainings did not deal specifically with women's human rights.

Hansjorg Kretschmer, the European Union representative in Ankara, has also spoken publicly about the importance of gender equality for political and economic development.

But while the European Union has been closely monitoring the progress of the Turkish reforms and has provided millions of dollars in funding for human rights and civil society projects, some worry that women's issues have not been given a strong enough look.

Women's issues "have been part of the package, but it's not a priority," says Sally Goggin, assistant director of the Ankara office of the British Council, an agency connected to the British government that has helped fund women's centers in Turkey's southeast.

"There are various funds and mechanisms there, but I think it's on the agenda but not at the top of the agenda."

* Yigal Schleifer is a journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey.

3. - AFP - "Turkey, EU discuss Cyprus customs union":

ANKARA / 23 July 2004

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy met Turkish officials here Thursday in a bid to overcome Cyprus' exclusion from a customs union between Turkey and the pan-European bloc caused by the absence of Turkish-Cypriot diplomatic ties.

Turkey, which is not a member of the European Union, nonetheless entered into a customs union with the EU in 1995.

Cyprus joined the EU on May 1 but has so far been excluded from participation in the overall EU customs union with Turkey because it has no formal diplomatic ties to Ankara.

"It's obviously a problem that the EU-Turkey customs union is not yet extended to Cyprus, although Cyprus joined the EU and is entitled to the same treatment as other recently acceding countries," Lamy told reporters after talks with Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul.

Long-divided Cyprus joined the EU on May 1, represented only by its internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government in the South.

A last-ditch effort to reunify the island's Greek and Turkish communities before EU accession failed in April when the Greek Cypriots rejected a UN peace plan that Turkish Cypriots endorsed.

Lamy said the customs union problem would not have a bearing on a crucial report the European Commission, the EU executive arm, will draft in October on Turkey's progress toward meeting EU political criteria.

The report will constitute the basis on which EU leaders will decide in December whether to start accession talks with Ankara.

Lamy praised what he called "huge progress" in Turkish efforts to align with EU's democracy norms.

Lamy said they also discussed "some trade frictions and irritants here and there which are not terribly dramatic but which are on the to-do list."

4. - AP - "New Government Frustrates Iraq's Kurds":

SULAIMANIYAH / 23 July 2004 / by Hamza Emdawi

The decision to hand the top jobs of president and prime minister to Iraqi Arabs has alarmed the country's Kurdish minority, reviving old suspicions across ethnic lines and setting the stage for a divisive political battle over a new constitution.

Kurdish fears over their place in the new Iraq had already been heightened when the United Nations refused to endorse an interim Iraqi constitution that guarantees their rights in this mostly Arab nation.

Both slights are perceived by Kurds as part of a long series of double-crosses suffered at the hands of Iraqi Arabs and foreign powers since creation of the modern Iraqi state by colonial Britain after World War I.

They have dampened Kurdish enthusiasm about the future of this country following the downfall of Saddam Hussein, their tormentor and executioner for 23 years.

"I am disappointed, but we must overcome this crisis and work harder for what we want," said bookstore owner Omar abdul-Rahman Raheem, 61, of the exclusion of Kurds from the two top jobs.

Speaking over a cacophony of honking cars and street hawkers outside his store in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, Raheem portrayed a minority whose joy at Saddam's ouster 15 months ago has quickly given way to disappointment, even anger.

"We need now to be even more ambitious and demand more than just self-rule," he said.

Like the Sunni Arabs, Kurds are believed to comprise 15-20 percent of Iraq's 25 million people. They were given five Cabinet posts when the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a Shiite Arab, took office June 28. These include the deputy prime minister and the key foreign ministry. Sunni Arabs got five Cabinet posts, a minister of state portfolio and the largely ceremonial job of president. There are two vice presidents - one Kurd and one Shiite.

"Is it forbidden for a Kurd to be prime minister or president?" asked Sardar Mohammed, political editor of Hawlati, or Citizen, the best-selling weekly newspaper in Iraq's Kurdish areas. "Sharing positions of power is the least we expect."

