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Apparently bogus interior ministry directive to
dismiss thousands of Kurdish policemen seen as an
attempt to destabilse the city.
The interior ministry has sought to distance itself
from an apparent order to fire 2,500 Kurdish police
officers working in Kirkuk, after protests from city
law enforcement officials.
Kirkuk police claim that they received an order from
the interior ministry two weeks ago to fire the
Kurdish police officers.
The officers in question had once been expelled from
Kirkuk as part of Saddam Hussein's Arabisation
policy - which had forced Kurds to leave the
oil-rich city - and rehired after the fall of the
regime.
Interior ministry spokesman Colonel Adnan al-Asadi
said that officials there were unaware of the
directive, while Lateef Haji Faraj, representative
of President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, in the
ministry, said it had been drawn up long ago but was
no longer valid.
Nonetheless, the alleged order heightened the
already tense situation in the multi-ethnic Kirkuk,
which is claimed by Arabs, Kurds and Turkoman. Since
the Kurds won a majority of seats on the provincial
council, Arabs and Turkoman representatives have
threatened to resign.
After being notified that the directive was not
genuine, local police officials insisted that if it
had been they would have refused to obey it -
calming the concerns of the Kurdish police officers
who had feared for their jobs.
Brigadier General Sarhad Qadir Uzeri, a Kurdish
police official, said such an order would have
spelled disaster for Kirkuk and would have meant
that the Arabisation policy of the Saddam era was
being repeated.
"If 2,500 Kurdish policemen leave Kirkuk, who will
protect the city?" he said angrily, slamming his
fist on his desk. "If [such a] decision is put into
practice, the city will be ravaged by terrorists."
Brigadier General Torhan Abdul-Rahman, a Turkoman
and director of Kirkuk police, said he suspected the
alleged order was issued to disrupt the situation in
Kirkuk. "It is against the brotherhood among
Kirkuk's different ethnicities," he told IWPR,
refraining to say who he thought was behind it.
Lieutenant Colonel Yadgar Shuku, a Kurd who is in
charge of police operations, said he, too, suspected
it was the work of people who wanted to start
trouble - again not naming names - and added that
this was unfortunate given Kurdish officers'
contribution to countering the insurgency, " They
forget all of this and they want to plant the seed
of a schism inside Kirkuk," he said.
Sirwan Ghareeb is an IWPR trainee in Kirkuk.
www.iwpr.net
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