A NEW CRISIS IN IRAQ MUST BE PREVENTED
“Kurdish groups carry out ethnic cleansing in Northern Iraq”

Along with the debates on the reconstruction of Iraq in the post war era, the forces of the KDP and the PUK have reportedly been carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the region, entering the provinces of Mosul and Kirkuk in Northern Iraq and increasing the pressure on the Turkmen and Arabs.

Ferry Biedermann denotes the following in his article titled “Ethnic re-cleansing begins”, which appeared in Asia Times Daily on April 29, 2003:

“An open truck carrying a family and their possessions pulls up at a checkpoint set up by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) at Dakuk, just south of the oil city Kirkuk.

Shaker Mahmoud al-Zendi and his family are back after a 20-year exile. “I had come back here in 1983 from fighting for Iraq against Iran,” says al-Zendi, who takes his name after his village. “But when I got home, my whole village had been wiped off the face of the earth. Then we migrated.”

The action against al-Zendi village was a part of the “Arabization” of the north by Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath regime. Baghdad decided to change the ethnic balance in oil rich Kirkuk and Mosul; the local Kurds had long been seen as troublesome. The Ba’ath regime tried to increase the number of Arabs in the province.

Last week, thousands of Kurdish families started to move back to their old lands from around the country. The Ba’ath party forced most Kurdish families into internal exile to remote and poor areas. Several families from al-Zendi were driven to Ramadi located in the dry and dusty desert towards Jordan.

Kurds are happy to return to Mosul and Kirkuk. But Arabs now occupy their land, and some seem ready to fight for it.

Al-Zendi instructs members of his tribe to set up tents at the site where his farm used to stand. His voice shaking with rage, he points to a distant farm. “That was ours. I asked them to leave immediately,” he says. “They will have to bear the consequences, if they say no.”

The PUK forces, led by Jalal Talabani, are now supporting the claims of the returning Kurds. “The occupiers will have to go back to their home districts,” says Nur Eddin Daoudi, a political officer who says that his task is to escort Kurds to their original homes.

The PUK is clearly aiming to reverse the Arabization introduced by the Ba’ath Party and to carry out a new ethnic cleansing by settling Kurds in the region. About 750.000 “Arabs and Bedu” in the Kirkuk district will have to leave because they were “instruments of the Ba’ath Party”, Daoudi says.

The Arabs, Daoudi says, will be given one month to leave Kirkuk.

“But we have nowhere to go,” says Sheik Awad Bardi Owgla from al-Wahdeh village, speaking in Arabic. This is the village al-Zendi had pointed to.

“Those Kurds are liars.” says Owgla. “They had been given land by the government just a few months before us. Most of our land was also state land, and we bought the rest from individuals.”

That tallies with a PUK guideline that everybody who registered in the area before 1971 can stay. Families who registered later will have to leave, Kurdish leaders say.

Owgla concedes that his village may have taken over some Kurdish land after their expulsion in 1983. But he indicated that the issue could be negotiated. Instead, he says, the Kurds are shooting at his house and children.

The al-Zendis in the meantime are inspecting a pile of rubble that was once the family home. “This is where I will also build my new home,” says al-Zendi, the leader of the Kurdish family. For now, Kurdish men are living in tents across the houses of Arabs to mark their presence. The women and children are staying in a house that the Arabs had to leave a short while ago. Now the Kurdish women are cleaning the house out to get rid of all signs of the last occupant.”

In case the coalition forces, comprised of the US and British troops, fail to take necessary measures at the right time and to disarm the Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq, particularly in the provinces of Mosul and Kirkuk, where the Kurds reportedly initiated a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against several Arabs and Turkmen, the armed conflict that will arise in the coming period between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq can turn out to be a civil war, involving all the ethnic groups.