THEY WON'T GO AWAY IF YOU IGNORE THEM (via Kevin Whited):

Turkey refuses to deal with Iraqi Kurds (Upstream, 2/07/07)

Turkey today rejected demands from the Iraqi national oil company Somo that its companies should deal in future with Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq when doing business there.

Ankara is worried about Kurdish moves towards greater autonomy in northern Iraq, fearing they could spark separatism among its own Kurdish population in south-east Turkey.

It insists on dealing only with the central Baghdad government and halted transport of refined oil products to Iraq over the weekend via its Habur border crossing in protest at a letter from Somo to Turkish exporters. [...]

Iraq accused Turkish politicians last week of fomenting division in its northern areas and said it might bring some form of economic pressure to bear on Ankara.

Turkey has accused Iraqi Kurds of systematically settling the city of Kirkuk, at the expense of resident Arabs and Turkish-speaking Turkmen, with the aim of incorporating its oil wealth into an independant Kurdish state. That, Ankara fears, could in turn fan Kurdish separatism on its own territory.

As Brother Whited points out, the interesting thing here is the degree to which the central government of Iraq accepts that Kurdistan is a virtually independent state.

MORE:
A gift for power: Iraq's Kurdish president is impossible to pin down. He's friends with the Americans - but also with Iran. He calls himself a Maoist - yet enjoys immense wealth. Who is Jalal Talabani? Jon Lee Anderson meets him in Baghdad (Jon Lee Anderson, February 9, 2007, The Guardian)

Talabani, who is 73 and has the fat cheeks, brush moustache and large belly of a storybook pastry chef, is renowned for his political cunning, his prodigious love of food and cigars, his sense of humour, his unflagging optimism, and his inability to keep a secret. He is known as Mam Jalal, which means Uncle Jalal in Kurdish. It is a term of both endearment and cautious deference; Talabani has a mercurial personality, with extreme mood swings. He has survived in Iraqi politics largely owing to an ability to outfox his opponents and, sometimes, his allies. Over the years, he has made deals with everyone from Saddam Hussein to Ayatollah Khomeini and both Bush presidents. He is probably one of the very few people in the world who can claim, truthfully and unapologetically, to have kissed the cheeks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Talabani refers to George W Bush as his "good friend" but regards Mao Zedong as his political role model.

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shia politician who is Iraq's national security adviser, told me, "He's very difficult to define. If you are an Islamist, he brings you Koranic verses; if you're a Marxist, he'll talk to you about Marxist-Leninist theory, dialectics and Descartes. He has a very interesting ability to speak several languages, sometimes" - he laughed - "with a very limited vocabulary. He has a lot of anecdotes and knows a lot of jokes. He is an extraordinarily generous person, and he spends like there is no tomorrow."

Rubaie mentioned a period in the 60s when Talabani was allied with Saddam. "One day he was a good friend of Saddam, and then he became a staunch enemy," he said. (In fact, Talabani flirted with Saddam twice more.) Rubaie saw nothing contradictory in this; Talabani, he said, was the ultimate pragmatist.

No other Iraqi politician has Talabani's experience, contacts, and savvy. As a result, he has made the presidency, which was meant to be more ceremonial than the prime minister's job, a powerful post. Yet this role, too, carries contradictions. After spending decades fighting for "self-determination" for Iraq's Kurds, Talabani finds himself defending Iraq's unity. He now has a choice to make: either he can be a founding father of the "new Iraq" - the elder statesman who will help rescue it from civil war - or, if Iraq falls apart, he can be a founding father of an independent Kurdish state. As always, Talabani has hedged his bets. "I am a Kurd from Iraqi Kurdistan, but now I am responsible for Iraq," he told me. "And I feel my responsibility." In another conversation, he said, "It's true that I am an Iraqi, but in the final analysis I am a Kurd."

Under Saddam, the Kurds "were facing a dictatorship in Baghdad that was launching a war of annihilation against the Kurdish people," he said. "We were in need of all kinds of support from anybody in the world. When war starts, and you participate in it, you will need support from anyone. There is no supermarket where you can go and choose your friends in a war."

In the current war, some of his unreconciled friendships have been troublesome. Iran was once one of the Kurds' greatest allies, and Talabani had planned to fly from Paris to Tehran. But he abruptly postponed the trip at the request of the Bush administration: he would have arrived in Tehran on November 6, and the prospect of pictures of America's Iraqi ally visiting Iran the day before the midterm elections made the White House uncomfortable.

In Baghdad, Talabani lives in a yellow- brick mansion on the eastern shore of the Tigris river, outside the Green Zone. Until April 2003, when Talabani seized it, the mansion belonged to Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former chief of the secret police, who, like Saddam, was sentenced to die for his role in the Dujail massacre. (Barzan was executed on January 15, but his hanging was bungled when the rope ripped off his head.) The presidential offices are next door, in a palace that once belonged to Saddam's wife, Sajida.

Talabani's complex sits on the north side of the ramparts of the Jadiriya Bridge; on the south side is the home of his political ally Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim's house is where Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister, once lived. The approaches on Talabani's side are heavily guarded by Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face death") fighters - Talabani commands some 50,000 peshmerga in the militia of his party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - and on Hakim's by militiamen of the Badr Organization, his party's armed wing.

The two leaders and their militias work closely on political and security matters, though in other ways the Kurds, who are largely secular, and the Shias, who are very devout, present a sharp contrast in styles.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2007 8:04 PM