Iraqi Out-of-Country Voting Results (%)

This was reflected in Nashville, Tennessee (USA) which has about 8,000 Kurds. More than 95% of the 3,930 Iraqi expatriates who registered there cast ballots, despite extreme winter storm conditions. The 95.3% turnout rate, or 3,744 people, was the highest out of five U.S. cities that held voting Friday through Sunday and ranked 13th out of 36 cities worldwide that allowed out-of-country voting³.  This incredibly high Kurdish turnout mirrored the turnout across the three provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan - Sulaimaniya, Erbil and Dohuk - which averaged 84%, well above the national average of 58%. Dohuk had the highest voter turnout in all of Iraq, where a whopping 89% of eligible voters came out to cast their ballot.

Meaning of the vote

What do these results mean, and why did a disproportionately high percentage of Kurds come out to vote? This became very clear through my observations while working as a polling officer in Toronto. The Kurds did not come to vote for Iraq - they came to vote for Kurdistan. This should not be surprising to anyone who is aware of the upcoming 17th anniversary of Hussein's brutal chemical attacks on the Kurdish village of Halabja in March of 1988. Under Iraq's regimes, the Kurds have been subjected to 80 years of repression, enslavement and genocide⁴.  Over 200,000 Kurdish villagers perished in Saddam's ethnic cleansing campaign, many of whom are only now being dug out of mass graves. After decades of seeing nothing but death and destruction from Iraq, it is only natural for the Kurds to choose liberation and self-determination.

Apart from repression, the Kurds also share very little with the rest of Iraq. They are a completely different race of Indo-European origin; they speak their own distinct Kurdish language; and they are secular, as compared to the religious Islamic Shia and Sunni Arabs of Iraq. In fact, after over a decade of relative isolation from the rest of Iraq, a whole new generation of Kurds have emerged that speak no Arabic whatsoever in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. Over this short period of time, the Kurds have prospered, as compared to the rest of Iraq that has been nearly completely destroyed by Saddam and his cronies. The Kurds want nothing to do with the rest of Iraq, which is currently mired by suicide bombers, religious fanaticism, and economic stagnation.

Referendum movement

In 2003, Kurdish activists collected 1.7 million signatures on a petition demanding a referendum on the future of northern Iraq's Kurdish region. Parallel to the 2005 Iraqi vote, nearly two million (1,998,061) people participated in a referendum voting for Kurdish independence. 98.8% (1,973,412 people) voted for independence, and only 20,251 voted for staying inside Iraq. The choice of independence was a constant pattern in every part of Kurdistan including areas outside the Kurdish administration, such as the hotly contested areas of Khanaqin and Kirkuk. In Kirkuk province, 131,582 people participated in the referendum, 131,274 people voted for independence and only 181 people voted for staying inside Iraq⁵.  The referendum document is collecting dust on a table at the United Nations.

What's next?

I walked into the elections as a naïve Iraqi who believed that the elections symbolized hope for all the ethnic groups within the context of a united Iraq. I walked out as a more mature, culturally-aware and pragmatic Iraqi. I realize that the Kurds have finally had enough tyranny, enough genocide, and enough racism and destruction at the hands of the Iraqi state for the past 80 years. They came out in masses, carrying Kurdish flags, wearing Kurdish clothes, refusing to speak anything but Kurdish when entering the polling station. This enraged the other Iraqi polling officers, who threatened to walk off the job unless the Kurds removed their flags and anything else that showed their ethnic identity. I was shocked to see other Iraqi pollsters call security to remove an elderly Kurdish woman who had a t-shirt on that simply said, "I love Kurdistan". When a Kurd spoke Kurdish, he or she was always told to speak Arabic, despite the fact that many didn't know how to.

For the first time in my life, I saw how very real this "Kurdophobia" really is, and realized how impossible it was for Kurds and Arabs to coexist within the context of an unified Iraqi state - a state formed by colonial powers with artificial boundaries that divided 40 million oppressed Kurds between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. In little over a decade, the Kurds have shown the entire world that they can take care of their own affairs. Their progressive and forward-thinking democratic institutions can serve as a beacon of hope and a model of prosperity for the entire region. The latest vote in Iraq revealed the aspirations of a people that have been brutalized for too long. If self-determination truly is a globally accepted principle, it is time to let the Kurdish people go.

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