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regional assembly may vote as early as next week on
creating the agency. Setting it up could further
destabilize the divided nation.
BAGHDAD — Leaders of Iraq's Kurdish north
have unveiled a controversial plan to consolidate
their hold on the region's future petroleum
resources, raising concerns about how the ethnically
divided nation will share its oil revenue.
The Kurdish parliament will be asked to vote on the
creation of a Ministry of Natural Resources that
would regulate potentially lucrative energy projects
in newly discovered oil and natural gas fields
within the three provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan.
The new ministry, if established, would be another
step in the Kurds' gradual retreat from the Baghdad
government, as well as a potentially destabilizing
development in a country already on the verge of
fragmenting along ethnic and religious lines.
"They have the right to make a decision in their
territory, but it is dangerous," said Mohammed
Aboudi, a divisional director-general of the
national Oil Ministry and a government advisor.
"They are starting to search for oil without any
consultation with the central government. What if
Basra does the same, or any other province?"
Interim Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr Uloum, advised of
the proposal, warned against unilateral decisions on
oil.
"At the end of the day, it's important to have
coordination and communication, especially with oil,
because it's a very sensitive issue," Bahr Uloum
told the Los Angeles Times.
Long oppressed and marginalized under Arab
governments in Baghdad, Kurds pushed aggressively
for a constitution that limits the central
government's power and gives regional officials the
authority to exploit newly discovered oil and gas
fields.
In a controversial move in November, a Norwegian
energy firm began drilling for oil in northern
Kurdistan. The regional government had signed the
deal without seeking approval from Baghdad.
The constitution is deliberately vague about how
future oil profit is to be distributed nationally,
leaving a highly volatile issue unresolved.
A vote on the proposed Kurdistan Ministry of Natural
Resources could come as early as Monday in the
Kurdish regional parliament, which is debating a
plan to reunify and streamline the two halves of the
Kurdistan Regional Government.
Kurds and their advocates characterized the proposed
regional organ as a slight elevation in status to a
Cabinet-level post for the state-owned oil company
that manages such matters and dismissed concerns in
the capital as overblown.
"Forming a new ministry is an arrangement that will
help increase oil production," said Peter Galbraith,
a former U.S. diplomat who has advised the Kurds.
"If oil production increases in Alaska, it may be
that the Alaskans get a major part of the benefits,
but Alaska is still part of the U.S."
Besides, control of the oil under their soil is
their birthright, said Fadhel Merani, an Irbil-based
official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP,
one of two political groups controlling the Kurdish
region
"People have the right to express what they feel,"
he said in a telephone interview, "but they have to
understand other ethnic groups' feelings also,
especially those who suffered in the past."
But though few contest the legality of the Kurdish
proposal to create a parallel agency, Iraqi
officials argue that doing so now, without
coordination with the national Oil Ministry and amid
a mounting national crisis over the failure so far
to form a government, risks exacerbating already
violent ethnic passions and fueling the perception
that the country is coming apart.
"There is still a central government," Aboudi said.
"There is a Ministry of Oil. Yes, there is no
political stability in Iraq. It doesn't mean we
leave all laws and regulations and every region does
what it wants."
Iraq's 4 million Kurds, nestled in a mountainous,
Switzerland-sized region that has been autonomous
since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, have been charting
their own course for a while.
Kurds fought side by side with U.S. special forces
three years ago as they stormed into the oil-rich
cities of Kirkuk and Khaneqin during invasion of
Iraq. With a language and culture distinct from
Iraq's Arab majority, Kurds have isolated themselves
in their relatively safe enclave, looking upon the
violence ravaging the rest of the country with some
detachment.
Kurds and their supporters say the creation of a new
ministry is well within the parameters of the
constitution.
"There are people who haven't faced the reality of
what has gone on in Iraq," Galbraith said. "They
still think that the old central state is going to
be put back together again. It's not going to happen
in Kurdistan. It's not going to happen in the south.
It's not going to happen in Baghdad."
Each half of the Kurdish region, which split apart
in a 1990s civil war between forces of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, and the KDP, has its own
ministries of defense, interior, health and
education. The Iraqi Constitution, ratified in an
Oct. 15 referendum, gives Kurdistan the authority to
wheel and deal with the international petroleum
industry within Irbil, Sulaymaniya and Dahuk, where
Kurds make up more than 95% of the population.
But Kurds also lay claim to much of the region
around Kirkuk, which is said to contain up to 40% of
Iraq's proven oil reserves. A referendum on the
disputed area's future is to take place by the end
of 2007.
Officials in Baghdad, including allies of the Kurds,
said they were blindsided by news of the proposed
ministry.
"We know what the ambitions of the Kurds are," said
Iyad Samarrai, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party,
a Sunni Arab group. "But everybody agreed to make
such moves within the [national] political process."
LA Times.com
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