Vol. 81/No. 30 August 14, 2017
Iraq: Kurdish independence referendum faces
US opposition
At the same time, the Kurdish Democratic Northern Syria Federal System Constituent Assembly, whose armed forces are leading the drive to take the city of Raqqa from the reactionary Islamic State, have called for elections in communes, town and village administrations and for national parliament from September to January.
This move was strongly opposed by the dictatorial Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, which declared them “illegal.”
The backdrop for these developments are the continuing wars in Iraq, unleashed by Washington’s interventions and exacerbated by the bitter social and political divisions based on religious privilege in Iraq, and the seven-year-long Syrian civil war.
In 2011, Assad brutally crushed widespread popular mobilizations for democratic rights in Syria and against his regime. Tens of thousands were killed, or jailed and tortured.
Since then more than 400,000 people have been killed and over half of Syria’s 22 million people driven from their homes, creating a catastrophe for working people.
The unintended consequences of these developments have been the emergence of strong, disciplined and well-armed Kurdish forces with control over most of the Kurdish regions in both countries.
Lacking any other viable alternative on the ground, the Washington-led anti-Islamic State coalition maintains a tactical alliance with both the KRG’s peshmerga and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria in the fight to push back IS and defend the imperial interests of the U.S. rulers in the region.
Opposition to Kurdish independence or autonomy by the capitalist rulers in Damascus and Baghdad is rooted is deep fears of the effects on their rule, and fears in Tehran and Ankara of their inspiring renewed moves for independence by Kurds under their rule.
Washington wants the KRG to put off any referendum, at least until sometime in 2018 after the Iraqi general election.
“Having a referendum on such a fast timeline, particularly in disputed areas would be, we think, significantly destabilizing,” Brett McGurk, U.S. envoy to the U.S.-led Global Coalition against Islamic State recently told the Kurdish newspaper Rudaw. One of the disputed areas is the oil-rich city and region of Kirkuk, taken by the peshmerga in 2014 after Bahgdad’s forces fled in face of an IS offensive.
Speaking at his weekly press conference July 25, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said that the KRG referendum is “unconstitutional and illegitimate,” and “we will not deal with it” or recognize the results.
Addressing a Washington conference July 28, Chancellor of the Kurdistan Regional Security Council Masrour Barzani reminded the gathering of “all these atrocities that the [Kurdish] people had been through, all these chemical bombardments and the infamous Anfal operations.”
During the Saddam Hussein regime’s 1988 Anfal campaign tens of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq were slaughtered — many with chemical weapons. At the time Washington was backing Saddam’s regime in its war against Iran, seeking to do damage to the continuing legacy of mass working-class radicalization that followed the overthrow of the U.S.-backed shah in 1979.
The deadliest attack was in Halabja in March 1988, when Iraqi warplanes dropped mustard gas and the deadly nerve gas sarin. Some 5,000 people — mainly women and children — were killed and thousands more died from the effects years later. Survivors of these attacks were driven from their villages, which were burned to the ground while Washington looked the other way.
“When is the right time?” Masrour Barzani said in Washington. “We think the time has come,” referring to the scheduled referendum.
About 30 million Kurds inhabit a large contiguous region that spans the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, the largest nationality in the world without a state.
The Turkish government accuses the YPG of being terrorists allied with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought the Turkish rulers for over 30 years in the name of Kurdish national rights. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will never allow a Kurdish state on Turkey’s border.
Moscow, which has had a consul in the KRG capital Erbil since 2007, recently signed deals for Kurdistan oil — a 20-year-long deal with the Russian state company Rosneft. It includes an investment of $3 billion in KRG territory, added to a February deal to purchase up to a million barrels of oil per day through 2019. Moscow, Washington and Ankara are now all players in the Kurdistan oil market.
“We see the referendum as the expression of the ambitions of the Kurdish people,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Rudaw in a July 24 interview. But, in no uncertain terms, Lavrov warns the KRG leaders against taking any steps to transform that “expression” into actual moves to independence.
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