How the Kurds fare in today's Iraq is the real test of the nation's commitment to the human rights and democratic values it has embraced since Saddam's fall. It also is a reflection on the nation-building effort being made to reconstruct Iraq's rich mosaic of ethnic, religious and linguistic groups in a way that ensures justice for all groups.

So far, the Kurds' march to equal rights in predominantly Arab Iraq has been a mix of great strides and significant setbacks. Their journey is likely to have a significant impact on neighbors Turkey, Iran and Syria, whose governments have at one time or another resorted to violence to deal with restive Kurdish communities pressing for self-rule or protesting discrimination.

Some Kurds anticipate a fierce political battle over their rights and worry Iraq may lack the political maturity to create a pluralistic society.

One of these skeptics is Kurdish political analyst Rebin Hardy, who warns that civil war or the emergence of a new dictatorship in Iraq should not be ruled out as the Kurds press for their rights in the new constitution to be drafted next year.

"The culture of dictatorship remains in Iraq and the strongest groups in the country are ethnic and religious parties that are not prepared to accept change or democracy," he said.

The Kurds have for years been Washington's most reliable allies in Iraq. U.S. protection allowed them to enjoy autonomous rule in their northern region since 1991. These ties have fed anti-Kurdish sentiments among other Iraqis, many of whom are deeply suspicious of the United States.

Some Kurds, however, suspect U.S. and British support for their cause has diminished, arguing that this may have been behind their failure to land a top job in Allawi's government or win endorsement of the interim constitution adopted in March by Iraq's Governing Council.

They also detect weakness in their support for the Kurds over the thorny issue of Kirkuk, a northern Iraqi city claimed by the Kurds. The city's vast oil wealth has prompted Saddam to expel tens of thousands of Kirkuk's Kurdish residents, sending Arab Iraqis to take their place.

"We are really worried. We thought things will be much better than this," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician and former member of the disbanded Governing Council. "We feel that support from the Americans and the British is receding and that's causing a great deal of disappointment."

Iraq's Kurds and Shiites had been singled out for the most brutal oppression during Saddam's rule, with tens of thousands from both communities imprisoned, executed and tortured. Saddam's removal from power has earned them instant empowerment. But, while the Shiites' rise to political domination was expected since they are a majority, the Kurds' place is much less certain.

Still, the Kurds have made gains, some of which have allowed them to shield their areas from the intense and sustained violence that has wracked the rest of Iraq for more than a year.

The interim constitution added Kurdish as an official language beside Arabic and gave Iraq's three Kurdish provinces the right to reject a draft of the permanent constitution when it's put to a referendum next year.

"If the next constitution does not include our rights, we will not get them in the future," warned Nawshirwan Mustafa, deputy general-secretary of the Sulaimaniyah-headquartered Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two political parties that rule Iraq's Kurdish region. "It's the Kurds' biggest battle," he said.

5. - MotherJones.com - "Arab and Kurd":

23 July 2004 / by Tom Engelhardt

The week before the early surprise "transition of power" in Iraq, the New Yorker magazine published a disturbing piece by Seymour Hersh that contained news probably far more dangerous than any coming out of Baghdad. His report, Plan B, revealed how top Israeli officials reached the conclusion by last August that "the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq." Fearing the consequences, Ariel Sharon's government began freelancing a new divide-and-conquer strategy meant, among other things, to help ensure the fragmentation of the Iraqi state and potentially destabilize further an already destabilized region. They decided "to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel's strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq's Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan… Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria."

This (in Hersh's phrase) "politically reckless" move -- an example of tactically brilliant short-term thinking almost guaranteed to prove a long-term strategic blunder and sure to blowback on the Israelis -- is likely to be especially harmful to the Kurds themselves. Now, like the Americans, they will be ever more closely identified in the region with the defense of Sharon's Israel. The training of Kurdish militiamen may, in the short run, aid Israel's policies in the region and bolster Kurdish dreams of an independent state, but it will, in the end, likely prove yet another disaster for the Kurds. Their militias are not serious fighting forces, if you're thinking, say, of the Turkish military (which ruthlessly crushed its own Kurdish population's desire for autonomy), or even perhaps future Iraqi armies. The Kurds, a people scattered across the region, have put their faith and fate in the hands of states (and their intelligence agencies) that have always betrayed them -- including the Shah's Iran, Saddam's Iraq, the United States more than once, and now the Israelis.

