In US congressional hearings last week, Iraq’s central government was accused of reverting to its old ways, with control of the country’s oil reserves a mainstay of that effort. That’s what the people in Kurdistan think, too.
Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, is clearly not the least bit happy about the efforts of Iraq’s central government to control the country’s oil-especially that of Kurdistan.
“This August, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq passed an oil and gas law to regulate the oil sector in our region,” Barzani recently wrote. “So far,” he said, “we have signed eight production-sharing contracts with international oil and gas companies. We expect to sign another two in the near future.”
Negative reaction
But the Iraqi government has hardly welcomed the agreements. Indeed, as Barzani says, “We were deeply disappointed by the negative reaction of several officials in Baghdad to these contracts.”
Pay careful attention to his real concern: “In the last several months it has become clear to us that many in the Iraqi Oil Ministry are locked in a time warp dating back to the regime of Saddam Hussein, in which Baghdad holds tight control of all the resources of Iraq and uses these resources to create obeisance and loyalty to the center.”
If you think that sounds like bombast, consider the sworn testimony of another Iraqi. In congressional hearings held just last week, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, an Iraqi judge who led the US-established Commission on Public Integrity, said-among other things-that oil revenues were helping to finance militias in the country.
Rocket attacks
Also consider al-Radhi’s observations that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had protected relatives involved in corruption and allowed ministers to protect their employees from investigation.
According to al-Radhi, 31 of his employees and 12 of their family members were assassinated, including one investigator and his pregnant wife, and his home was attacked with rockets. “We have learned the hard way that the corrupt will stop at nothing,” al-Radhi said. “They are so corrupt that they will attack their accusers and their families with guns and meat hooks, as well as countercharges of corruption.”
Does that sound like the regime of Saddam Hussein, or does it not?
Listen to Barzani again: “In the past, oil in the Kurdistan region has been more of a curse than a blessing. The people have never benefited from our natural resources. Successive governments in Iraq have deliberately left our oil in the ground in an effort to keep our people poor and to deny our aspirations for a better way of life.”
One can easily understand then when he asks: “Does it surprise anyone that we harbor deep suspicions about becoming reliant on the capital that has brought us such misery for so many years?”
No, it does not surprise us at all.