An engineer in the mayor's office of the Kirkuk province's Dibis district points to villages on a map accused of encroaching on oil infrastructure.
October 7, 2010
DIBIS, IRAQ - In a hot office in Kirkuk’s Dibis district, the mayor, Hadi Hama Mustafa Ghazai, angrily rips a letter from a two-ring binder and sends a lackey to make a photocopy.
“These are immoral things they are doing,” Ghazai says.
The offending letter is from the North Oil Company (NOC). It lists more than two dozen alleged infractions of an Oil Ministry regulation against building too close to oil and gas pipelines. Residential units – including those belonging to prominent politicians – government buildings, a brick factory and a playground are all in violation, the letter states.
Left unchallenged, the NOC’s letter would cause the removal of 5,000 people from six villages – all of them Kurdish, Ghazai says – totaling eight percent of his district’s population. Ghazai is fighting back.
“These are Saddam decision,” he says.
Dibis mayor Hadi Hama Mustafa Ghazai in his office, waving the letter of eviction from the North Oil Company.
Oil infrastructure doesn’t have to precisely mirror the reserves below ground, and so the physical growth of the oil sector usually doesn’t have to conflict with the growth of nearby communities. Yet, as Iraq’s oil sector expands, more and more Iraqis are suffering from nearby oil infrastructure. In Baghdad, for example, a neighborhood deemed too close to a pipeline was recently demolished, and in the south, new oil development has come at the expense of local farmers.
The recent oil developments are only the beginning. In the last year, Iraq has contracted foreign oil companies to develop 11 key oilfield projects, which promise to bring production capacity to more than 12.5 million barrels per day (bpd) within seven years. This week, the Oil Ministry announced a 24 percent increase in the country’s proven reserves.
In the June 2009 oilfield auction, the Kirkuk field, the oldest producer in Iraq, received only one bid, which the ministry rejected. The bidding consortium was asking for nearly $6 per barrel more than the ministry was willing to pay. One executive involved in the bid said the consortium’s high price was the political – and thus, security – uncertainty surrounding the field, which lies squarely within the ethnically disputed territories between Arab and Kurdish Iraq.
In Dibis, a farmland turned mini oil hub, residents know that oil resources can bring prosperity, but they warn that no flush future can happen without first reconciling past conflicts. Without healing history’s grievances, a simple, stern letter can sting like salt in an open wound.
For many here, the threatened displacement of several thousand Kurds sounds an eerie echo of the former regime. In 1988, Saddam Hussein unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide designed to transform the ethnic identity of Kirkuk. Arab citizens from other parts of the country were transplanted to the area as whole Kurdish villages were uprooted and sometimes destroyed for giving support to the Peshmerga, the Kurdish armed forces.
American officials say the fight over the stretch of territory between the northern autonomous Kurdistan region and the rest of Iraq – the so-called “trigger line” – poses a risk for civil war, and have continued to focus their military and diplomatic efforts on bringing the two armed sides together.
Dibis sits in the heart of this disputed territory, where Iraq’s oil wealth, ethnic politics, and history intersect. As Ghazai says, it’s a district of “strategic importance.”
Tensions on the rise
On the 45-km drive from Kirkuk city to Dibis district – a 587 square km patch that lies to the west – a continuous landscape of North Oil Company instillations is visible from the road: Iraq’s first-ever oil well, pumping stations, gas isolation units, pipelines and storage tanks that contribute to nearly a quarter of Iraq’s daily oil output.
As much as 60 percent of the district’s territory is off limits, Ghazai said, due to proximity to the various infrastructure and 215 oil wells drilled since 1927, when oil production began – first by foreign oil companies and then, after nationalization, by the state.
In the mayor’s long, rectangular office, subordinates and allies gather on sofas stretched along walls adorned with pictures of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Behind Ghazai’s desk is a door through which hot, sweet tea is continuously dispatched.
The mayor blames the dissonance between the village in Kirkuk and the NOC on a clear disconnect: the company doesn’t use local experts in decisions on housing, planning and land use. He takes offense that the letter from Hameed al-Saeidi, director general of the North Oil Company, was sent directly to the Dibis police chief instead.
“Attached is a list of violations on oil prohibited areas and oil and gas pipelines within the sector of your work,” the letter states. “Please check on it and provide us with your feedback in terms of lifting these violations for the best of public interests.”
A house belonging to deputy speaker of the KRG parliament, Kamal Kirkukli, is on the list. Also slated for eviction: a house designated for the unnamed director of the Dibis Electricity Directorate, a social center for Kurdish Asayish (special security forces), a brick factory and a sports playground. None have been evacuated.
In response, Ghazai sent a letter to the governor of Kirkuk demanding he intercede, alleging the North Oil Company is itself violating land use regulations.
“These are including just the Kurdish villages, not the Arab villages,” Ghazai says.
The NOC is currently averse to talking to journalists on the record about its operations, and refused to comment for this story. The Ministry of Oil says that developing the oil sector is paramount to national interest, that anyone violating regulations will be relocated, and that anyone so affected will be compensated. Many Iraqis, however, have complained that they have not seen such compensation, and one farmer has even taken the government to court.
A political crossroads
By ill-fated chance, many of Kirkuk’s early oil operations were near Kurdish villages. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Kurdish rebels were fighting the Iraqi government. But by 1975, after Iran and Iraq signed a border agreement and Tehran ended its support for the rebels, the Kurdish revolution stalled.
“At that time, no Kurdish worker or technical staff worked at the North Oil Company,” said Ghazai – a dubious claim, but one that carries weight in a country where public sentiment is more emotion than fact. Kurdish residents and officials have long said they have been slighted in employment, and that their housing concerns are ignored.
After 1975, Ghazai said, Kurds “would be fired or moved to the southern areas.”
“My father was displaced in 1975,” said Nirman Nama Muhammed, a 41-year-old Peshmerga battalion commander, who used to report directly to current Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani.
Like many Kurds, who returned en masse to Kirkuk after the fall of the former regime in 2003, Muhammed is back in his family’s village, Mara’iya – which is now pegged by the NOC for eviction.
“Now what’s happening to me?” Muhammed said. “What’s the difference between that government and this one?”
This common question is largely rhetorical, because the difference is massive: the three provinces of the Kurdistan region are prosperous and nearly autonomous, despite the ongoing friction over federalism with the central government. Peshmerga are now funded and trained using resources from the central government. And the genocidal atrocities of the past regime – a Kurdish village was once gassed on orders from Baghdad – would be unthinkable today.
Yet the political process to reconcile the disputes along the trigger line has just been postponed again. A long-delayed census has now been bumped back to December; after that, a referendum will determine the status of Kirkuk and other disputed territories claimed by Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen and others.
“Even if they include the Arab villages, we will not be silent,” says Ghazai, positioning himself as a defender of all Dibis citizens, regardless of ethnicity. “If you want now to implement these (eviction) decisions, it will be a doomsday
