Arabs Fear Kirkuk Purge

[Barrett808]

Arabs Fear Kirkuk Purge
Aaron Glantz

KIRKUK, (Southern Kurdistan) - ”When someone has the power, he will take everything,” says retired soldier Mohammed Hassan Mohammed in a Shia mosque in the Northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

Like most Shia Arabs in this oil-rich city, his family came here in the 1980s during Saddam's massive campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. Like most Shias here, his family came from the Iraqi military. And like most Shias here, he rejects Kurdish claims that Kirkuk is a part of Kurdistan.

What about claims that Saddam killed or forcibly removed more than 100,000 Kurds from Kirkuk and replaced them with Arabs, I ask. ”What they say is very correct,” he says, ”but when you see what they're doing, it's like what Saddam Hussein was doing.”

But Kurdish leaders are firm. They want all the Arabs who came to Kirkuk since 1975 to leave. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) chief Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish candidate for president or prime minsiter of Iraq, has made the repatriation of Arabs from Kirkuk a non-negotiable point for a Kurdish-Shia governing coalition in Baghdad.

(more)

http://home.cogeco.ca/~kurdistan5/8-2-05-arabs-fear-kirkuk-purge.htm

[yellowcanine]

1. A little more Iraq "untidiness." Why doesn't Housekeeping get here to

clean it up already?

[Xithras]

2. I hate to say it, but I agree with this "purge".

The Arabs are living in homes that were taken from the Kurds at gunpoint under Saddams rule. Now that Saddam is out of the picture it's only to be expected that the Kurds want to get their homes back. These people lost their homes, businesses, and liveleyhoods simply because Saddam didn't like their ethnicity.

Here's an analogy: Jeb Bush is elected president in 2008 and decides that he wants Detroit to be an all white city. To accomplish that, he drags the blacks out of their homes at gunpoint and drops them penniless in the countryside. Any who resist are killed. White "settlers" are brought in and are given the now empty homes and businesses for their own use.

Fast forward 15 years: Jeb is finally outed from office in a military coup, and democracy is restored in America. Should the blacks get their homes back?

[daleo]

4. Maybe native Indians should get the Americas back too.

It is not that easy to undo migrations. They are not just talking about returning homes and property to former owners, but expelling every Arab who settled after 1975 and their children who were born in the north.

[Xithras]

8. Not quite the same

For what it's worth, if we were having this discussion 100 years ago I'd have agreed with the sentiment, if not the practicality, of that statement.

A better analogy is the modern Israel/Palestine issue. We're not talking about an affront that was perpetuated on our half-forgotten ancestors, but something that was done to this generation. A 20 year old Kurd evicted from his ancestral home in 1980 would only be 45 today. He wouldn't be asking for compensation for some nebulous concept of a lost homeland, but for the acutal HOUSE he was thrown out of 25 years ago. A landowner thrown off of his thousand year old farm to make way for an Arab settlement won't be demanding an ethically cleansed Kurdistan, he'll be asking for his land back.

No, it's not easy to undo migrations, but these people are living on stolen land and at the very least are going to have to pay for it.

[daleo]

9. Reparations are certainly fair.

I agree that the time span that the migration has been in effect makes a difference in practice (facts on the ground). I don't know how much it changes the justice of the argument.

Reparations for having land taken away seem fair enough; expulsion is a different matter, especially for people who have been born in the territory in question. And the article does mention expulsion.

[Xithras]

11. But who pays the reparations?

The Iraqi government? Very few Iraqis are wealthy enough to afford an income tax, so the governments only source of revenue is oil sales, and most of that will be spent on rebuilding war damaged infrastructure for at least the next decade. After that I fully expect that Iraqi oil output will begin falling as the fields dry up. The Iraqi government doesn't have the billions of dollars that will be required to compensate these people, and I would even question whether the future Iraqi government, and by proxy its people, should be responsible for paying a debt racked up by Saddam.

The Arabs? According to the article most of the Arabs are former soldiers, so most aren't wealthy. Most people who would take advantage of the sort of offer that Saddam made ("Hey, we're killing off these dirty Kurds, come get your free houses!") probably weren't wealthy in the first place and likely couldn't afford to actually purchase their homes.

[daleo]

12. Perhaps the people who benefited from the appropriated property

Presumably they have title or at least equity. Even if they didn't purchase the houses, somebody must own them. In a sense, they are benefiting from stolen property and would suffer a loss in the transaction, the same as anyone with stolen goods. Given the difficulties of such a redressing of wrongs, they might then be recompensed to some extent by the state.

Even at that, all this could be very convoluted. It may not be easy or even possible to prove who had title to land or property back in 1975. Properties may have passed hands many times, sometimes to other Kurds, who would now stand to lose. Clearly the details of implementing any such scheme would be difficult, and Iraqis would have to work them out as best they could.

Expelling Arabs would not make this any easier, even if it did free up the properties involved. If an independent Kurdistan expelled all non-Kurds (especially without financial compensation) they would just be setting the stage for a grievance which could fuel a future war.

[NYC]

13. Same problem existed with East & West Berlin.

Houses occupied by "usurpers" for years.

It's a difficult situation. In this instance, it arose because Great Britain drew the dividing lines.

[Xithras]

14. How did Germany resolve it?

I'm not familiar with the details of the German reunification.

[NYC]

15. Money.

I can't tell you everything, and I don't even know what the "general" plan was, but people were financially compensated for their houses that had been occupied for decades.

Remember that even the dispossessed may have (or must have) established new lives in their new locations.

For instance, someone who fled the East before the wall closed, has a job, a home, gave birth to children in the West, etc. As much as he may have liked his house in the East, he would have to uproot himself to go back, and he would no longer have the same neighbors, etc. I think most claims were settled financially.

[atreides1]

6. Ethnic Cleansing, What a Concept

The only problem with your analogy is that Jeb and his supporters won't allow the blacks from Detroit to remain alive long enough to get their homes back. And any other minority that even thinks about
resisting will disappear as well.

Yes the Kurds suffered, yes they died, but there is no Kurdistan, there hasn't been a Kurdistan since the end of WWII. In order for the Kurds to regain Kurdistan as it was, they would have to convince Turkey, Syria, and Iran to give back parts of their current borders.

I don't see it happening!!!

Ethnic cleansing, no matter who does it, is wrong, period!!!!

[Xithras]

7. But is it really ethnic cleansing?

If you steal my home and move into it, at what point does it become yours? A year? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?

My point is that this is really a property rights issue. These people owned and lived on that land for countless centuries, and a couple decades ago a bunch of thugs with machine guns came and threw them out. The Kurds owned that land, they built those homes, and they created those cities.

The Arabs are squatters living on stolen land and in stolen houses, and any free land with any semblance of property rights has to recognize the right of a landowner to evict a squatter from his property. The Kurds have every right to return to their former homes and evict those who would have profited at their expense.

[Charon]

16. Relocation

Sorta like forcibly making Los Angeles Japanese free in 1942.

[daleo]

3. Sounds like a call for ethnic cleansing

”The principle is important,” Iraqi Kurdistan Prime Minister Necevin Barzani told the Financial Times recently. ”Whether or not the children were born there is a different issue. These people have occupied property that belonged to other people and unrightfully settled. They should go back.”

[jdj]

5. ruh-roh.

here we go.

[Karenina]

10. On your mark...