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Turks told not to meddle in oil-rich
Kirkuk city 11.12.2006
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MANAMA,
Bahrain,-- Turkey renewed its frustration on Sunday
with the Kurdish bid for domination of Iraq's
oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, which lies on
Iraq's volatile ethnic fault lines between Arabs and
Kurds.
Mehmet Vecdi Gonul, Turkey's defense minister, said
Kirkuk's future status carries major implications
for Turkey and Iraq's other neighbors no matter who
controls the city and its surrounding oilfields.
Gonul asked the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish-led
government not to impose an "unrealistic" future on
Kirkuk.
But Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, an
ethnic Kurd, warned Turkey not to meddle in "our
Kirkuk."
"You speak of Kirkuk as if it is a Turkish city,"
Zebari said told Gonul. "These are matters for Iraq
to decide."
Turkey wants to prevent the city and its giant pool
of underground oil from becoming an economic engine
that could fund a bid by Iraqi Kurds for
independence, a move would threaten to draw Turkey,
with its 15 million Kurds, into a regional war.
"We hope the natural resources of Kirkuk would be
used by all groups in Iraq without discrimination,"
Gonul told the International Institute of Strategic
Studies conference in the Bahraini capital.
Kirkuk is an ancient city once part of the Ottoman
Empire, with a large minority of ethnic Turks as
well as various Christians, Shiite and Sunni Arabs,
Armenians and Assyrians.
Since the U.S.-led liberation in 2003, Kurdish
forces in Kurdistan autonomous region (northern
Iraq) have rallied to reverse what they claim to be
an Arabization policy of Saddam Hussein, which
purged Kirkuk and other oil-rich areas of Kurds and
replaced them with Arab settlers.
Thousands of Kurdish settlers from northern Iraq
have flooded back into Kirkuk, colonizing the city's
desert outskirts. Many believe the influx is a bid
to change the city's ethnic balance ahead of a 2007
census and referendum that aims to decide whether
Kirkuk will be annexed to Iraq's autonomous
Kurdistan region.
The grim Iraq Study Group assessment issued in
Washington last week described Kirkuk as a "powder
keg" and recommends the referendum be delayed.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt warned those in
favoring in the partition of Iraq that they were
treading on dangerous ground.
"Every partition is written in blood," Bildt told
the security conference in Bahrain. "The carnage we
see today is only the beginning of the bloodshed we
will see if there is a partition."
Gonul agreed, saying Iraq's fragmentation "will be
the beginning of a disaster that will engulf the
whole region."
The International Institute of Strategic Studies
conference has brought together some 200 security
representatives from more than 20 countries,
including Iran, Iraq and the United States.
AP
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