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Talabani, Barzani affirm application of
art. 140 won't be postponed
3.6.2007 |
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June 3, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region (Iraq),
Jun 3, -- Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud
Barzani affirmed that they would not accept
postponement of the application of article 140 of
Iraq's constitution, which deals with the issue of
Kirkuk.
"We are determined to have article 140, pertaining
to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk,
applied," Talabani, Iraq's president, said during a
press conference held with Iraqi Kurdistan Region's
president, Massoud Barzani, at the resort of Dukan.
The two Kurdish leaders had earlier on Sunday met to
discuss ways of unifying their positions on the
enforcement of article 140.
The several hours' meeting was attended by Nechirvan
Barzani, the prime minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan
region, Deputy Premier Barham Saleh, as well as a
number of members of Talabani's Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK) and Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP).
Kurds claim that the demographic distribution of
Kirkuk's population was considerably changed after
the 1980s, following attempts by the former regime
to encourage Iraqi Arabs to flock to the oil-rich
city in a bid to change its demographic makeup in
favor of Arabs.
VOI. |
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (L) and Iraq's
Kurdistan region president Massoud Barzani (R) |
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Kirkuk city is a Kurdistani city and it lies just
south border of the Kurdistan autonomous region and
it is not under the full control of Kurdistan
Regional Government administration, its population
is a mix of majority Kurds and minority of Arabs,
Turkmen.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein 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.
Based on Iraq's Constitution 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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