In Iraq, Combating Oil Corruption, Staving Off Fears of a Kurdish-Arab War

Iraq Oil Report. Posted February 22, 2009.

British forces in Basra are less focused on security and more on economic development, the BBC’s Jim Muir reports as he embeds with British forces giving Japanese businessmen a tour of their investments:

As part of that revised mandate, here they were ferrying a delegation of Japanese economic officials around the south, where Tokyo is pumping in hundred of millions of dollars in soft loans. …

We had landed at the Basra oil refinery, where the visitors were given a warm welcome by director-general Tha’ir Ibrahim and his staff.

“Now that security is so much better, we’re launching projects to increase the refinery capacity by about 35% and to upgrade the product specification,” said Mr Ibrahim.

“The tank farm [oil depot] here was 60% destroyed during the war with Iran in the 1980s, and then hit again by the Coalition during the occupation of Kuwait in 1990.”

“Now the Coalition are helping us rehabilitate the plant. That’s life!”

The Japanese delegation were as delighted as their hosts at being able finally to visit projects which they have been involved in from afar for years, without being able to see them on the ground for security reasons.

“I really feel the big change over the past year, and I feel really safe here,” said delegation leader Hideki Matsunaga, who heads the Middle East department at the Japanese International Co-operation Agency. “Of course there are still risks and some incidents and so on, but that’s the same all over the world.”

Elections & Politics

Iraq’s Kurdish-Arab tensions threaten to escalate into war, Leila Fadel reports for McClatchy Newspapers. Iraq’s Jan. 31 provincial elections have been hailed as a sign that the country is putting its violent past behind it, is moving toward democracy and no longer is in need of a large U.S. military force. Along a 300-mile strip of disputed territory that stretches across northern Iraq, however, the elections have rekindled the longstanding hostility between Sunni Muslim Arabs and Sunni Kurds, and there are growing fears that war could erupt.

Al Hadbaa, an Arab nationalist party with some Kurdish and other members that vowed to retake disputed territory from the Kurdish security forces, halt Kurdish expansion and eject Kurdish militias, won 47 percent of the vote in predominantly Arab Nineveh, according to the preliminary election results. That means the Kurds will lose control of the provincial council.

Meanwhile, Voice of America reports the prime minister of Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government says the United States must help resolve pending Kurdish issues before withdrawing from Iraq. Nechirvan Barzani appealed for U.S. support (last) week on the constitutional article (Article 140) governing territorial disputes, and the oil and gas law.

(editor’s note: while Barzani’s comments warrant mention, VOA isn’t too accurate on details, such as its insistence that revenue sharing disputes have derailed the oil law.)

Rahmat al-Salaam reports for Asharq Alawsat an Iraqi MP close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki says that statements made by Nechirvan Barzani, Kurdistan Region prime minister, about a war breaking out between Arabs and Kurds after the American withdrawal from Iraq, are “a disservice to the political situation in the country.”

With election results officially in, the best place to turn as usual is Reidar Visser at Historiae.org, and he includes a breakdown of Prime Minister Maliki’s province by province victories.

Visser writes:

After today’s official release by the Iraqi elections commission of the seat allocation in the new Iraqi provincial councils elected on 31 January, the process of forming new coalitions can begin in earnest. …

The new councils will meet within 15 days to elect their new officials, and new coalitions will have to be formed in this period. Precisely because of the relatively homogenous political map now after the seat allocation, the ongoing negotiations among party elites in Baghdad could have enormous significance.

Allies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will take control of the southern oil hub of Basra after winning 20 out of 36 provincial council seats in local elections last month, Khalid al-Ansary reports for Reuters. Six of the seats allocated to Maliki’s State of Law coalition were assigned to women, Usama al-Ani, deputy head of the independent electoral commission, told a news conference.

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