It's been a long time since anyone played an organized game of soccer at the stadium in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
For the past 41/2 years, the fading green pitch has been the site of a squalid tent city that's home to some 2,200 people. Laundry festoons the bleachers where the fans once sat, and open sewage flows through shallow ditches dug in the dirt outside. The parking lot is filled with simple cinderblock houses, some with electricity and satellite dishes, that attest to how long some families have called the stadium and its environs home.
The residents are Kurds, refugees in what was once their own city, who were driven from their homes during Saddam Hussein's notorious Anfal campaign to “Arabize” Iraq's fourth-largest city during the 1980s. They returned to Kirkuk – which many Kurds consider the “Kurdish Jerusalem,” the historic heart of their homeland – in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
But they found their old homes occupied by Sunni and Shia Arabs who weren't at all keen on moving out, despite being offered a $16,000 government compensation package to do so.
Whether the refugees will finally return to their old homes will likely be decided in a referendum that looms in early 2008. Residents are to decide whether Kirkuk and surrounding Tamim province will join the autonomous Kurdish area in the north of the country or remain under Baghdad's control. It's a vote that many fear could plunge the last stable corner of Iraq into chaos and violence.
That the refugees are still in the soccer stadium almost five years after the U.S. invasion is a testament to how high the stakes are as Arabs and Kurds continue to wrestle for control of the oil-rich city. The central government in Baghdad doesn't want to see the refugees return to their old homes, fearing that Kirkuk and the oil reserves that surround it in Tamim province will fall further outside its control.
As much as 40 per cent of Iraq's production comes from Tamim province, and some estimates suggest that as many as 10 billion barrels of oil may lie beneath its soil. The region also sits astride a key oil pipeline that takes Iraqi crude to market via the Turkish port of Ceyhan.
Viewing Kirkuk as the key to an economically viable independent state, the Kurdish regional government has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Kurds to move back to Kirkuk in the past few years, and now won't let them return to their former exile in the north, threatening to cut off government handouts if they do. With nowhere else to go, the refugees have hunkered down for another cold winter in the soccer stadium.
Kurdish leaders are eager to bring about the referendum, but both the central Iraqi government and the occupying U.S. army have pushed for its delay, fearing it will spark new violence. In the worst-case scenario, the Kirkuk issue could be the one that finally drags the Kurds into the Sunni-Shia fighting that has ripped apart the rest of the country, setting Iraq, perhaps irrevocably, on the course to being torn into three pieces.
“The situation in the entire country will become much more dangerous if the referendum is held without being very, very well-prepared,” said Majoob Zweiri, a specialist in regional politics at the Centre for Strategic Studies in neighbouring Jordan.
“Right now, the Iraqi government and the U.S. are speaking about reducing tensions, the decreasing number of casualties. They want to say that everything's going well. They don't want to create a new zone of instability in Iraq. There's a lot of concern about the consequences of the referendum.”
