With some imaginative, practical and humane support, Britain can deter threats to Kurdistan’s safety in the wake of its independence referendum, reports Lewis Baston
I am interested in elections, and that is what took me to Iraq. I was privileged to observe the referendum on independence organised on 25 September by the Kurdistan regional government, an official autonomous region of Iraq.
As I travelled the region I saw the familiar apparatus of an orderly election: children’s drawings pinned to the wall in school classrooms that were pressed for a day into service as polling stations, officials scrutinising the voting lists before issuing a ballot, and some ingenious pop-up ballot booths along one side of the room. The election officials I saw had professional ethics, one woman fiercely protecting the slot in the ballot box until she was sure the voter had inked his finger sufficiently to safeguard against fraud.
Many families dressed in their best clothes to vote, and people proudly bore the purple ink of voting for days afterwards. Although there was never any doubt about the result, there was satisfaction about the high turnout (72 per cent) and decisive margin (93 per cent).
It seems a long time ago now. Kirkuk, where I saw people voting last month, was invaded and occupied by Iraqi central forces and their allies the Iranian-backed Shia Hashd al-Shaabi militia amid bloodshed and fear. Turkey, Iran and Baghdad have closed most access to Kurdistan. The referendum had gone ahead against the wishes of the Iraqi central government and nearly all the international community. The Kurds intended it as an assertion of sovereignty and a start to a – perhaps very long – negotiated process, rather than leading to an immediate declaration of independence.
While it came suddenly, the referendum arose from the strong feeling in Kurdistan that they had not been treated fairly by their government in Baghdad. A lot of the complaints were similar to those that inspired the American revolutionaries in the 1770s – lack of representation in government, deprivation of rights and liberties, and a central government not playing fair with the money.
The central authorities in Baghdad have failed to implement several important pieces of the constitution. The status of the disputed territories including Kirkuk was supposed to be decided by 2007 after a census and a vote, but Baghdad reneged on this, as it has on a revenue sharing agreement between the central government and the KRG. Government in post-2003 Iraq was originally a partnership between the Kurds and Iraqi Arabs, but the Kurdish presence has been salami-sliced. Iraq has become an elective dictatorship in the form of a sectarian Shia regime closely aligned with Tehran.
In the disastrous year of 2014 Baghdad cut off funding to Kurdistan in February and the oil price collapsed, but the Peshmerga still bailed out the Iraqi army against Islamic State in June, and Kurdistan hosts 1.5 million internally displaced people who fled the brutal Isis regime in Mosul. As several Kurdish politicians put it to us, why would we want to be part of a state like that? What has Iraq done in the last decade to make Kurds feel part of a common enterprise rather than a subject people? The Kurds have acted with enormous restraint for over 10 years and have been poorly rewarded.
The Kurds feel hurt and isolated by the world response to the referendum and the subsequent crisis. They did not expect outright support from the western powers, but at least hoped for neutrality and understanding of the position they were in, trapped in an increasingly hostile Iraqi state and in a deep economic crisis. But there was unexpectedly vehement condemnation, which in turn emboldened Kurdistan’s unfriendly neighbours to hit harder than expected. First came the flight ban, then a wider blockade, then the army and militias rolled into Kirkuk.
The moral imperative is heightened when one recognises the immense debt the west owes the Kurds for resisting Isis in the desperate days of 2014, and the risk that continued constitutional dysfunction and sectarianism in Iraq could breed similar monsters in the very near future. Kurdistan is nearly alone in the Middle East in genuinely valuing pluralism – it is no accident that Christians and Yezidis have gravitated to the KRG area and Iraqi Arabs found it the safest refuge from Isis.
If one wants to talk realpolitik, Russia has form on creating and exploiting frozen conflict zones within sovereign states, has developing commercial interests– and has leverage over Turkey and Baghdad. If the west fails to protect a significant ally in a difficult region and Russia is willing to offer some guarantees, who could blame the Kurds for accepting Moscow’s overtures?
I do not wish to overlook the complexity of helping Kurdistan, nor to criticise the help that British armed forces and diplomats are giving on the ground; British officials were closely involved in trying to convene serious negotiations over the summer, but these foundered on the rocks of Iraqi and Kurdish internal politics and the festering lack of trust between Erbil and Baghdad.
Kurds say, with a sense of regret and inevitability, that they have no friends but the mountains. Have decisions made by the imperial powers in 1916 and 1923 really dictated the limits of what Britain can do in 2017? There is a clear case at the political level for some clear enough support to deter further aggression from Baghdad, and some thinking as imaginative, practical and humane as John Major’s response to the desperate crisis of 1991. There may not be much time.
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Lewis Baston joined the all-party parliamentary group on Kurdistan for their September 2017 visit to observe the referendum and discuss developments with political and civil society figures in Kurdistan. He tweets at @lewis_baston
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Photo: Lewis Baston