If the Israeli link is dangerous for the Kurds, it may prove hardly less so for the Americans in Iraq. Paul Rogers, the sober and thoughtful geopolitical columnist for openDemocracy.net, has often pointed, as he did recently, to "the development of closer links between the US military and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), especially the Americans' procurement of specialist Israeli equipment developed for use against the Palestinians [for their forces in Iraq], and the IDF's sharing their experience of urban warfare [with the Americans in Iraq]. In pursuing these links, US military planners believed that any relevant experience or equipment that might limit US casualties was greatly welcome. They did not appreciate that news of Israeli involvement would have a cumulative impact in Iraq and the wider region -- confirming the widely-held view that the US occupation of Iraq was part of an overall Israeli-American policy to redraw the political map of the Middle East."

The Israelis have simply added another round of munitions to a Kurdish situation in northern Iraq that is, as Dilip Hiro points out below, explosive. Any such explosion could draw all sorts of states into conflict. Hiro, a veteran Middle Eastern analyst, surveys the Kurdish situation at this perilous moment and suggests what the shape of a future Iraqi civil war might look like and where it might begin.

6 . MotherJones.com - "The Sarajevo of Iraq":

Worsening Kurdish-Arab Friction Threatens the Region

23 July 2004 / by Dilip Hiro*

In the ongoing crisis in Iraq, one factor has remained unchanged: the loyalty of the Kurds to Washington. Whereas, for most Arabs, March 20, the first anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, was ignored, Iraq's Kurds celebrated it with traditional dancing and gunfire as "Iraq Liberation Day." Unsurprisingly, when the time of "transition" came, the Bush administration gave the Kurds two of the top five positions in the new interim Iraqi government -- instead of the one that would have been their due if their percentage of the national population were all that was taken into account.

Indeed, when Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani -- the respective leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) -- protested Washington's failure to include a reference to the Transitional Administrative Law (popularly known as the interim constitution), in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546 that paved the way for the "transition" in Iraq, it was no more than a lovers' tiff. Kurdish leaders have, in fact, doggedly maintained their loyalty to the United States in the hope and expectation that George Bush would set them firmly on the path to an independent state -- even though their history, since U.S. President Woodrow Wilson failed to deliver such a state after World War I, should have taught them quite a different lesson.

Sadly, to this day their perception of that history is blinkered. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres, signed by Damad Feird, the Ottoman Sultan's Prime Minister, and the wartime Allies stipulated that Anatolia would be dismembered and Turkey's southeastern region, then containing Mosul province, turned into an autonomous territory. The prospect of independence, if recommended by the League of Nations, was dangled before the Kurds, then rejected by the Turkish parliament and, in July 1923, superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which made no mention of the Kurds.

According to the latter treaty, Turkey renounced its claims to the non-Turkish provinces of the former Ottoman Empire and the Allies confirmed Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia. Two years later, at Britain's behest, a League of Nations arbitration committee awarded Mosul province to Iraq, then under British mandate.

And so it went for the Kurds, though their historical myopia persists. Only recently, misreading the interim constitution, promulgated on March 8, the inhabitants of Iraq's three Kurdish-majority provinces, Dohak, Irbil, and Suleimaniya -- since 1974 collectively called the Kurdistan Autonomous Region (KAR) -- thought they had been granted independence, and welcomed its promulgation with wild celebrations. Apparently, this was due to a popular interpretation of a provision in the interim constitution stipulating that if two-thirds of the voters in any three of Iraq's eighteen provinces cast their ballots against a draft permanent constitution in a referendum, then it would "fail." This was seen as, in essence, an independence veto.

