A Kurdish state in the make?

A Kurdish state in the make?(DS).By David Hirst.I was surprised last week to read an article in the Baghdad newspaper Al-Sabah, by its editor Abd al-Jabbar Shabbout, suggesting it was time to settle the “age-old problem” between Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds by establishing a “Kurdish state.”
For never before had I heard so heretical a view so publicly expressed in any Arab quarter. And this was no ordinary quarter either. Sabah is the mouthpiece of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Shabbout went on to suggest a negotiated “ending of the Arab-Kurdish partnership in a peaceful way.”He called his proposal Plan-B – Plan-A being what was already in train: namely, a continuous “dialogue” between Iraq’s central government and the Kurdish regional government, conducted within the framework of the “new Iraq” – constitutionally defined as “federal, democratic and parliamentary” – that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein.
But Plan-A, Shabbout observed, was going nowhere. Differences – over power and authority, oil and natural resources, territory and borders – were so profound that dialogue had repeatedly failed. And this month it almost came to war. For a while the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga faced each other across the frontiers between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq in an atmosphere so tense, noted Shabbout, that hostilities could have broken out at any moment.
And it wasn’t only Shabbout, but Maliki himself, who warned that if war did break out it wouldn’t be just a war between Kurdish rebels and Baghdad, as it used to be under Saddam. It would be an “ethnic war between Arabs and Kurds.”
So are the Iraqi Kurds now on the brink of their third, perhaps final, breakthrough, the great losers of Sykes-Picot about to become, 90 years on, the great winners of the Arab Spring? They themselves certainly hope so. “Not only is Iraqi Kurdistan undergoing an unprecedented building boom,” reports Joost Hiltermann in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, “its people are now articulating a once-unthinkable notion: that the day they will break free from the rest of Iraq is nigh.” And Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani often openly alludes to this possibility. “We have had enough,” he says, of the “the dictatorship in power in Baghdad” and of the Kurds’ participation in it.
It seems, however, that he awaits one last thing before taking the plunge, another of those game-changing events – such as the breakup of Syria – that can transform the whole geopolitical environment in the Kurds’ favor. But the quarter in which Kurds are actively looking to bring this change about is in Turkey. That they should even think of this is, historically speaking, extraordinary, considering that, of all the Kurds’ neighbors, Turkey probably has most to lose from independence-seeking Kurdish nationalism, and has brutally repressed it in the past.
Considering, too, that ever afraid that Kurdish gains elsewhere may be a progenitor of Kurdish aspirations in Turkey, Ankara has long set great store on Iraq remaining united, with its Kurds an integral part of it.
Turkey’s extraordinary courtship of Iraq’s Kurds has continued to bloom, and to move from the merely economic to the political and strategic as well. In fact it has moved so far – the Kurds believe – that Turkey might soon break with Maliki’s essentially Shiite regime altogether, and deal separately with those two other main components of a crumbling Iraqi state, the Arab Sunnis and, more importantly, the Kurds.
The allurements that an independent Kurdistan could proffer in return would include its role as a potential source of much-needed, abundant and reliable oil supplies, as a stable, accommodating ally and buffer between it and a hostile Iraq and Iran, and even – in a policy option as extraordinary as Turkey’s own – as a collaborator in containing fellow Kurds, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
Having established a strong presence in “liberated” Syrian Kurdistan, the PKK is now seeking to turn this territory into a platform for reviving the insurgency in Turkey itself.
It is even said that Erdogan has gone so far as to promise Barzani that Turkey would protect his would-be state-in-the-making in the event of an Iraqi military onslaught. However, presumably that would never come to pass if, adopting Plan-B, the Maliki regime really is contemplating the seismic step of letting the Kurds go of their own free will.Read the full story here.

David Hirst is a former Middle East correspondent for The Guardian and author of “Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East.” He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.