The UN on Kirkuk

The United Nations has issued its recommendations on the future of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, one of the most difficult challenges facing the Iraqi government as it tries to build a peaceful future. The UN report has not been made public, and only its general outlines have been officially announced, but there is enough leakage for The New York Times to offer a general outline, and for commentary by veteran Iraq-watchers. It seems the report urges several possible futures, but comes down against partition (between Arabs and Kurds) and favors some sort of autonomous city-state or corpus separatum with power sharing among Arabs, Kurds, and the third ethnic group involved, Turkmens.

Those kinds of solutions are easier said than done, easier to talk about than to realize. Kirkuk offers no easy solutions. It sits amid oilfields which make it a valuable prize; for decades the central government sought to Arabize the area, renaming the province "Ta'mim" (Nationalization) and moving Arabs in where Kurds and Turkmen had once predominated. The Kurds (and the Turkmen) have been seeking to reverse decades of demographic change, but as always happens in such cases that involves dispossession of people who have already lived there for years. Here's a backgrounder by Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group that introduces the issues. Any grand compromise that deprives the Kurds of the city but does not offset that with some sharing of the oil revenues is likely to provoke open conflict between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the central government.

Of all the slowly simmering fuses threatening the future of Iraq, Kirkuk is perhaps the biggest powderkeg. For that reason it, rather like Jerusalem, has been deferred as too thorny to resolve right away; the province did not hold provincial elections earlier this year like other provinces.

Juan Cole notes that he thinks partition would be a better solution. Certainly power sharing arrangements have a tendency to come apart when there's a great deal at stake. It will be interesting to learn more about the UN recommendations.