Rana Hamid, originally from Anbar province, participated in a protest on Friday opposing the return of a Kurdish governor to the province.
“I swear we are Baathists and Saddamist. We will not give up Iraq,” she is alleged to have shouted in footage of the protest supplied to Rudaw.
She also called Arab parties “betrayers” for failing to speak up for Arab rights in Kirkuk.
The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party ruled Iraq from 1968 until 2003 when the US-led invasion toppled its leader Saddam Hussein and launched the de-Baathification programme. Saddam and his regime committed crimes against humanity, including the Anfal genocide of the Kurds.
Under Iraq’s 2005 constitution (Article 7), Baath party symbols and propaganda are “prohibited” by law.
Angered by Hamid’s professed support for Baathism, Kurdish groups filed a lawsuit against her.
“A lawsuit has been filed against the woman who praised Saddam during the Arab protest,” Afrasyaw Kamil, spokesperson for Kirkuk police, told Rudaw on Sunday.
“The court has issued an arrest warrant for her because what she did was against the constitution and the law. Therefore, police raided her house to arrest her but she was not at home. We do not know where she has fled,” he added.
Iraq’s constitution states: “Any entity or program that adopts, incites, facilitates, glorifies, promotes, or justifies racism or terrorism or accusations of being an infidel (takfir) or ethnic cleansing, especially the Saddamist Baath in Iraq and its symbols, under any name whatsoever, shall be prohibited.”
“Such entities may not be part of political pluralism in Iraq. This shall be regulated by law,” it adds.
The de-Baathification policy, first adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority after 2003, sought to remove Baathist officials from their posts in government, the military, and civil society.
The policy was widely seen as a failure, as the disbanding of the Iraqi armed forces and the removal of predominantly Sunni Baathist officials provoked a sectarian backlash.
Kirkuk is synonymous with Iraq’s strained inter-ethnic relations. The oil-rich province is home to Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, and other minorities. During Saddam’s rule, the Baath tried to “Arabize” the province by moving out local Kurds and Turkmen and settling southern Arabs in their place.
Iraq’s 2005 constitution ordered the reversal of Arabization and the return of Kurds and Turkmen to their land. It also called for a referendum to determine whether Kirkuk should join the Kurdistan Region or remain a federal Iraqi province – a referendum that has still not been held.
The issue came to the fore in 2014 when the Kurdish Peshmerga took control of Kirkuk’s security. Iraqi federal forces had withdrawn in the face of an Islamic State (ISIS) assault.
Although the Peshmerga held ISIS at bay, Kurdish rule in Kirkuk was not accepted by all of the province’s ethnic components. When the Kurdistan Region held its independence referendum in late 2017, Baghdad responded by sending troops to retake the province from the Peshmerga.
Kurdish officials, including Kirkuk governor Najmaddin Karim, were sacked from their posts. His Arab deputy, Rakan al-Jabouri, was installed in his place.
Following months of talks over who the Kurdish parties should nominate to stand for governor, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) finally agreed to jointly back Tayyib Jabbar.
A joint KDP-PUK delegation plans to visit Kirkuk this week to open dialogue with Arab and Turkmen parties to find a solution that satisfies all of Kirkuk’s ethnic and religious groups.
“We are planning to offer the Turkmen and Arabs in Kirkuk the 2003 plan, where Kurds hold the Kirkuk governor position, Turkmen receive provisional council presidency, and Arabs get the deputy governor position,” Khalid Shwani, a senior PUK leader and head of the delegation to Kirkuk, told Rudaw last week.
Security in the disputed territories, including Kirkuk, has deteriorated over the past year as ISIS remnants and their sophisticated network of sleeper cells resume their earlier hit-and-run insurgency tactics. Kirkuk city has been rocked by several explosions in recent weeks.
Although relations between Erbil and Baghdad have improved greatly since the brief armed conflict in late 2017, security cooperation between the Iraqi armed forces and the Peshmerga remains elusive.
