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Hoshyar Zebari: Turkey speak of Kirkuk as
if it were a Turkish city 19.12.2006
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December 19, 2006
ANKARA - Resorting to an expression widely
used by the Turkish establishment to express its
sensitivities regarding the status of the northern
Iraqi Kurdistani city of Kirkuk, Adnan Mufti, the
speaker of the Iraqi Kurdistan autonomous regional
Parliament, said the Iraqi Kurds consider Kirkuk to
be a “red line,” the private Dogan News Agency (DHA)
reported on Monday.
The regional Parliament gathered in Erbil with an
extraordinary agenda concerning a report in which
the U.S. Iraq Study Group made recommendations to
President George W. Bush on Iraq. The Parliament
announced that it had rejected the report, DHA said.
The bipartisan study group, headed by former U.S.
Republican Secretary of State James A. Baker III and
former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, said:
"Given the very dangerous situation in Kirkuk,
international arbitration is necessary to avert
communal violence. A referendum on the future of
Kirkuk would be explosive and should be delayed."
In an apparent reference to the particular
recommendation on Kirkuk, Mufti was quoted as
saying, "The issue of Kirkuk is the red line of
Kurds."
The Turkish capital is worried that Iraqi Kurds are
trying to take control of Kirkuk as part of their
push for an independent state on Turkey's border and
has repeatedly urged power-sharing among ethnic
groups in the Iraqi oil center of Kirkuk.
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Adnan Mufti, the speaker of the Kurdistan autonomous
regional Parliament (Iraq)
Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq's foreign minister |
The city lies just south of the Kurdistan autonomous
region stretching across Iraq's northeast. Kurdish
leaders want to annex the city. Iraq's constitution
calls for a census and referendum on the issue by
the end of 2007.
Mufti also said that resolution of the Kirkuk issue
has been outlined in the constitution and that
offering new resolutions from abroad was "useless."
Last week, at a conference held by the International
Institute of Strategic Studies in the Bahraini
capital of Manama, Turkey's Defense Minister Vecdi
Gönül 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. He asked the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish-led
government to avoid imposing an “unrealistic” future
on Kirkuk.
However, Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari,
who was also at the conference, warned Turkey not to
meddle in "our Kirkuk."
"You speak of Kirkuk as if
it were a Turkish city," Zebari, an ethnic Kurd,
told Gönül. "These are matters for Iraq to decide."
turkishdailynews com.tr
The former Iraqi president forced about 250,000
Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in
the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city and the region's
oil industry.
Kirkuk city is not under the full control of
Kurdistan Regional Government administration. A
referendum is to be held in late 2007 to decide
whether the oil-rich Kurdish province should be
annexed to the safe semiautonomous Kurdistan region
in Iraq's north.
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