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Italy-Interview: Children and Peace the
Priority in Kurdistan
15.2.2007
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February 15, 2007
Rome, February 15, -- Children's health and
peaceful coexistence are the top priorities for the
autonomous northern region of Kurdistan, its health
minister Abdul Rahman Osman Yones, told Adnkronos
International (AKI) in an interview on Thursday.
Together with four children from Kurdistan - two
Muslims and two Christians - he is on a three-day
visit to the Italian capital, Rome, to seek
humanitarian and political assistance for Kurdistan.
"We wanted to show the world that Muslims,
Christians, Yezidis and other religions can live
together in harmony", Yones told AKI.
Yones argued that in Iraq's multi-ethnic Kurdistan -
which includes Kurds, Arabs and Turkomens - people
are allowed to express their ethnic and religious
diversity.
During meetings in Rome with Vatican secretary of
state Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, officials from the
Tor Vergata university hospital and Father Angelo
Garcia of the Spanish Messengers of Peace NGO which
operates in Iraq, Yones is seeking to raise
awareness of the plight of 6,000 sick children in
Kurdistan and to raise funding for their medical
treatment. |
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"Many of these sick children are born with heart
disease, maybe to due successive wars and the
presence of substances such as depleted uranium. The
unfortunate situation is that we don't have the
medical facilities to treat them," Yones said.
The Italian NGO IME has brought 150 children
suffering from congenital heart disease, leukaemia
and thalessaemia from Kurdistan to Italy for
treatment in hospitals in Italy. "Some 45 are still
here, and while I am in Rome I will visit them and
their families," Yones said.
Yones had praise for Italy's assistance to
Kurdistan, saying: "I have been in the job for eight
months, and Italy is our biggest humanitarian
helper."
Yones, a member of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) party, is a medic
by training who moved to Britain in 1990 where he
worked as a hospital doctor and GP. Prior to that he
worked as a physican for the PUK's Peshmerga forces
and as a doctor for the NGO Medicins sans Frontieres
in the border areas.
Asked about Kurdistan's relations with Iraq's
central government, Yones described these as "very
good at the moment." The region is totally dependent
on the central government, which allocates only 5
percent of its total budget to health.
"We get 17 percent of that," he said, adding that
this is a fair, given that Kurdistan's population is
some 5 million against a total 45 million people in
Iraq, where the last official census was in the
1950s.
Aside from funding, a shortage of drugs, antiquated
medical infrastructure and a lack of training are
biggest among many problems facing the region's
healthcare system, Yones explained. "The most modern
hospital in Kurdistan is in Erbil (the capital), and
was buillt in 1984," he noted.
"Staff remain cut off from the outside world and are
not up-to-date in their professional knowledge,"
Yones added, blaming late Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein for this situation.
Saddam outlawed videos - even for professional
training - and "due to his village mentality,"
turned Iraq "from a civilised country to a rural
one."
Yones recalled that in his home town of Kirkuk in
the 1970s, women freely wore Western-style short
skirts. "Now they are covered up from head to toe,"
he said.
On the thorny issue of the Kirkuk region - which
produces most of Iraq's oil - and its possible
incorporation into Kurdistan, a move opposed by
Turkomen and Sunni Arab residents, the minister
commented: "Kurkuk is a very rich city but has
always been part of Kurdistan."
Kurds are still the overwhelming majority in Kirkuk
- more than the Arab and Turkomen population
combined - despite Saddam's Arabisation of the city
which saw many thousands of families evicted from
their property and forcibly displaced elsewhere in
Iraq, sometimes without even being allowed to take
their possessions with them. Many have now returned.
On the wider issue of a future Kurdish state, Yones
said: "Kurds are the biggest oppressed nation in the
world, made up of some 30 million people.
Independence is a basic human right but should
happen peacefully."
"At this moment in time, Kurdistan is destined to
remain within a federal Iraq, and we are happy with
this: it is what is possible now. But we will never
allow anyone to rule over us again," he underlined.
Although the regional government remains subordinate
subordinate to Baghdad in the key areas of finance,
defence and foreign affairs (it has representatives
abroad but not ambassadors), many of Iraq's
ambassadors are Kurdish, as is the country's
president and its foreign minister, Yones recalled.
"These are two very important posts. For the first
time in modern Iraq's history, Kurds are adequately
represented," he said.
Kurds hold 20 ministerial posts in Kurdistan's
regional government and the second largest share of
seats in the Iraqi National Assembly after the
majority Shiite bloc.
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