Iraq's election wild card: Kirkuk

Six months ago, Asso Hama Amin went to the official government storefront for picking up UN food rations and switched his registration card - which determines where he can vote - from Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk, the city where he was born.

There's just one problem: Mr. Amin lives in Sulaymaniyah, a white- knuckled, hourlong drive and world apart from Kirkuk.

In the months leading up to Iraq's Jan. 30 elections, thousands of Kurds originally from Kirkuk have virtually "moved" back here by switching their registration cards from the places where they actually live.

Some hope to eventually return or to get money and land from Kurdish political parties; others see this as a way to move a large influential Sunni voting block to Kirkuk, a symbol for Kurds who were brutally expelled from this city by Saddam Hussein decades ago. They hope to use this mass registration as new clout to force the return of Kirkuk to Kurdistan and make it their homeland once again.

Kirkuk, the oil-rich city that Saddam Hussein "Arabized" through forced migration, is on the Iraqi side of the line separating the Kurdistan Regional Government from the rest of Iraq.

"This is our city," says Samar Sittar, a 24-year-old college student who lives and studies in Baghdad but plans to vote in Kirkuk. "We have to vote in our city, not in any other. It is a political issue, not a matter of numbers. This is our homeland." But while Kirkuk is a nice place to vote, he wouldn't want to live there. At least not yet. In Kirkuk, most of the 7,000 or so Kurds have returned to live in tents with no hot water or heat, with winter approaching.

The Kurdish vote will be crucial in the upcoming elections - they may well be the only Sunnis voting - and Kurdish leaders are seizing the political moment: They're putting pressure on interim prime minister Iyad Allawi to reopen the explosive issue of rejoining Kirkuk to Kurdistan.

"Allawi doesn't have that much support compared to the Shiite religious groups," says Asos Hardi, editor in chief of the independent Kurdish newspaper ITALHawlati.

"It's hard to imagine that he would get many votes in the Shiite population, and I don't think the Sunni Arabs will vote for him. So I believe that he does need the Kurdish votes," he says.

The two main Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, announced their demand on Sunday: postpone the election in Kirkuk Province until "normalization" - until the city's original ethnic makeup is restored - and then hold a referendum on the fate of Kirkuk.

If the Kirkuk elections are not postponed, say some Kurdish leaders, Kurds will boycott the entire national elections. "It will be postponed, I am certain," says Hasib Rozbayani, Kirkuk's director of resettlement for returning Kurds. "We have asked the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Baghdad government. I am very optimistic."

And if not? "We will boycott. Peacefully, of course," he says.

Election officials reject the call for a delay - or a boycott - in Kirkuk's local election. "They can do as they please, but the elections will go ahead on January 30," says Farid Ayar, spokesman for Iraq's independent electoral commission.

The idea is to delay the election for Kirkuk's provincial council alone until Mr. Hussein's ethnic cleansing can be reversed - "whether it takes two months, one year, or any amount of time," says Ramazan Rashed, deputy director of the PUK's Kirkuk office.

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