The case for an independent Kurdistan

Over the next few weeks, the crisis now unfolding on Turkey’s eastern borders may ease, through diplomatic maneuvers or following a limited strike at Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas based in Iraq. But the Kurdish “problem,” one of the world’s oldest conflicts, is not about to go away without significant changes in the political landscape of the Middle East.
The most important of them is all but inevitable: the declaration of a fully independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
In the worst scenario, that step could set off a larger war, with Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran intervening on behalf of their religious and political clients in Iraq. Yet if cooler heads prevail, a Kurdish homeland could provide a major safety valve for longstanding, perilous tensions in the most volatile arena on Earth. 
Both scenarios imply a second nearly inevitable outcome: the end of Iraq as a nation-state within its present boundaries. With each passing day, the prospect for a viable compromise between these two alternatives grows dimmer.

FACTS ON THE GROUND
For anyone who makes it through the dense gauntlet of checkpoints that seals off the overwhelmingly Kurdish north from the mostly Arab south, the tenor of daily life above the security cordon can be disorienting. It is as though Baghdad, the presumed national capital scarcely 150 miles miles away, were on a distant continent a hemisphere away. Since the early 1990s, the 3 million Kurds in Iraq’s northernmost provinces have enjoyed almost total autonomy under the protection of the Peshmerga, their highly disciplined army, and U.S. warplanes. They have elected a regional legislature and president, establishing a de facto state that salutes its own flag, manages its own separate telephone network and broadcasting system, and equips and trains its own military and police.
Iraq is an irrelevancy here. No Iraqi flags fly next to the red, white and green banners of the Kurdish Autonomous region. Arabic, the principal language of Iraq, is spoken far less than English. Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War that led to northern autonomy, an entire generation of nominally Iraqi Kurds has been educated in Kurdish-language schools, watched Kurdish-language television and interacted only rarely with Iraqi Arabs.
In a 2005 referendum held in the three Kurdish provinces, 98.6 percent voted for full independence.
“The Arabs have punished us too much, for too long. You won’t find anyone here who wants to be part of Iraq again,” a 63-year-old Kurdish shepherd told me. His village had been leveled three times by Iraqi Army artillery during periods of Kurdish political unrest.
In the 20th century, the Kurds of Iraq mounted eight insurrections against oppressive regimes in Baghdad.
 “Self-determination is the natural right of our people,” the Kurds’ regional president, Masoud Barzani,  told reporters after the referendum. "When the right time comes, it will become a reality.”
The differences between Arab Iraq and Kurdish Iraq are vividly measured in facts on the ground, as well as popular support for independence.
In the Kurdish north, the deadly chaos of Baghdad, Basra and central Iraq yields to the dust and disarray of a phenomenal construction boom. The region hums with cranes and bulldozers building new apartment blocks, suburban bungalows, airports and shopping malls.
In Arab Iraq, the prevailing flow of traffic is a desperate tide of oubound refugees fleeing to any foreign country they can enter, legally or not. The U.N. estimates that more than 4.4 million Iraqis have left their homes due to the war.
The Kurdistan region’s population, in stark contrast, is soaring so rapidly – thanks primarily to an influx of former exiles – that its officials have given up trying to keep count. In Erbil alone, expenditures on residential building in 2005 were thought to be 40 times the level of 1996. As for regional traffic, its day-and-night symbol is a line of incoming trucks waiting up to a week for customs clearance, a line that stretched more than 15 miles the day that I crossed the border.
The trucks carried tons of building materials, consumer goods and food products. And like the ranks of entrepreneurs, investors and business consultants who stood alongside me at the Kurdistan Region Customs Office, the trucks had almost all come from Turkey.

MUTUAL NEEDS
The chief ray of hope in this picture is that Kurdistan’s de facto statehood is already heavily reliant upon de facto economic ties to Ankara. If ethnic emotions on both sides – as well as the activities of the PKK guerrillas whose attacks set off the current crisis – can be contained, the argument for full-fledged independence and diplomatic recognition is compelling.
The possibility is not as outlandish as Kurdish and Turkish rhetoric often suggests.
“We need our neighbors. We need their trade, their economic cooperation, and coordination on security matters,” Dr. Shafiq Qazzaz, a close advisor to Barzani quietly responded when I asked him about the outlook for amicable relations with Turkey.
In 2007, Turkish exports to Kurdish Iraq are expected to exceed $3 billion, more than $1,000 for every inhabitant. As many as 3,000 trucks cross the border in a single day.
Major Turkish investors are said to be involved in a recent flurry of lucrative oil contracts signed by the regional government of Kurdistan – which boasts some of the Middle East’s richest oil fields – in defiance of Baghdad’s insistence that all such agreements be authorized by the Iraqi energy ministry. The main pipeline from the Kurdistan fields bypasses Arab Iraq altogether and passes directly through Turkey to the Mediterranean.
Iraq, which was assembled by France and Britain in 1920 out of several disparate possessions of the defunct Ottoman Empire, has never been a successfully unified state. An independent Kurdistan would, in that sense, be the logical response to a nation-building failure that has chronically destabilized Middle Eastern affairs and cannot be reversed. 
It would also defuse the ancient bitterness of the Kurds themselves, the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, and a people who have never presided over their own state despite 8,000 years of continuance residence in the Fertile Crescent.
Ankara’s worry is that a Kurdish state would fan the flames of separatism among Turkish Kurds. But there is sound reason to believe otherwise.

THE IRISH MODEL
To a reporter who covered more than a decade of communal violence in Ulster, evolving sentiment on bot sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border is reminiscent of Northern Ireland as it edged toward peace in the 1990s, when London and Dublin halted their respective support for hardcore Unionists and Republicans.
Today, the majority of Turkish Kurds are well integrated into the country’s rapidly modernizing economy, and far less supportive of the PKK than they were when a bloody civil war raged in the Turkey’s Kurdish southeast a dozen years ago.
On what is presently the Iraqi side of the frontier, most Kurds openly condemn the violence of the PKK, which has been formally designated a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union. The popular consensus is that everyone would be better off if the guerrillas put down their arms.
At present, Ankara must negotiate with Baghdad – with a government that has little or no influence in Kurdistan – when  armed conflict escalates on the border. A Kurdish state, dependent  on Turkish trade and investment, would be an immensely more useful negotiating partner.
From the European perspective, an explicitly cooperative diplomatic relationship between Turks and Kurds would eliminate a major objection to Turkey’s entry in the E.U.
From Washington’
s point of view, it would put to rest a diplomatic nightmare. Like the Turks, Kurds are moderate Muslims with a deep commitment to secular politics and harmonious exchanges with Israel – and even more than the Turks, they are also solidly pro-American. If the sole U.S. policy alternative is a choice between the two, Turkey – a strategically critical NATO member, with the second largest army in the alliance – is certain to come out on top, and Kurdistan’s hope for self-determination could well go up in the flames of a bloody regional war.
That would not only be a tragedy for the Kurds, but for Turkey and the United States as wel

  – Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5