Demographic Engineering, the Forcible Deportation of the Kurds in Iraq, and the Question of Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Abstract

The Iraqi state-directed demographic engineering of the oil-rich Kurdish districts of Kirkuk and Khanaqin was launched in the early 1920s and has continued to the present day. The history and use of Arabization as a geopolitical strategy for controlling oil revenue in the region has been investigated (Talabany 2008; 2011). The issue of genocide within these various demographic and ethnic constructions remains understudied. This article, informed by interdisciplinary perspectives, examines certain government documents, and follows John McGarry (1998) and Paul Morland (2016) in deploying the term “demographic engineering” to describe the control of population size, territorial changes, and the confiscation of Kurdish properties in Iraq. First, it highlights the question of genocide and its nexuses with demographic and ethnic construction in the Kurdish provinces. Second, it argues that the Kurds experienced both hard and soft forms of demographic engineering from the time of the Ottoman Empire to the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. Morland (2016) defines hard demographic engineering as the deliberate modification of a territory’s demographics by increasing or decreasing its population. The indirect soft approach shifts the identities of ethnic groups or alters territorial borders. The article concludes by reiterating that the demographic engineering of Kurds in Iraq was not only “a technique of conflict regulation” (McGarry 1998: 613) but also a means of producing geopolitical and ethnic identity shifts.