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Trouble looms for Iraq's Kirkuk oil
province
8.4.2008
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April
8, 2008
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- The question of who will control Iraq's disputed
oil province of Kirkuk is looming large as a
UN-brokered deadline for a vote on its future
approaches amid continuing ethnic and political
tensions.
It is five years since US-led forces toppled Saddam
Hussein, who had tried to remake the area by driving
out its Kurdish residents and bringing in Arabs, and
the debate still rages as each side claims the
territory belongs to them.
A referendum to decide the fate of the area was
enshrined in the constitution adopted after the
US-led forces seized control of Iraq. It was to have
been held in December but was delayed for six months
after rival groups were unable to agree a deal.
"In December, the question of Kirkuk was a ticking
time bomb. The United Nations has stopped the
clock," UN special envoy to Iraq Staffan de Mistura
told AFP.
On paper, the factions are still at loggerheads and
the issue threatens to explode into a new
battlefield in the war-ravaged country, amid claims
the United Nations has only postponed the problem.
"By rights, Kirkuk belongs to us," a foreign affairs
official from the Kurdistan autonomous regional
government, Falah Mustafa Bakir, told AFP.
"If Kirkuk is important to others, it is because of
the oil. But for the Kurds,www.ekurd.net
it is first and foremost
a question of justice," Bakir said. "Kirkuk is a
symbol of the Kurdish oppression of the past."
The city is populated by an ever-growing number of
Kurds, as well as by Arabs and Turkmen, many of whom
arrived as part of Saddam's policy of forced
Arabisation.
Since 2003, the Kurds have pumped huge investment
into the city's political institutions and
encouraged more ethnic Kurds to move to the region
in an attempt to redress the demographic balance.
"It is not going to take three months to resolve
this crisis, but years," said Ahmed Amid al-Obeidi,
leader of an Arab group, the Kirkuk Iraqi Front.
"There is no solution in the framework of Article
140 (the clause of the constitution which set a
December 2007 deadline for a referendum on the
city's future). This is no longer valid."
Obeidi added that Arabs would never abandon Kirkuk
or allow it to be handed over to autonomous Kurdish
rule.
Turkmen community official Kanan Shakir Uzeyragal
said that "in any case,www.ekurd.net
none of the preconditions
necessary for the establishment for the organisation
of this consultation have been completed, nor the
judgements over disputed land, or the census.
"Of the 40,000 contested cases of (land) ownership,
only 10 percent have been resolved. And as for the
census, it has not even been started."
Inclusion of Kirkuk in the autonomous Kurdish region
of northern Iraq has been one of the most
longstanding demands of Kurdish parties across the
political spectrum.
But Hassan Turan, a Turkmen member of the Kirkuk
provincial council, said: "In truth, the referendum
is a dream. Nobody apart from the Kurds support this
referendum, so why are they being so stubborn?
"The only solution is a political agreement
involving a fair division of power between the
communities at the heart of the local institutions,"
he said.
After ignoring the problem for some time, the
Americans "seem to have now got the measure of the
problem," a local analyst, who did not want to be
named for security reasons, told AFP.
US Vice President Dick Cheney's recent visit to the
seat of the Kurdistan regional government in Erbil
suggests it is likely the United States is
"increasing pressure for a political agreement on
the referendum," he added.
Turkish pressure on northern Iraq has also
increased, with Turkish troops again crossing the
border at the end of February to attack Turkey's
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels.
In a sign of a shift in the Kurdish position, Bakir
said recently that Kurds were ready to accept "a
fair political solution" other than a referendum.
"A political agreement is possible, but we must get
rid of this countdown to a referendum," Turan said.
In a bid to find a solution to the conflict, the
United Nations has spoken to the various factions
and promised a set of "new propositions."
"They have listened to us. Now everyone is waiting
for their ideas," Obeidi said.
"Kirkuk is like a piece of meat from an old cow," he
added. "It needs a long time to cook, and the UN
have not even lit the fire under the stove."
Kirkuk city is historically 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. Kurds
have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk,
which they call "the Kurdish Jerusalem."
The former regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
had 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.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, AFP |
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