A state called Kurdistan?
By comparison with the rest of Iraq, the country's Kurdish region has thrived since Saddam's overthrow in 2003. But a viable independent state could realistically still be decades away.
One of Iraq’s worst kept secrets is that Iraqi Kurds want an independent state. Whitehall included the Kurds of what was then the Mosul villayet (province) of the Ottoman Empire into its newly crafted Iraq some 80 years ago and for most of that time the forced marriage has not been a happy one.
During my first visit to the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq, in the summer of 1994, the area was in the throes of a full blown civil war. The 1991 Gulf War had allowed Iraq’s Kurds the opportunity to run their own affairs for the first time, in a safe haven the size of Switzerland established by the U.S., Britain and France. But the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties – the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – had begun fighting over the scraps of smuggling revenue that consisted of the near-destitute safe haven’s main source of income. Also suffering from double sanctions (the international ones placed on Iraq and Saddam’s sanctions against the Iraqi Kurdish region) and unfriendly regimes in every direction – in Baghdad, Damascus, Teheran and Ankara - the future did not look bright.
Despite this, every Kurd I spoke to was thrilled to be free of Baghdad’s grip, however tenuously. With their history of central government neglect, repression, deportations, forced assimilation and finally chemical weapon-borne genocide in 1988, it is not hard to see why...
Full story: http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2008/08/iraq-kurds-kurdish-kurdistan