It was true that Turkey found this provision sufficiently objectionable to express its public disapproval of Iraq's interim constitution, which describes the Iraqi government as "republican and federal." Ankara has repeatedly aired its opposition to a federal Iraq, arguing that any such arrangement would inspire its own sizeable Kurdish population to demand a federal Turkey. The Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad, racked by riots in its predominantly Kurdish northeastern region in March, has been no less alarmed by Kurdish irredentist aims in Iraq, which, in turn, fuel Kurdish nationalism in adjoining countries.

Turkey, uneasy with the armed Kurdish militias -- or peshmargas ("those prepared to die") -- in northern Iraq, noted with satisfaction that, on June 8, soon-to-be Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Alawi announced that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had reached an agreement with the leaders of nine militias to dissolve their forces by January 2005. The erstwhile militiamen were to be given the options of retraining, integration into the new Iraqi security forces, or being pensioned off. Since three-quarters of the 100,000 militiamen that fell under this agreement belonged to the two main Kurdish parties, the on-the-ground responses of the Kurdish leaders were what mattered most, and they were predictable.

Having agreed to dissolve their militias or merge them into the new Iraqi army, Barazani and Talabani soon postponed the agreement indefinitely. So it came as no surprise when, in a recent interview with a Czech newspaper, Talabani practically disowned the CPA deal entirely. This led a senior Turkish military commander to criticize Washington for failing to curb the ‘terrorists' (read, KDP and PUK militias) in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Growing Kurdish-Arab Divide

Within Iraq, there is a clear conflict between secular Kurdish nationalism, fostered by the 12 year long autonomous existence of the Kurdish Autonomous Region under an Anglo-American air umbrella while Saddam Hussein ruled the rest of the country, and the aspirations of the recently empowered, deeply religious Shia majority to establish a centralized Islamic republic in Iraq through the ballot box. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has made clear his fears that the Kurdish "veto" provided by the interim constitution will result in drafts of a permanent constitution bouncing back and forth indefinitely while the interim constitution hardens into permanency.

The situation in Kurdish Iraq threatens to draw various regional powers into conflict. For example, the potential for an expansive Kurdish-Shia conflict has been noted by Israel's top leaders, who have been increasingly worried about the rising power of Shias in a region where Iraq and Iran are Shia-majority countries and Syria is ruled by an Alawi, a sub-sect within Shia Islam. In response, they decided to upgrade their espionage network among the Kurds in each of these countries as well as in Turkey. (The proportion of Kurds in their populations varies from 6% in Syria to 20% in Turkey.) For Israel's Mossad and Aman (its military intelligence), the starting point for such an enterprise remains the 150,000-strong Kurdish Jewish community in Israel, a fairly wide pool to tap.

In July 2003, Israel's intelligence agencies swung into action after their political masters concluded that the US occupation of Iraq was going badly, wrote Semour Hersh, the prize-winning New Yorker investigative journalist, in Plan B last month (based on his interviews with his intelligence sources in the United States, Israel, and Turkey). A further impetus to Israeli planning came in December when Washington suddenly announced that it would hand over power to the Iraqis on June 30. Israel's leaders decided it was only prudent to take out an insurance policy in case the transfer of power went badly, resulting in chaos -- to the benefit of Iran.

While evidently assigning their Kurdish agents in Iran the task of gathering intelligence on the government's nuclear activities, in Iraq their agents have been encouraging Kurdish aspirations for an independent state. This, in turn -- and to their satisfaction -- inspired rioters in Syria's Kurdish-majority towns of Qameshli, Amuda, Hasaka, and Malikiya, where protestors burnt public buildings and raised the Kurdish national flag. Some 40 people were killed before the Syrian army restored order.

But Israel's strategy has a distinct downside, since encouraging desires for Kurdish independence runs dangerously counter to Turkey's long-standing policy on the Kurds and so has the potential of undermining Israeli-Turkish military cooperation that dates back to 1995. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country or component independence, everybody will want it," a Turkish official told Hersh. "Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."

