Kurdistan: What's in a Name?

Condoleeza Rice got herself into a little diplomatic hot water recently when she mistakenly referred to Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq as "Kurdistan," which means "country of the Kurds." Coming from the US Secretary of State, the name seemed to imply a concession to the national aspirations of Iraq's Kurds. This angered Iraq's northern neighbors -- Syria, Iran, and especially Turkey -- all of whom have angry Kurdish minorities in their own countries.

But anyone who has spent any time here has stopped calling it northern Iraq, or Kurdish-controlled Iraq or even Iraqi Kurdistan (at least in casual conversation.) We call it Kurdistan, the locals call it Kurdistan, and in many ways, Kurdistan is what it already is.

Besides the differences in language, ethnicity and history (Kurds speak Kurdish; Arabs speak Arabic, and from the 1970's to the 1990's, Iraq's Arab-dominated government waged war in one form or another against its Kurdish populace), the basic distinction between Iraq and Kurdistan is that the former is a civil war zone while the latter has a functioning government and civil society.

Kurds in Kurdistan have many of the trappings of a normal independent nation-state. With their own parliament and regional administration, the Kurds have governed themselves since 1991, when they pushed the Iraqi army out of the north with the help of the US military. The Kurds now maintain their own security with their own de-facto national army, the 70,000-strong pesh merga, while the rest of Iraq is under de-facto occupation by a foreign army (the American-led coalition). There are very few American soldiers in Kurdistan.

Kurds also have their own immigration policies. For security reasons, the Kurdish government doesn't allow Arab Iraqis without proper paperwork and a Kurdish sponsor (in other words most Arabs) to enter Kurdistan. Non-Iraqis crazy enough to visit to Baghdad need visas that can take weeks to procure. But I flew into the Kurdish-capital of Arbil and got a ten day visa on the spot.

Also, there are practically no Iraqi flags in Kurdistan, except in Sulymania, the power-seat of Jalal Talabani, the Kurd who is President of Iraq (a largely symbolic post.) Instead, the Kurdish tricolor (the same red, white and green as Iraq but with a flaming sun at the center) is more common than wallpaper in Kurdistan.

Not content with quasi-autonomy, most Kurds would like to go all the way. Almost every single Kurd (99.9 percent) who voted in an unofficial referendum in 2005 wanted a divorce from Iraq.

But the final break isn't going to happen anytime soon. Iran, Turkey and Syria view Kurdish sovereignty in Iraq as a threat to stability and territorial integrity of their own countries. Kurdish leaders know that landlocked Iraqi Kurdistan wouldn't stay independent for long if these countries shut their borders, and if the central Iraqi government in Baghdad, which controls civil aviation, shut down Kurdistan's airports. Kurds need America to keep their highways and airports open, and Washington has committed itself to a united iraq and to mollifying Turkey, its NATO ally. Iraq itself will have to fall off the map before the rest of the world gets used to hearing the word "Kurdistan."

--Andrew Lee Butters/Arbil