Whose city is Kirkuk? It’s claimed by Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Turkmen in Iraq. A glance at the Wikipedia entry for the city chronicles a history in which contention for ownership of the city goes back 5,000 years. A quick look at the discussion page for entry is even more information with Kurdish, Turkmen, and Sunni Arab partisans debating the question on historic, linguistic, and demographic grounds. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Kirkuk is adjacent to the Baba Gurgur oil field, the heart of Iraq’s northern oil country.
As a dispassionate observer of the debate, if Iraq had robust protections for minority rights within a functioning system of civil law, I’d be inclined to declare Kirkuk a Kurdish city on demographic grounds—more than half of its population is Kurdish. Under the circumstances Kirkuk may best be thought of as an Iraqi city first, a Kurdish city second. When, as I expect, it’s declared part of Iraqi Kurdistan, I suspect the ethnic cleansing will be harsh.
Keep the context in mind when you read this New York Times article on the Kurdish squatters packing Kirkuk’s erstwhile soccer stadium waiting for the upcoming vote:
KIRKUK, Iraq — Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a startling sight.
On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq’s most lucrative oil reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren playing field.
There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have converted the dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
These homeless Kurds are here not for soccer but for politics. They are reluctant players in a future referendum to decide whether oil-rich Tamim Province in the north and its capital, Kirkuk, will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government or remain under administration by Baghdad.
Under the Iraqi Constitution the referendum is due before Dec. 31. But in a nation with a famously slow political clock, one of the few things on which Kirkuk’s Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities agree is that yet another political deadline is about to be missed.
