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Hundreds
of Kurds flooded on to the streets in the northern
city of Kirkuk yesterday firing weapons in the air
and honking horns after the powerful Kurdish
alliance came second in the Iraqi elections, winning
25 per cent of the vote nationwide.
Kurdish leaders will enter negotiations with the
Shia coalition, which took nearly half the votes but
lacks the two-thirds majority necessary to appoint
leaders and pass legislation. Despite the strong
showing and groundswell of support for greater
autonomy in the Kurdish north the message from the
newly elected leaders was more conciliatory. "Iraq
is a mosaic," said a Kurdistan Democratic Party
spokesman, Faraj al-Haidary. "It is a combination of
all parts - not as an alliance with one party."
The two major Kurdish political parties, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, ran on the same ticket in the
national elections and have agreed to put up the PUK
leader Jalal Talabani as their candidate for
president, a nomination that seems likely to win the
support of the Shia bloc.
"We will reach out to everyone, even the Sunnis who
didn't vote, and remind the Shias not to do what
happened in 1920, when some groups were forgotten
about," Mr Haidary said, referring to the 1920
revolution, which, though led by Shias, marked the
beginning of their disenfranchisement as British
proxy rule came to rely on the Sunni minority.
But there is the potential of the Kurds alienating
disenfranchised Sunni rebels simply by assuming what
many see as their rightful position. If Mr Talabani
does become president, "it is difficult for the
Sunnis to lose the presidency and the premiership at
the same time", said Womidh Nadhmi, the former
chairman of Baghdad University's political science
department. "It is difficult to compensate them."
Mr Nadhmi said Mr Talabani had acted intelligently
so far in dealing with the insurgency, urging
restraint before the US assault of Fallujah in
November which levelled the city.
Some groups have raised concerns about the
possibility of Kurdish secession, but a local
pollster, Saadun al-Dulaimie, said a poll he
conducted in the Kurdish region found 65 per cent
wanted the three Kurdish provinces to remain a part
of Iraq and only 32 per cent wanted independence.
Mr Dulaimie said that, if anything, it would be the
Arabs that drove away the Kurds. "Eighty per cent of
the Kurds said they preferred a democratic state,"
he said, citing a countrywide poll he conducted last
year. "In the rest of Iraq, only 58 per cent of the
people said they wanted democracy."
Kurdish success sounded alarm bells in Turkey.
Ankara fears Kurdish domination of the oil-rich city
of Kirkuk as it could potentially make a Kurdish
state in northern Iraq viable. This could further
inspire Turkey's own rebellious Kurds, who have been
fighting government forces in southeastern Turkey
since 1984. Turkey has long complained that Kurdish
groups were illegally moving Kurds into Kirkuk in an
effort to tip the city's population balance in their
favour.
http://www.independent.co.uk
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