If the Maliki government in Baghdad truly wants to keep Kurdistan a part of Iraq, it is doing a great job of hiding it. Baghdad’s first and foremost blunder comes with the failure to sign a hydrocarbons law for the country. Refusing to take responsibility for paying the peshmergas’ salaries and pensions also stands out as a lost opportunity for the central government. In a more general sense, Prime Minister Maliki’s unwillingness to share power and run the country in a constitutional manner worsens centrifugal tendencies.
Regarding the “oil law,” or lack thereof, politicians in Baghdad are well known for their Byzantine approach to signing oil contracts and their refusal to allow governorates or regions any significant role in managing Iraq’s oil resources. Everyone in Iraq including the Kurds agreed with the principle that oil revenues be divided proportionally according to population, but leaving all decisions regarding management and contracts in the central government’s hands would be foolish for anyone but those running the show in Baghdad. Already we have seen that after agreeing to a limited oil exploration and export regime with Kurdistan, politicians in Baghdad refused to use the revenues from the process to pay the responsible oil companies their share.
The result is predictable: Kurdistan is going its own way with oil. Erbil has nearly finished its first independent pipeline to Turkey and just signed an agreement with Turkey to build a second one. The Kurds have signed their own agreements with Exxon, Chevron and Gazprom, among many others, which gives the United States, Russia and Turkey big reasons to protect Kurdistan from Baghdad. What’s more, the Kurds apparently offer foreign oil partners much more enticing and straightforward oil deals than Baghdad, where the ever-shifting rules, commitments and complexities of the oil game try the patience of even the most stalwart oil companies.
When it comes to the peshmerga, Maliki’s people seem to have forgotten a key strategy for ruling a country and keeping it together: patronage. If he would take on the burden of paying the salaries of Kurdistan’s security forces, which are in principle Iraqi security forces, Mr. Maliki would increase their dependence on his government in Baghdad. Instead, everyday that he begrudges the peshemerga a salary from Baghdad, and with every year penny of oil money he refuses to share with the Kurds, Mr. Maliki reminds the Kurds how easily they can get by without Baghdad.
When Mr. Maliki and his people also refuse to share power with Kurds, Sunnis or competing Shiites, they gnaw away at the already worn fabric holding the Iraqi marriage together. There can be no willing union of communities in Iraq without compromise, the rule of law and power sharing (love can come later). Yet Mr. Maliki personally controls all of Iraq’s security portfolios, he ignores laws about military appointments, he forbids legal and legitimate efforts to form other recognized regions in Iraq, he increasingly stacks the courts and “independent” committees with his sycophants, and he sets his hounds after Arab sunnis. No wonder the security situation in Iraq is deteriorating. Even with foreign jihadis off to their latest party in Syria, government policy from Baghdad is enough to breed violent disaffection. If things continue like this, the international community will be hard pressed to fault the Kurds for wanting to secede.
All of which makes me wonder: Perhaps Mr. Maliki wants the Kurds to leave–he just can’t say so too loudly given Iraqi nationalist sensitivities about territorial integrity and such. When someone lacks the courage to ask for a divorce, they may push their partner to ask. Without Kurdistan, Arab Shiites would make up more than seventy per cent of Iraq. The Sunnis would be hopelessly overshadowed and Mr. Maliki would have even less annoyances impeding his consolidation of power.
If that’s the case, the only thing left still keeping the Kurds in the Iraqi marriage may be the children–whom we’ll call Kirkuk, Diyala, Salah al-Din and Nineveh. Kurdish leaders don’t want to leave without them, especially if that means abandoning their Kurdish communities to Baghdad. Mr. Maliki and his people, on the other hand, probably can’t accept a Kurdish divorce that leaves custody to Erbil. So for the sake of the kids, the dysfunctional marriage continues.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).
