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Kurds' Kirkuk demands raised after rebuff
16.1.2008
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January 16 2008
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- A top Iraqi Kurdish leader says Kurdish
oil-rich Kirkuk's fate will be decided in a vote, a
day after a coalition of Sunni and Shiite Arabs
united against Kurd plans.
"There is no turning back," Massoud Barzani,
President of the Kurdistan Regional Government KRG,
told the LA Times.
"The referendum must be conducted in the next six
months."
The Shiite and Sunni parties -- which include former
allies of the current governing coalition and whose
members number 150 of Iraq's 275 parliamentarians --
say the KRG's plans for Kirkuk and their
controversial oil deals are bad for the country.
The al-Mutamar newspaper reports the statement of
the new coalition backs the national government's
right to decide how Iraq's oil sector is developed.
The KRG, claiming the national government is too
slow on setting oil policy and unconstitutionally
keeping central control, has passed a regional oil
law and signed dozens of exploration and production
deals with international oil firms.
Baghdad has called them illegal, threatened to
blacklist the companies and says it's the KRG that
is acting unconstitutionally.
The statement says the deals and the Kirkuk desires
by the Kurds are dividing the country.
Kirkuk is a northern Iraq city and its adjacent oil
fields are some of the oldest and largest in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein kicked out Kurds,www.ekurd.net
Turkomen and others who
were living there and replaced them with Arabs.
He also redrew the lines of the provinces, taking
Kirkuk and other northern areas out of the three
heavily Kurdish provinces that make up the KRG now.
Iraqi Kurds ensured the 2005 Constitution reverses
Saddam's move, ending with a referendum by Dec. 31,
2007, to allow voters to decide the future. The KRG
wants voters to be able to choose to join its area.
But Iraqi Arabs, backed by nationalists in Baghdad
and other parts of the country, and Turkomen, who
have the backing of Turkey, are virulently opposed
to the plan.
A U.N.-brokered deal late last year gave the issue
six months of breathing room. Turkey and others want
the fate of Kirkuk to be negotiated, not solved in a
vote. The KRG says that's out of the question,
saying the constitution mandates it.
But opponents, who back a centralized government and
don't want Kirkuk and its oil part of the
semiautonomous Kurdish region, say that missing the
constitution's deadline makes the article null and
void.
The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a large Shiite
Arab bloc and partner with the Kurds in the
governing coalition, favors forming a KRG-style
region in the south,www.ekurd.net
where most of Iraq's
proven oil reserves are located.
Al Sharqiyah TV in Dubai reports Iraqi President
Jalal Talabani, co-leader of Iraq's Kurds with
Barzani, is meeting with the Fadhila Party to shore
up support for the fledgling governing coalition.
UPI
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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