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UN envoy meets local officials in Kirkuk
4.2.2008
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February 4, 2008
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's special
envoy Andrea Gilmore is holding a meeting with
members of the Kirkuk local council on the mechanism
to implement article 140 of the Iraqi constitution
pertaining to fate of the oil-rich Kurdish city and
other disputed areas during the next six months.
"Members of the local council from the Turcoman
Front did not attend the meeting because they are in
Baghdad," a source from the Kirkuk local council
said.
The Turcoman parties had met on Saturday in a
workshop in Baghdad on the fate of Kirkuk and agreed
that article 140 of the constitution dropped legally
with the expiry of its deadline. The meeting was
attended by a number of Iraqi MPs and ministers.
"The Turcoman parties agreed to unify political and
media discourse and that article 140 has ended
legally and constitutionally with the expiry of its
deadline set in the constitution," Saad al-Din Arkij
said on Saturday.
Arkij said an agreement was reached during the
meeting to have Kirkuk as an independent province to
be run by the groups in the city and in a way to be
agreed on later.
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,www.ekurd.net
Christians and
Turkmen. lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad. Kurds
have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk, which they call "the Kurdish Jerusalem.", Kirkuk is historically a Kurdish city.
The article currently stipulates that all Arabs in
Kirkuk be returned to their original locations in
southern and central Iraqi areas, and formerly
displaced residents returned to Kirkuk.
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.
Under article 140 of Iraq’s constitution a
referendum must be held on whether the city secedes
to control of the Kurdistan region al government KRG.
A referendum, provided for in the Iraqi
constitution, was scheduled to be held by the end of
the past year on including the city into the
Kurdistan region, but the UN mediated to
extend its time to July 2008.
VOI | Agencies
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