[lg policy] Iraq: Kurds Are Threat to Minorities, Rights Group Says

[Harold Schiffman]

Kurds Are Threat to Minorities, Rights Group Says


SAM DAGHER
Published: November 10, 2009

ERBIL, Iraq — The policies and tactics of Kurdish authorities are
exposing minority groups in northern Iraq to “another full-blown human
rights catastrophe” unless the minorities receive better protection,
according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch. Members
of the minority groups are being singled out by extremist insurgent
groups and also are caught in the middle of a struggle for land and
resources between Arabs and the central government on one hand and
leaders of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region on the other, said the
report, which was released in the Kurdish region’s capital, Erbil, and
focused on Christians, Shabaks and Yazidis in Nineveh Province.

“When you talk about wiping out a whole community that has been there
since antiquity, it’s a looming catastrophe,” said Joe Stork, deputy
Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, which is based in New
York. The report is particularly critical of the policies and tactics
pursued by Kurdish authorities who control Nineveh’s disputed
territories through the heavy presence of their security forces and
political party offices. The report describes how the Kurdish
government has sought to repress minorities, subsume the identity of
Shabaks and Yazidis into that of Kurds and sow rifts within the groups
with bribes and patronage while suppressing dissent through violence,
torture, arrests and killings.

The United States military has recognized the Arab-Kurdish conflict in
northern Iraq as the main driver for continued instability in Iraq.
The disputed territories extend from Sinjar in Nineveh in northwestern
Iraq to Mandali in Diyala Province in the east and include the
oil-rich city of Kirkuk. After a series of bombings in July and August
against minorities in Nineveh that killed at least 143, wounded scores
and flattened villages, the American military commander in Iraq, Gen.
Ray Odierno, announced plans to deploy United States troops along with
members of the Kurdish pesh merga force and the Iraqi Army in the
disputed areas to stop groups linked to Al Qaeda from exploiting
friction between Arabs and Kurds.

With the exception of occasional joint operations and meetings between
pesh merga and Iraqi Army officers that occur because of American
insistence, no progress has been made in deploying the joint forces in
the disputed areas or getting the Kurds and the central government to
cooperate on security in a meaningful way, said Sheik Jaffar Sheik
Mustafa, the minister of the pesh merga, who is the Kurdish region’s
equivalent of minister of defense.

Mr. Mustafa said the combined forces would be based at combat outposts
throughout the north and would conduct joint raids and patrols and
staff checkpoints. He said the Kurdish authorities had agreed to the
idea but that opposition was coming from Baghdad and the Arab-led
provincial government in Nineveh, which see the arrangement as an
infringement on their sovereignty and want Kurdish troops to retreat
from the areas they occupy outside their region’s 1991 border.

“I think this joint force is crucial at this juncture,” Mr. Mustafa
said. A senior American official in Kirkuk said he was optimistic that
the joint force would ultimately become functional. A representative
of the United States Embassy in Baghdad said that “in tandem with an
ambitious push to improve security for all in the province, including
embattled minorities,” American officials were working to resolve a
political standoff between Sunni Arabs and Kurds in Nineveh’s
provincial capital, Mosul, that has exacerbated the situation.  After
its victory in the provincial elections in January in Nineveh, a Sunni
Arab-led coalition excluded the second-place Kurdish coalition from
all senior posts in the new local government and demanded that the
pesh merga leave the Nineveh areas they controlled. In response, the
Kurds boycotted meetings of the provincial council and used force to
prevent the Arab governor and other senior officials allied with him
from entering areas in Nineveh controlled by Kurdish forces.

Mr. Mustafa said the joint security forces must include Americans in
order to secure the area and carry out Article 140 of the Iraqi
Constitution, which outlines the mechanism for resolving the fate of
disputed territories. Kurds are clinging to it, but Arabs reject it.
“We will not give up one inch of the areas that we occupy until
Article 140 is implemented,” Mr. Mustafa said. He dismissed the
findings of the Human Rights Watch report as “false.” He said that
there might have been violations committed by individual Kurdish
security officers against minorities in Nineveh but that this did not
reflect the policy of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/world/middleeast/11erbil.html?hp


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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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