Iraqi government endorses decision to relocate thousands of Arabs from Kirkuk

[struggle4progress]

Source: AP

By STEVEN R. HURST

BAGHDAD (AP) - Tackling one of the most complex and controversial issues facing Iraq, the government has endorsed plans to relocate thousands of Arabs who were moved to oil-rich Kirkuk as part of the late president Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaign to displace Kurds, a cabinet minister said Saturday.

The Interior Ministry, meanwhile, raised the death toll in the Tuesday truck bombing in Tal Afar, a mainly Turkmen Shiite Muslim city in northwestern Iraq, to 152, making it the deadliest single attack since the war began four years ago.

Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said more than 70 additional bodies had been found in the rubble of the marketplace where the suicide bomber exploded his payload.

The new police chief in Tal Afar, Col. Ibrahim Al-Jubori, reported his force had found four more victims of apparent Shiite revenge attacks on Sunni men Tuesday. The bodies were shot multiple times and showed signs of torture he said. ~snip~

Read more: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2007/03/31/3880443-ap.html

---

Contains useful overview info

[MADem]

1. Stand by for the nation to be divided into ethnic states. NT

[PDJane]

2. That was the aim, no?

[MADem]

3. Regardless of the aim (which wasn't that, I don't think) it's the result.

The idea was that we'd be greeted as liberators with flowers and sweets, and the grateful wogs would stand by with awe, admiration and a desire to emulate the Great American Fathers, while we raped the land of their oil.

THAT was the idea, actually!

Didn't work out too well, though...how many days since "Mission Accomplished?"

[IndianaGreen]

4. Now we can charge the US and its puppet regime with ethnic cleansing

I don't think the Shia, the Suni, or even Turkey, will react kindly to this crap!

[daleo]

8. Ethnic cleansing.

The first phrase that came to my mind too.

[DCKit]

5. Hasn't the Kurdish controlled region been the only stable area to date?

They just can't resist poking the wasp's nest, can they?

[pinto]

6. The Iraqis may choose partition, if there's some oil revenue sharing.

At this point, it may not be such a bad solution, however it runs out.

One big drawback, of course, is alignment of neighboring states with each faction, but that seems to be a fait accompli already.

At least it would be a home grown partition, not one imposed from without, as was the original establishment of Iraq as a unified state.

:shrug:

[struggle4progress]

9. I'm gonna have a hard time bein enthusiastic about partition.

The Administration approach, from day one, was guaranteed to split the country apart, since it was based on constant interpretation of everything along ethnic/sectarian lines.

We saw this sort of interpretation in South Africa, under the Afrikaaner nationalists, who hoped to splinter the majority population into Bantustans but were defeated by an opposition movement that resisted that project with some skill. We similarly saw such an interpretation in the Balkans, where dedicated Serbian nationalists over a decade or more pushed ethnic propaganda that ultimately produced the European tribal wars of the 1990s.

Partition will alarm Turkey, which keeps threatening to invade to avoid having a strong Kurdish nationalist neighbor, and it will produce a collection of small weak states. No oil revenue sharing plan can be enforced effectively between separate sovereign nations, so any such plan will promptly be abrogated. This will leave the oil poor regions as a perpetual "failed state" with a history of training terrorist cadres -- and that will be used to justify an indefinite US military presence in the oil producing regions as US client states. The effect will be an increasing anti-American resentment and instability.

[azurnoir]

7. The Kurds wanted

to be autonomous long before the invasion. Kurdistan has the natural resources to sustain itself and then some, they have water, arable land, and oil.

[nealmhughes]

11. The Kurds are the best poised overall right now, after centuries of being on the backburner.

The inclusion of Mosul in or out of the Kurdish Autonomous Region will become a huge problem. Right now the Kurds want Mosul, but unfortunately, the Kurds had been pushed out of the city proper by Saddam Hussein to outlying villages in favor of Assyrians, Turkomen, and especially Arabs.

Mosul was a lot more cooperative in the past, when the various religious and ethnic groups actually used Arabic as their lingua franca and got along, but the Suez Canal changed the trade routes, and ergo it became a backwater, but the discovery of oil in the north has changed all of that.

We need to recall that Mosul was the Biblical Ninevah and Assyrians still call it that, and is the home of shrines of both Jonah and Nimrod from the Torah, Bible and Quran, and thus is multi-sectarian: Muslim, historically Jewish, and Christian, as well as various Cult of Angels groups.

Damn! Let the whole bloody country convert to Bahai or Zoroastarianism and get the B.S. over with already and make Aramaic the common language!

[kaal]

10. US endorsed Ethnic Cleansing

... I'm not surprised. Try get Bush to comment on this.