Kirkuk Bomb Kills Iraq Peace Hopes After U.S. Pullout

 

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aB6f0He..vyc

By Daniel Williams

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Jamal Tahir Bakr, police chief of the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, expected the euphoria over the U.S. withdrawal from Iraqi cities to end, just not so quickly.

A car bomb blew up a city bazaar and killed 37 people on June 30, the official withdrawal date. It put an end to any illusion that the U.S. pullout, coupled with heightened control by the Iraqi police and army, would bring peace, he said.

"People were getting hypnotized by the idea that normal times were here," Bakr said in an interview the day after the bombing. "It didn't make any difference how much you warned them, they had it in their heads. And then the bomb. The real situation is now clear: The problems are not over."

Too many conflicts are unresolved, Iraqis in Kirkuk say. An insurgency led by Sunni Muslims that rejects the Shiite Muslim- dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki persists. Kirkuk is rent by a long-running feud between the local Kurdish population and Arab Iraqis. U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden warned al-Maliki on July 3 that the U.S. might disengage from the country if it reverts to sustained violence.

Iraqi police aren't prepared to take on the heavy burden of securing a city of 1 million people, its own officials say. There aren't enough of them. And the region around Kirkuk, which supplies 25 percent of Iraq's oil exports, doesn't get enough funds from the central government for more police.

'Fooling Ourselves'

"Normal? Maybe we were fooling ourselves," said Sadiq Mohammed Burhan, 56, who lost seven relatives in the bombing.

Iraqi inability to control violence as the U.S. makes its phased exit by the end of 2011 may hamper President Barack Obama's push to shift military resources to Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO allies there are fighting al-Qaeda, the global terrorist organization, and its Afghan allies.

Obama called the Kirkuk bombing "senseless" on June 30 and warned of "difficult days ahead," though he said the pullout was an "important milestone."

Al-Maliki labeled the urban withdrawal an Iraqi victory over "foreign occupiers" and said in a June 30 Baghdad speech that "the national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and sovereignty of Iraq."

U.S. military officials blame the bombing on the Islamic State of Iraq, an insurgent group made up of members of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's Baathist party. The bomber parked his car, bought some groceries, put them atop the vehicle and walked off. As he faded into the crowd, the car exploded, incinerating shoppers, merchants and live chickens on sale.

Concrete Barriers

Government television has run reports faulting Bakr's police for not patrolling properly and for lifting concrete barriers from the market area, which let unrestricted car traffic flood the bazaar.

After the bombing, the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad ordered him to reinstall the barriers, Bakr said. His reaction: "We are supposed to have 13,000 police in Kirkuk. The government says it only has money for 11,000. We are the least protected city in Iraq."

Security forces have also become specific targets. Between July 2 and July 4, gunmen using silencers killed a soldier, a policeman and then another soldier and his brother on Kirkuk streets.

"We know they want to discredit the Iraqi security forces. This is a way of saying, the forces can't even protect themselves," said Major Christopher Norrie, operations officer with the U.S. army stationed outside Kirkuk.

Oil's decline from a peak of $145 a barrel last July to about $67 has reduced revenue, which Bakr says is one reason why he isn't getting enough police resources. He also says he suspects the central government is dragging its feet because the city council is dominated by Kurds.

Oil Reserves

Bids to develop two major oil fields in the region -- part of an effort to attract foreign petroleum companies and increase production -- failed on June 29 and 30 when companies couldn't agree on terms with the government.

Burdin Hickok, senior banking and finance adviser for the U.S. State Department's Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kirkuk, predicts that unrest may curb existing output at these fields and hinder exploration of unexploited reserves that potentially hold 6 percent of the world's oil.

The biggest risk to the area's oil production comes from Kurdish-Arab tensions, he said. Kurds, who control an autonomous region in northeastern Iraq, want to annex Kirkuk and nearby rural communities. Thousands of Kurds were expelled from the region during the 1970s by Hussein. Arab Iraqis insist that Kirkuk remain outside Kurdish control.

No Security

Residents of the burned-out market say the dispute was at the heart of the bombing: All of the victims were Kurds.

"The Arabs don't want to give us our rights," said Ghalib Jalal Shaqwan, whose brother survived after being burned in the explosion.

That is hindsight. The merchants themselves had lobbied to get cement barriers removed and told police they would hire their own security forces. They didn't.

"We didn't think we needed to spend the money," said Shaqwan, 30. "We believed things were getting better. Why else were the Americans leaving?"

One bomb changed everything. The sellers in the bazaar want constant police patrols. They want the barriers. And they want the Americans back.

"They should stay for 25 years," Shaqwan said as a clutch of bystanders nodded. "That's how long peace will take."

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Williams in Kirkuk at dwilliams41@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 6, 2009 02:47 EDT

How To Help the Palestinians

June 24, 2009 6:30 AM
by Khaled Abu Toameh
Journalist

http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/06/how-to-help-the-palestinian-people.php

The leaders of the Palestinian Authority do not want the international community to hear anything about massive abuse of human rights and intimidation of journalists that its security forces are practicing almost on a daily basis in the West Bank.

