Politics / Middle East Kurds Anxiously Eye Iraqi Elections, Hoping Unresolved Fissures Don’t Erupt by Seth McLaughlin In 1992, about four years after Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Iraqi Kurds, Barham Salih opened up the first Washington office of the Kurdistan Regional Government. The operation sat in a basement apartment about 10 miles outside the city in a sleepy Virginia suburb. Roughly 18 years later, Salih is Iraqi Kurdistan’s prime minister and the region’s Washington office is housed in a renovated multimillion-dollar brick building that is decorated with chandeliers and marble floors. It sits in an upscale neighborhood about a mile from the White House. Qubad Talabani, the U.S. representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, shared this snippet of KRG history during a recent interview with The Washington Diplomat. And after he mentioned the story, he smiled — perhaps a small recognition of the symbolic step forward his region of Kurdistan and his people have taken in spite of a troubled past and uncertain future. That future, Talabani said, will in large part be determined by the March 7 parliamentary election — Iraq’s third since the American invasion in 2003. The results will lay the framework for relations between the central government in Baghdad and his regional government in Kurdistan, which together will try to address deep-seeded disagreements that have split Arabs, Kurds and the region’s minorities for decades and resulted in bloody tit-for-tats. “The new government will come in inheriting a series of problems that have been left unresolved,” Talabani said. Today’s disagreements? Who decides how oil revenue is spent, who controls the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and how is power shared between the KRG and the central government in Baghdad. But these are not just pressing issues for the KRG and the central government. They are pressing questions for the United States, which has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives this decade to create stability in a region fraught with sectarian, ethnic and civil violence. In other words, this election puts the KRG, Iraq and the United States at a crossroads. At stake are no less than the prospects of a smooth U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, the country’s fledging democracy and the lives of millions. The Election The big fear heading into the Iraqi election is that the aggressive politicking and sectarian tension that has characterized the campaign season so far will bleed over into everyday life after the ballots are counted. Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said those concerns spiked after Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission barred more than 500 candidates from the elections. Many of those barred were secular candidates and Sunnis with alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party — potential rivals, many said, to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s ruling bloc. The decision drove speculation that al-Maliki’s government was trying to marginalize Sunnis before the vote and sparked concern in Washington that the ban could undermine the election and the country’s overall stability. In early February, an appeals court mitigated some of the perceived damage by overruling the commission, though the majority of candidates remained on the blacklist or had already withdrawn or been replaced by that point. In addition, a popular Sunni political party — whose leader was among the 500 banned candidates — had threatened to boycott the election before flip-flopping and deciding to run. Nevertheless, fears remain that Sunnis will accuse Shiite religious parties of rigging the vote and will avoid the polls as they did in 2005, after which a torrent of sectarian strife erupted. Even if the election is deemed legitimate, observers worry that its impact will likely not be felt until months after the votes are counted. No single bloc is expected to emerge with a majority of the 325 seats in the legislature. Instead, the group with the largest number of seats will mold the next government, a process that involves on-again, off-again jockeying with minority groups over cabinet positions. When asked who will win the election, Talabani answered it will be the group that “can build a coalition the best.” “That is when the fun and games will begin,” the Kurdish representative said. “The elections, I think, will be a walk in the park compared to the government formation process.” Indeed, many Iraqis — Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites alike — say the U.S. model of democracy has so far only produced political deadlock and squabbling. What’s more, sectarian attacks and violent reprisals have been spiking ahead of the election, only this time, the Americans may not be there front and center to prevent a full-blown civil war from erupting. O’Hanlon outlined some possible future scenarios: the Sunnis and Shiites could come together and work against the Kurds on issues such as oil revenue, federal power and disputed territories; if tensions between Sunnis and Shiites continue, each of their political arms could try reaching out to the Kurds — although a Sunni-Kurd coalition would still be a minority; or the Shiites and Kurds could reach a compromise that includes some sort of oil deal in exchange for Kurdish support of a Shiite-led coalition government that effectively sidelines the Sunnis. “We will have to wait and see,” the Brookings fellow said. “But I hope that people do not act too much along sectarian lines and that they also do not try to pursue maximum advantage for their own group because that is the sort of behavior that got us into big trouble in the first place and that is the sort of thing that could restart the sectarian conflict. “Groups should be looking for a way to compromise with each other on major issues and not be playing for maximum advantage — as frankly the Kurds sometimes had done in the past,” O’Hanlon added. “I think Iraq needs a big dose of statesmanship right now since it’s obviously undergoing some severe strain in one of the most crucial moments that it has had in a long time.” New Government, Old Beefs Talabani says the KRG is ready to work with the next central government. But, at the same time, he warns that compromises will only be cut if the new coalition shifts away from “an ideology in Baghdad that says I must control everything.” His take is based on the KRG’s belief that the central government has misinterpreted the constitution and tried to shortchange regional authorities. For instance, in the current beef over oil, Talabani says the constitution clearly spells out that natural resources are to be shared. But the central government, he says, refuses to agree because it does not want to relinquish the power that goes along with controlling the purse strings of oil revenues. According to Talabani, the constitution hands the federal government control of developed oil fields and the regional governments control over undeveloped oil fields. He also believes oil revenues should be funneled into the national treasury — not the Iraqi Finance Ministry as they are now — and then distributed on an equitable 17 percent basis across the country. Next Page