Bitter-sweet reaction to handover in north

The psychiatrist and vice-chancellor of the university in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah well remembers the day when Kurdish irregulars, backed by US troops, flooded south to take control of Kirkuk and Mosul. "It wasn't just the overthrow of the Baathist regime that overjoyed us," he told IRIN. "It was the knowledge that once again all of Iraq was ours - the territories controlled by the Kurds after 1991 were a claustrophobic place." But 15 months on this new freedom seems limited by ongoing bloodshed across Iraq, according to local people. "I have to go to Baghdad to get a new passport, and I'm having nightmares already," he said. "Before the war, you made the journey knowing you risked arrest. Now you risk death." "They call the line dividing us from the rest of Iraq the Green Line. It should be called the Red Line." Such ambivalence following the recent US-led war in Iraq is widespread in the north of the country, and it colours attitudes to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)'s early handover of power to an Iraqi-led transitional government this Monday. If the swearing in of the new government had taken place five months ago, Kurds say, they would have remembered the US-led occupation as a time of liberation and defence of their rights. But their pro-American sentiments have taken a serious battering since then. "To be honest, I'm glad to see the back of the CPA," humanitarian coordinator for Kirkuk's Department of Health, Dr Burhan Rashid, told IRIN. "They made the assumption from the start that they knew how to run our country better than we did, and sidelined us. Now, at least, we can move forward as we see fit." Stirred by the feeling that the CPA was unsympathetic to the attempts of Kurdish refugees to return to Kirkuk, anti-American sentiment is probably stronger among Kurds in this multi-ethnic city than elsewhere in the north. But it can be felt everywhere. "We expected great things from the Americans, perhaps too much," the director of Sulaymaniyah's paediatric hospital, Dr Iklas Nimmat, sighed. "They did nothing to improve our situation." The Kurds say they have long been disturbed by the inability of US officials in Iraq to pacify southern and central Iraq. But some say the point at which they really began to question their relations with the Coalition came late in May, when the US and Britain, in an effort to patch over the transatlantic row over the reasons for war in Iraq, began pushing the United Nations Security Council to accept a resolution on the future of the country. However, the resolution made no mention of administrative laws ratified by the now-defunct Governing Council in March. Seen in the north as a just reward for their co-operation with the US, the laws in essence gave Kurds veto powers over the terms of a permanent constitution likely to be written next year. "It was not just its defence of federalism we supported," explained Runak Faraj, editor of a fortnightly women's newspaper in Sulaymaniyah. "That law contained provisions for women's rights, for the creation of a functioning civil society - all of them issues we have been fighting for since 1991." Britain and the US decided to omit reference to the law in deference to Iraq's Shi'ites, whose most influential spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had attacked the law as the work of "a non-elected council under occupation... [that] would constrain the national assembly." "This US deference to one section of Iraqi society is disastrous, the result of Washington's desire to rush through the transfer of power without any regard to the issues involved," fumed one senior Kurdish official. "We are victims of Washington's calendar politics." Faraj, the newspaper editor, is even blunter. "So the Americans accept diktats from mullahs now, do they? I am afraid we are going down the road opened by Khomeini in Iran." It was only after Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from Iraq's new transitional government that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made it clear the laws would be respected until elections early next year. Allawi also backtracked on plans to disarm the estimated 80,000 members of Iraq's Kurdish militias. Behind the anger, though, few Kurds expect the handover to have a major effect on their relations with central Iraqi authority. "I work far more closely with the Kurdistan Regional Government and other [Iraqi] Kurdish universities than I do with Baghdad," said Sulaymaniyah University Rector Kamal Khoshnaw. "The new minister of education has given us assurances that this autonomy will continue." In Kirkuk, Burhan Rashid agrees. "The humanitarian programmes predated the recent war, and the CPA left them largely untouched," he explained. "The only change I would like to see now is for Baghdad to give local health departments more freedom to take decisions on local problems." Foreign NGO workers are similarly laid-back, pointing out that their interlocutors have always been Iraqi authorities, not the CPA. Perhaps more conscious of what they stand to lose with the slow withdrawal of direct Coalition influence, Kurdish leaders are busy making friends south of the Green Line, which divides the north and south. Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massud Barzani has been wooing the chiefs of the large Sunni Arab Jabour tribe. His mercurial Patriotic Union of Kurdistan counterpart, Jalal Talabani, meanwhile looks set to make good use of his chairmanship of a 1,000-strong commission which in July will choose 250 members for Iraq's National Council, a rudimentary transitional parliament.