Masrour Barzani, son of Kurdish President Masoud Barzani,repeats call for referendum on seeking Kurdish indpendence from Iraq, February 2016. Alice Martins / Press Association. All rights reserved.KRG’s President Barzani has
recently intensified his efforts for independence. There might be many reasons
for this. First and foremost, the state of Iraq is often regarded uncontroversially
as a ‘failed state’, artificially designed by British and French colonisers in
the aftermath of WW1, offering the Kurds nothing but a calamitous century-long
history including genocidal attempts to eradicate Kurdish nationalism. Added to
this, the domestic demand for the right of self-determination is well known to
the Kurdish leadership. 98.8 percent of Kurdish voters said yes to independence
in the Kurdistan independence referendum of January 2005.
The small region of Kurdistan,
little more than an autonomous region of Iraq protected by a no fly zone before
the overthrow of Saddam, has now become an international entity. The KRG has
its own foreign relations apparatus with 34 foreign consulates operating in
Erbil. It has also a vast economic reach mainly because of colossal oil and gas
preserves in Kurdistan as well as its trade with neighbouring countries. This
has convinced the outside world that the notion of a Kurdish state is no longer
out of the question.
Since 2014 the Islamic State, (IS),
has become another reason for the Kurds to speed up their efforts to secede
from Iraq. Failing to defend Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul against IS
assault, Iraq’s army also left the Kurdish city of Kirkuk, a troublespot between
Arab Iraq and the Kurds for much of the last century. Taking advantage of the security
vacuum, the Kurds sent Peshmerga forces into the city in order to prevent it
falling into the hands of IS. This led to Kurds regaining almost all of 40 per cent
of the territory that used to be considered, since 2003, “disputed areas”. In
addition, rows between Baghdad and Erbil over the KRG’s oil policy reached a point
of no return when in 2015 the Iraqi government refused to send its full share
of Kurdistan’s 17 per cent of the national budget.
The question before Masoud Barzani,
nonetheless, is what to do in order to turn state-building rhetoric into a
future Kurdish state which has successfully obtained the right of
self-determination?
Needless to
say, any given state-building process requires domestic
and external prerequisites. With respect to the latter, international and
regional actors have to reach a conclusion as to how such a Kurdish state would
be perceived, that does not contradict their multiple interests in the region. However,
assuming, for the sake of argument, that such key external entities as Turkey
and Iran will be relatively tolerant towards the emergence of a Kurdish state,
salient domestic preparations need to be made. In what follows I will focus on
this dimension in particular.
The German sociologist, Max Weber’s
classic definition of the state, as a monopoly over the legitimate use of
violence within an established territory, still seems valid. Taking the two
criteria of “monopoly of violence versus multiple purveyors of violence” along
with “legitimate purveyor of violence versus illegitimate purveyor of violence”
into account, there are four categories in which to describe any state, which
are explained below.
Any state possessing a monopoly of
violence (one unified coercive force: army) and which possesses a legitimate
purveyor (popular and inclusive democratic government) and which uses this
violence to keep law and order in place and protect the sovereignty of the
state, is considered a ‘consolidated state’. States without these characteristics
are often seen as ‘failed states’, either as “factionalized/fragile state”,
because they lack a monopoly of violence or as “predatory states”, when their illegitimacy is
their distinctive feature.
Applying this to Kurdistan, it must
be recognised that there are currently two partisan armed and security forces
(traditionally known as Peshmerga) in Kurdistan, each under the control of one
of the two major political parties; the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, (PUK). The potential here for endless malign
partisan conflict, could spell a future Kurdish state of hazardous chaos.
Although these Peshmerga forces are
evidently perceived as the foremost resource of the Kurdish struggle for survival
over the last century, especially due to its current internationally recognised
battle against the Islamic State, the resulting disunity threatens the
stability of any future state of Kurdistan. The fragmented characteristic of
Iraqi Kurdistan with its historically fissiparous nationalist struggle, which
deprived it from having a unified army, is something to fix before stepping
into statehood, considering the infamous capacity of the Middle East for
unprecedented conflicts of all kinds.