Kirkuk: Eye of the Storm

Lying midway between the Turkish-Iraqi border and Baghdad, Kirkuk was the military staging post for the Ottoman Turks, who captured it in 1534 and settled it with the Turks -- called Turkmen -- from Anatolia. It thrived as a garrison town. When petroleum was discovered in the area in 1927 by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, its executives found that neither Turkmen (mostly merchants and rentiers), nor beduin Arabs were interested in working for them; so they began to recruit workers from the Kurdish areas to the east and north. These Kurds settled in villages around the city.

Thus Greater Kirkuk emerged as a multi-ethnic city -- with Turkmen at its center, surrounded by Arabs, in turn surrounded by Kurds on the city's outskirts. While the three communities maintained this voluntary segregation, it was an edgy situation. In 1959, in a three-day battle between pro-Communist Kurds and anti-Communist Turkmen, for instance, 79 people were killed.

During the Kurdish insurgency of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ethnic composition of Greater Kirkuk became a point of contention between the Iraqi government and Kurdish nationalists, with the latter claiming a Kurdish majority in the city and its suburbs. However, the (then-classified) census of 1977 showed the 484,000 residents of Kirkuk province (later renamed Tamim) being 45% Arab, 38% Kurd, and the rest Turkmen. The 1997 census indicated that Kirkuk's population of 370,661 was 40% Arab and 38% Kurd, with the remainder Turkmen -- little change, that is, despite Saddam Hussein's policy of settling Shia Arabs from the south in the area. On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the estimated 700,000 people then living in Greater Kirkuk probably divided up along similar lines: 45% Arab, 35% Kurdish, and the rest Turkmen.

Following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the two Kurdish parties made no secret of their plans to transform Kirkuk with its oil wealth into the capital of an expanded Kurdish Autonomous Region. Kurds, some pushed out of the city by Saddam, now arrived in their thousands. The Peshmerga were turned into the local police force and, assisted by the occupying American military, Kurds dominated the US-appointed city council. All this was in violation of an initial agreement that U.S. forces would maintain the status quo and not allow Kurds to cross the KAR's border, 15 miles east of the city center.

Assisted by Kurdish-dominated local security forces, tens of thousands of Kurds have forced Arabs from their homes, creating at least 100,000 new refugees living in squalid camps in north-central Iraq. This has engendered widespread anti-Kurdish feeling among Arabs in the region and beyond. Anti-Kurdish graffiti, attacking Kurds for collaborating with the "infidel occupiers," is a commonplace in the Shia districts of Kirkuk. Elsewhere, the followers of Hojatalislam Muqtada al Sadr have vocally denounced the Kurds.

Many Sunni Arabs, though sharing the same sectarian affiliation with Kurds, are equally critical of them. The Sunni Arab-Kurdish divide widened when the Arab press reported in April that Kurds were fighting in Falluja with the Americans. These Kurds belonged to one of the two Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (now National Guard) battalions that had been ordered to fight alongside U.S. Marines in the assault on the insurgents in the city. The other battalion, consisting exclusively of Arabs, refused to do so. Talabani's convoluted explanation for Kurdish actions -- "Some Kurds have joined the new Iraqi army, and if the Coalition commanders forced them to participate in some fighting, it was without the knowledge of the Kurdish leaders." -- left many unconvinced.

During her foray into Falluja in late April, Hala Jaber of the Sunday Times found the locals speaking of "the mercenary Kurds, accused of being Mossad agents." She added, "Some Kurds had confessed [to being Mossad agents], I was told, and had been summarily executed."

The situation in Kirkuk remains tense. "The Kurdish peshmargas [acting as policemen] are unqualified and untrained, and this creates irritation," said Khudair Ghalib Karim, a Turkmen leader. "If there are clashes this is the reason." Across the Green Line, though the Kurdish militiamen are reportedly ready to make a major push for Kirkuk, they are unlikely to act as long as the Americans remain in the city.

Viewing Iraq as a whole, it is safe to say that if the country slides into a civil war, it would not be between Sunnis and Shias, but between Arabs and Kurds -- and it will start in Kirkuk.

* Dilip Hiro's latest book is Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, a sequel to Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (both Nation Books). Hiro is based in London, writes regularly for the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the Washington Post and the Nation magazine, and is a frequent commentator on CNN, BBC, and Sky TV.

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