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THE
victims of Saddam Hussein’s rule will take over
power in Iraq on Wednesday when the country’s first
democratically elected parliament meets for the
first time.
The Shiites and the Kurds, both brutally persecuted
under Saddam, will take the vast majority of the new
government posts, leaving the Sunnis, who have
controlled Iraq for 1,200 years, pushed to the
sidelines.
But it is the Kurds who have emerged with the best
deal, despite the fact that they form only 20% of
the population.
As a result of the huge turnout in Kurdish areas in
the January election, they have 77 seats to the
Shiites’ 140 in the 275-seat assembly, so that
without Kurdish support the Shiites are short of the
two-thirds majority they need to place their
candidates in the new government posts.
The parliament will elect a Shiite, Ibrahim al
Jaafari, a 57-year-old London doctor, as prime
minister, with Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani
becoming president in a largely ceremonial position.
But more important for the Kurds, they will get
their own share of Iraq’s oil wealth, and there will
be negotiations on redrawing the boundaries of the
Kurdish region in the north to include the oil-rich
city of Kirkuk. More than 100,000 Kurds who were
ethnically cleansed from Kirkuk in Saddam’s attempts
to turn it into an Arab city will have the right to
return.
For well over a decade the Kurds have enjoyed their
own semi-autonomous state as a result of joint
US-British round-the-clock air cover which created a
no-fly zone that was out of bounds to Saddam’s air
force. To these rights may now also be added the
right to retain their own militia, the peshmergas,
giving the Kurds many of the elements of a
semi-independent state.
"The Kurds are the big winners and since the
election have been in the best position to make a
deal," said Turi Munthe, head of the Middle East and
North Africa Programme at the London-based the Royal
United Services Institute. "The Shiites were
convinced that they were going to get a two-thirds
majority. Now it looks like they are being forced to
sell off bits of Iraq to the Kurds."
http://news.scotsman.com
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