Since domestic division has long
been at work, even in the shape of civil war in the 1990s, weakening Kurdistan’s
stance on all fronts, a sincere and decisive decision has to be made in
reuniting all the Peshmerga forces. This is something KDP’s President Barzani
and PUK’s Jalal Talabani will have to do to meet one of the very basic pillars for
any relatively consolidated state to survive and thrive.
The KDP and the PUK agreed to
reunite the offices including a Ministry of Peshmerga affairs, but another
source of concern is the perpetuation of the divided institutions for governing
the KRG’s territory. In the recent economic crisis following the oil price
falling to its lowest in decades, the KRG failed to pay civil servant salaries from
mid-2015 onward. This added to political disputes over the extension of
President Barzani’s office term, fuelling public protests and strikes in late
2015. Protestors stormed the ruling KDP party’s offices across the region
resulting in 5 deaths. Immediately afterward, KDP’s Prime Minister removed four
ministers (from the Gorran Movement, the second largest faction in Parliament)
from his cabinet. On the same day KDP’s security forces barred the Speaker of
the Parliament, Yousif Muhammad also from the Gorran Movement, from entering
the capital of Erbil, and accused them of responsibility for the violent acts of
some protestors against the KDP offices. Such political squabbles have incapacitated
Kurdistan’s parliament since then, the body that would have to oversee any progress
leading to a referendum for independence.
Moreover, media
sources such as satellite channels, news outlets and local TV and radio are also
heavily divided and almost exclusively under political party control, yet with
no single national TV channel as a mouthpiece of Kurdish national interests.
The employment and distribution of
wealth relies considerably on the loyalty that individuals and clans show to a
certain political party. The preponderant nepotism stemming from the widespread
party-based style of governing in public services has also penetrated into the
private sector. This unfair distribution of wealth and opportunities will
undoubtedly contribute to jeopardizing an independent Kurdistan, especially in
terms of economic prosperity and social justice.
Ironically, even the KRG’s foreign
relations has become an arena for partisan antagonism: the KDP has a close relationship
with Turkey on one hand, and the PUK and Goran
movement seem to get on better with Iran on the other hand. This in itself has
spawned a deeper breakdown between political fractions.
This socio-political division in
Iraqi Kurdistan, has placed some irreversible political and economic burdens on
Kurds both at the domestic and foreign levels. As an example of domestic
failure, the affluent region of Kurdistan is suffering from an inability to
accommodate basic provisions such as water and electricity for its small
population of roughly 6 million. The dominant rentier economy has served a
small proportion of the society that has an association with political parties
in one way or another. This has left the majority of the public in poverty, to
an extent that the sharply growing gap between the poor and the rich suggests
that obtaining a just social system for any future Kurdish homeland will be far
more challenging than independence itself.
Having suffered from this political
division, the public in Kurdistan have wholeheartedly expressed a demand for
unity and furiously protested against the deviation of Kurdish politics from
this goal. They know that legitimacy as one of the main elements of a
functioning state, cannot be achieved in a future state of Kurdistan if
political leaders undermine the public demand for unity. This is something that
is widely echoed in the oral and written language of the Kurdish public, from
cafes to social media and from family and neighbours to institutes. These
unheard voices rightly signal the fact that the current wide-ranging political
disunity ensures that a prosperous Kurdish state will only be greeted with intensive
scepticism.
Current developments in the Middle
East have never been more in line with Kurdish collective calls for
self-determination. Envisaged by many observers as a kind of pioneering
democratic experience in a region traditionally fertile for totalitarianism, the
Kurdistan region of Iraq is a relatively stable region in the civil war
quagmire of Iraq. This fact along with the internationally recognised Kurdish
co-operation in the battle against ISIS could serve a future Kurdish statehood
well, if Kurdish leaders manage to set their own home in order. Otherwise
though, considering the current internal prevalent disputes and squabbles between political parties, it will
not surprise anyone to see President Barzani’s appeal for independence
remaining mere rhetoric.