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Kurdistan: Missing Historical Opportunity.
Article 140, Kirkuk
4.1.2008
The Kurdish National Congress of North America
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January
4, 2008
The creation of modern Iraq by the Allies in the
aftermath of World War I brought Kurdish people
nothing but suffering and injustice. They denied the
Kurds the sovereignty of their soil not because they
were not capable and they did not have all the right
elements to be a sovereign nation but because the
British found oil in Kirkuk.
Since then the Kurds have been fighting to regain
what is rightfully theirs. Negotiations on the
rights of Kirkuk with the successive Iraqi
governments have been postponed endlessly. The 1970
delay cost the Kurds over 182,000 lives, over 4500
villages, and over 5,000 civilians in the city of
Halabja alone in the infamous chemical attacks.
After the liberation of Iraq in 2003, the new Iraqi
constitution,www.ekurd.net
which was approved by
80% of all Iraqis, clearly stipulated a step-by-step
timetable to solve this complex issue by December
31st, 2007.
Recently the Kurdish parliament approved [Vote 94
(Yes) – 17 (No)] the delay for six months, without
any pre condition or road map clearly show how
Article 140 will be implement in the next six
months. What if at the end of the six months there
is another request for delay and so on? This delay
did not take its constitutional path; the request
should have been submitted to the Iraqi government
from the High Committee for the Implementation of
Article 140. Then the Iraqi government would approve
the request and ask the Iraqi parliament to approve
this delay for one time only. The constitutional
process was not followed.
History is repeating itself. Thirty-three years
after the non-implementation of the 1970 agreement
between the Kurds and the Baghdad government, we are
witnessing another delay on Kirkuk. The
responsibility for this delay rests with the Kurdish
leadership in the first place, the United States
government for failing to help implement article 140
of the Iraqi constitution, and the neighboring-occupying
states of Kurdistan for doing their utmost to derail
the implementation of the article.www.ekurd.net
The Iraqi government
takes a secondary role because the Kurdish ministers
in the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Alliance
in the Iraqi parliament did not take a strong stand
to push the Iraqi government to speed up the
process.
We at the Kurdish National Congress strongly oppose
this delay and regard it as a slap in the face of
the Kurdish people and a belittling of their
sacrifices as a partner in the new Iraq. We demand
that the Kurdish Parliament and the Kurdish Regional
Government take a brave step by incorporating
immediately all the Kurdish areas cut off from
Kurdistan if article 140 is not implemented after
six months under any pretext. They must reject any
future request for further delay under any
circumstances. The plan to incorporate all the
Kurdish areas must be put in place parallel to the
implementation of article 140.
For ore information contact KNC at: knc@kurdishnationalcongress.org
The Kurdish National Congress of North America
P.O. Box 1663, Lake Forest, CA 92630, USA
P.O. Box 7033, Windsor, ONT, N9A 2N9, CANADA,
Tel/Fax: 949-583-1417,
www.kncna.org
*
Kirkuk city is a
Kurdish city
and it lies just south border of the Kurdistan
autonomous region, the population is a mix of majority
Kurds and minority of Arabs, Christians and Turkmen.
lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced
over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their
homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city
and the region's oil industry.
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