In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 6 The Arab Perspective Applying the Old Rules In many ways the Arab perspective on the situation in Kirkuk is the most maligned. If not viewed now as the forces responsible for Arabization, the Arabs are still often seen as the beneficiaries of the policy, gaining access to land, employment, and other opportunities at the expense of those Kirkukis deemed by those now contesting the future of the city as indigenous. With both the Kurdish and Turkmen communities, the task of identifying who is an indigenous inhabitant of Kirkuk is fraught with difficulties, and this is even more the case with regard to the Arab community . This task is, however, only one component of the ‘‘Arab problem ’’ in Kirkuk. There is a second issue to be taken into consideration that is in some ways far more complex than simply identifying the history of Arab settlement in the area. For most Arabs, whether indigenous or wafideen, the discussion over the future of Kirkuk should simply not be happening. Kirkuk—so the argument goes—has a long history of being an Iraqi city, identified not with one particular ethnic group or another but with Iraqis. According to this logic, if Iraqis were settled in the city by previous governments, then their residence there now should not be seen as problematic. The real situation to challenge is the attempts by Kurds to portray Kirkuk as historically theirs and to incorporate what was once a cosmopolitan Iraqi region into their national territory. It is readily apparent that Arabs were settled in Kirkuk from the 1960s on, largely as a means of altering the demographic characteristics of the city and governorate in a manner deemed more stabilizing by the government of Iraq. However, it is also quite clear that Kirkuk has within its boundaries Arab tribes and populations that have existed there for generations. Particularly in the southwest and southeast of the province, there exist Sunni Arab families and clans with tribal names of great antiquity and wider familial associations. These people claim that they 80 Ethnopolitical Perspectives are not the wafideen brought in by the Iraqi government but rather Iraqis indigenous to the north of Iraq and existing in reasonable harmony with their non-Arab countrymen. The Arab argument can be broken down into three distinct parts. The first is largely built around the legitimate presence of Arabs in Kirkuk, particularly from the tribes of the Obeid, Jibbur, and Hadid. The presence of these tribes in the province and in the affairs of the city has a long history and, say Arabs, makes it problematic for Kirkuk to be incorporated into the Kurdish-dominated Kurdistan Region. The second argument is that they believe the Kurds to be overstating the suffering they endured at the hands of the Iraqi government and therefore exaggerating the numbers of displaced Kirkuki Kurds who must now be resettled. The final argument is best described as being ‘‘Iraqi nationalist .’’ Arabs in Kirkuk view with disdain the threat posed to Iraq’s integrity by what they perceive to be the overreaching actions of the leaders of the Kurdistan Region. Believing the Kurdish leaders to be motivated by oil, Kirkuk’s Arabs view the Kurds as acting not in the interests of Iraq but in their own interests. Far from joining Kurdistan, the Arabs (often in unison with the Turkmens) argue for a range of other possibilities to be considered, including keeping Kirkuk simply as a governorate of Iraq or giving Kirkuk some form of special status. Prior to analyses of these three arguments, it is first necessary to explain exactly who the Arabs of Kirkuk are. Just as with the Turkmens and the Kurds, they are not a homogeneous grouping. There exist signi ficant numbers of Shi’is in addition to the presence of Sunni Arabs. Arabs settled in Kirkuk at different periods of time and often display different outlooks depending on how and when they were settled. Some also exist outside the city in the towns and villages of the governorate, and many are concentrated in specific districts (notably Hawija), merged with the Kirkuk governorate in an attempt to increase the proportion of Arabs appearing on the province’s population register. The Arabs of Kirkuk The Kirkuk governorate has long been a meeting point between Arab nomadic tribes hailing from the west and south and Kurds and Turkmens living in the area. Before Kirkuk became a byword for ethnic con- flict, it would...

Share