IT does not matter how the Kurdish Regional Government justifies its implementation of the oil law it passed unilaterally in August and the 10 production agreements it has signed or is about to sign with international oil companies. These agreements are more than deeply unhelpful; they’re wrong.
The Kurdish administration of regional Premier Nechirvan Barzani maintains that it is assisting the central government and points out that 87 percent of the revenues will go to the Iraqi government as planned. Barzani also claims that the Kurds are only kick-starting the opening up of the Iraqi oil sector that is enshrined in the draft oil law that the Maliki government is due to present to the National Assembly sometime next month.
Yet what Barzani went on to say undermines this claim. The Kurdish leader was deeply critical of Iraqi oil ministries, past and present, was scathing about the government’s slow progress on the national oil law, and concluded significantly that he did not see why the Kurds should wait around while Baghdad decided how to manage “our” resources. It is open to conjecture whether that possessive referred to Iraqi or the Kurdish Regional Government’s hydrocarbons.
What is important here is the effect that the Kurdish action is going to have on the passage of the national oil law. Given that the Maliki national unity government is barely functioning, the parliamentary discussion of the draft bill was going to be difficult enough. Now a further layer of acrimony has almost certainly been added. Non-Kurdish legislators are going to be demanding that the Kurds retreat from their action and abandon their separate legislation.
The Kurds will then be left with their new oil deals and the divisions in Iraq will have been deepened further. This really is not the way forward. Thus far Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has been silent on the development. A Kurd and leader of one of the two main Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Talabani’s duty as state president is clear. He must uphold the constitution and protect the interests of all Iraqis. Yet he may fear that condemning the rival Barzani clan and their KDP party will unravel the peace deal both men made in 2003 to create a Joint Higher Leadership in the Kurdish region.
Officially Washington condemns the Kurdish oil deals but there will be many on Capitol Hill, who will be sympathetic, not least those who backed the proposal of Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that Iraq should be broken up into three federal regions with a weak central government.
Unfortunately, Iraq already has a weak central government and nothing that has been done by the Kurds in the north seems calculated to strengthen it. Indeed, there will be many observers who will believe that this move was designed to undermine Iraqi unity.