 

They do not want the world to see that, with the help of the Americans and some Europeans, they are building more prisons and security forces than hospitals and housing projects for the needy.

 

They want the US and the rest of the world to continue believing that peace will prevail tomorrow morning only if Israel stops construction in the settlements and removes a number of empty caravans from remote and isolated hilltops in the West Bank.

  

The Palestinians do not need a dictatorship that harasses and terrorizes journalists, and that is responsible for the death of detainees in its prisons. In the Arab world we already have enough dictatorships.

 

The Palestinians do not need additional security forces, militias and armed gangs. In fact, there are too many of them, both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

 

American and European taxpayers' money should be invested in building hospitals, schools and housing projects. Investing billions of dollars in training thousands of policemen and establishing new security forces and prisons will not advance the cause of peace and coexistence.

 

There is no doubt that many Palestinians would love to abandon the culture of uniform and weapons in favor of improved infrastructure and medical care.

 

As for the international media, it's time to abandon the policy of double standards in covering the Israeli-Arab conflict. For many years, the mainstream media in the US and Europe turned a blind eye to stories about financial corruption under Yasser Arafat. The result was that Arafat and his cronies got away with stealing billions of dollars that had been donated to the Palestinians by the Americans and Europeans.

 

Back then, many foreign journalists said they believed that the stories about financial corruption in the Palestinian areas were "Zionist propaganda." Other journalists said they would rather file an anti-Israel story because this way they would become more popular with their editors and publishers.

 

Recently, a Palestinian TV crew was stopped at a checkpoint in the West Bank, where soldiers confiscated a tape and erased its content.

 

This incident, hardly received any coverage in the mainstream media in the US and Europe.

 

The reason? The perpetrators were not IDF soldiers, but Palestinian Authority security officers. And the checkpoint did not belong to the IDF; it was, in fact, a Palestinian checkpoint.

 

The story of the detention of the TV crew -- which, by the way, belonged to Al-Jazeera and the erasure of the footage did not make it to the mainstream media even after Reporters Without Borders, an organization that defends journalists worldwide, issued a statement strongly condemning the assault on the freedom of the media.

 

"Journalists must be able to work freely," Reporters Without Borders said. "The erasure of this video footage proves that the Palestinian security forces try to cover up their human rights violations. This incident should be the subject of an enquiry by the Palestinian Authority."

Walid Omari, the head of the Qatar-based satellite TV station's operations in the West Bank, told Reporters Without Borders that his crew was preparing a report on the death of a detainee at the Palestinian Authority detention center in Hebron that might have been the result of torture.

"We were the only ones to investigate this case and we did it despite strong pressure from the Palestinian Authority," Omari said.

Al Jazeera's Hebron correspondent went with a cameraman to the victim's home in the village of Dura, where they interviewed the family and filmed the body.

 

As they were returning to Hebron in a vehicle displaying the word "Press," they were detained by Palestinian Authority security forces at a checkpoint and taken to a police station, where the video footage they had just recorded was erased. They were allowed to go after an hour.

 

One can only imagine the international media's reaction had the TV crew been detained by Israeli security forces. Anti-Israel groups and individuals would have cited the incident as further proof of the "occupation's brutal measures" against the freedom of the media.

Moreover, it is highly likely that Israeli human rights organizations like Betselem would have dispatched researchers to the field to investigate the incident had IDF soldiers been involved.

 

Yet foreign journalists and human rights activists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories either chose to ignore the story or never heard about it simply because it was lacking in an anti-Israel angle.

 

One can also imagine how the media and human rights organizations would have reacted had a Palestinian died in Israeli prison after allegedly being tortured.

 

Haitham Amr, a male nurse, was detained by the Palestinian Authority's US-backed and trained General Intelligence Force on suspicion of being affiliated with Hamas. He was one of more than 700 Palestinians who are being held without trial in West Bank prisons that are run by security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

 

These security forces, which are being referred to by many Palestinians as the Dayton Forces [a reference to ret. US general and security coordinator Keith Dayton], claimed that Amr was killed after he jumped from the second floor of a building where he was being held in Hebron. The family and human rights organizations insist that Amr died as a result of severe torture.

 

If the Palestinian Authority really had nothing to fear, why did it send its police officers to detain the TV crew and confiscate the tape? Is the Palestinian Authority trying to hide something?

 

True, Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad hold more moderate views than Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal.

 

But Abbas and Fayad do not enjoy enough credibility among their own people, largely due to their open ties with Israel and the West. The security and financial support that the Americans and Europeans are giving to the Palestinian Authority is nothing but a bear hug.

 

That is perhaps why they chose to ignore the story about the male nurse whose family says was tortured to death by security officers who receive their salaries from US and European taxpayers' money.