[lg policy] Politics Delay an Iraqi Census

Tue Dec 7 15:23:56 UTC 2010

[Moderator's note:  notice how this article talks about "ethnicity"
but never once mentions
"language" e.g. the fact that Kurdish is a different language from
Arabic, from Turkmen,
and other languages spoken in Iraq.  Why is it that language is often
swept under the
table? Instead they focus on "ethnic sectarian discord".   (HS)]

December 6, 2010
Politics Delay an Iraqi Census

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

KIRKUK, Iraq — Here in this contested city, as in much of Iraq,
numbers are not facts. They are assertions. Even the simplest
questions — how many people live here now and who? — invite a
bewildering swirl of answers from regional officials, each laced with
underlying political motives and threats of impending violence.  The
simplest way to resolve the matter would be a national census,
something Iraq has not conducted in full for nearly a quarter of a
century. Its plans to do so, however, have become so mired in ethnic
and sectarian discord that many here fear the results would tear the
country apart.

Kirkuk, the main city of a region rich in oil and rife with sectarian
tension — is either 1.3 million, 1.4 million or 1.6 million, officials
here say, though a United Nations report in 2009 cited estimates that
it was fewer than a million. The number of Arabs who have left since
the American invasion in 2003 might be 250,000, or not; the number of
Kurds who have since arrived is said to be far higher, or not.
Turkmens once made up 60 percent of the city of Kirkuk, compared with
30 percent now. Maybe.

“No one can give you an accurate number,” said Ali Medhi Sadiq, a
Turkmen member of Kirkuk’s provincial council.

Iraq’s leaders have repeatedly scheduled a census, only to repeatedly
postpone it, most recently one to have been conducted last Sunday.
They have done so despite a constitutional obligation to hold one as
long ago as 2007, when sectarian bloodshed made it inconceivable.

“The postponement of the census in the past was due to the conditions
experienced in Iraq, especially on the security side,” the country’s
prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said in a statement after the
latest postponement. Now, he added, “there are no more security
reasons.”

What there is, is a fear that a census might turn assertions into
facts, especially in the disputed regions of Kirkuk, Nineveh and
Diyala, where ethnic identity looms ominously over every issue, from
political power to the spoils of land and oil. At the heart of the
problem are disputed territories arcing from the Iranian border to the
Syrian that the Kurds want to absorb into their semiautonomous region
in northern Iraq. In the zero-sum politics of today’s Iraq, Arab and
Turkmen leaders in those territories warn that an accurate population
count would bolster Kurdish claims. So they have vowed to boycott any
census.

“If we go to the census now,” said a Sunni tribal leader in Kirkuk,
Sheik Abdul Rahman Minshid al-Aasi, “it means we will grant our
province to Kurdistan.”

The fate of the census, considered essential to the country’s
political, social and economic development, has proved to be one of
the most vexing issues in Iraq. Mr. Maliki’s new and still fragile
governing coalition appears unlikely to resolve it soon, given its own
unwieldy power sharing.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. recently included the census as one
of the main challenges the United States must help the country tackle
as American military forces withdraw ahead of a deadline now barely a
year away.

The last full census in Iraq was done in 1987. Ten years later Saddam
Hussein’s government conducted one without including the three Kurdish
provinces: Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaimaniya, which were slipping out of
Baghdad’s control under United States and United Nations protections
dating from the Persian Gulf war in 1991. That census put the
country’s population at 19 million.

A new one would measure the profound demographic shifts in Iraq after
the American invasion in 2003, including wholesale movements of
Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds in the country and the flight of millions of
Iraqis abroad.

Even now the breakdown among Iraq’s ethnic groups — including
Turkmens, Assyrians and other smaller ethnicities — remains only an
estimate, one that is politically charged, especially among Sunnis who
dominated politics and government under Mr. Hussein.

Even the number of lawmakers in Iraq’s new 325-member Parliament — one
per 100,000 residents — is based on little more than a projection that
the country’s population has grown to 32.5 million. (The C.I.A.’s
World Factbook estimated it to be 29 million this year.)

Kirkuk Province itself, one of the oldest continually inhabited places
on earth, has long experienced demographic shifts and strife. The
Kurds claim it as part of their historical homeland, but in the 1980s
Saddam Hussein dislocated tens of thousands of Kurds and replaced them
with Arabs.

After the American invasion, Kurdish troops from the north — known as
the pesh merga — raced to seize control of much of the region,
including the city of Kirkuk, with the support of the American
military.

They have since consolidated control over politics and security,
fueling a sense of grievance among Arabs and Turkmens who have faced
discrimination, threats and violence. An American brigade remains at a
base on the edge of the city, as does an additional combat command
headquarters that continues to plan contingency operations despite the
declared end of American combat operations last Aug. 31.

The deputy governor for the region, Rakan Said, an Arab, complained
that he was powerless to stop what he called illegal Kurdish
settlements in Kirkuk because the governor and the commanders of
security forces were all Kurds who answered to the Kurdish regional
government. He compared the Kurdish repopulation of the region to
Israel’s settlements in Palestinian lands.

“I can’t do anything,” he said angrily in his office in a government
building adorned with a new banner celebrating the re-election of
Iraq’s Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani.

Iraq’s 2005 Constitution failed to resolve the question of governing
Kirkuk, but in its Article 140 it established a process for doing so
that included conducting the census, as well as a referendum on the
Kirkuk region’s ultimate status. Kurdish leaders invoke Article 140
like an article of faith, making its implementation a condition for
joining Mr. Maliki’s new governing coalition.

Barham Salih, the prime minister of the Kurdish region, called the
latest census delay a setback to the nascent coalition. “We need to
have the confidence and courage to tackle some of these issues head
on,” he said in an interview in Dokan, a lakeside resort northeast of
Kirkuk.

The Iraqi Ministry of Planning has completed preparations for the
census under the guidance of the United Nations, training more than
230,000 enumerators.

Rather than setting a new date, though, Mr. Maliki’s government has
instead established a committee to try to resolve the underlying
impasse, including Sunni complaints that the census will not be
conducted accurately in parts of Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces under
Kurdish control. Originally planned for 2007, then October 2009,
October 2010 and this month, the census appears likely to be postponed
indefinitely.

Some officials have suggested a compromise that would remove the
question about ethnicity — thus establishing the country’s population
while sidestepping territorial claims by Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens or
other, smaller ethnic groups. That, of course, is opposed by the
Kurds.

“Delaying it has only delayed a problem, making it more complicated,”
Mr. Salih said of the census. “This will only feed the paranoia. This
will only feed the mistrust. This will only feed the sense of a lack
of confidence in the leadership of this country that ultimately does
not want to solve its problems.”

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

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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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