March
15, 2010
KIRKUK, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
—
An Iraqi Kurdish politician in the northern city of
Kirkuk on Sunday accused election workers in mostly
Arab areas of the city of electoral fraud during
last week's parliamentary polls. The allegations,
made in a Kirkuk press conference by Kurdish
politician Khalid Shenawi, set the stage for a
possible battle over poll results in the city, which
was left out of previous votes out of fear for the
city's stability.
"We have evidence that election committee officials
and observers were involved in fraud in order to
favour one list over the others, especially in areas
with a majority Arab population," said Shewani, who
belongs to President Jalal al-Talabani's Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan party.
Shewani alleged that poll workers in those areas had
manipulated the vote in favour of former Iraqi prime
minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi List.
"We will not give legitimacy to elections so
overwhelmed by fraud in the areas of Hwija, Zab,
Riyadh and Abbasi, favouring the Iraqi List at the
expense of other lists," he warned.
Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make Kirkuk and its
environs the capital of a future independent state,
calling it their "Jerusalem." Iraqi Arab and Turkman
politicians view the area, with its 10 billion
barrels of proven oil reserves, as integral parts of
Iraq.
The issue of voting in the area has proved so
fraught that it was left out of previous votes since
the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and nearly was
again in the most recent polls, after Arab
politicians threatened a boycott if voter rolls they
said had been doctored to show a greater number of
Kurdish residents were not examined.
In the end, lawmakers in Baghdad struck an uneasy
compromise on the issue to allow the city to
participate in the polls at the same time as the
rest of the country. According to that compromise,
election results from the city and its environs
would be provisional, subject to legal challenge
after the vote.
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,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." Kurds see it as the rightful and
perfect capital of an autonomous Kurdistan state.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is related to
the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk city
and other disputed areas through having back its
Kurdish inhabitants and repatriating the Arabs
relocated in the city during the former regime’s
time to their original provinces in central and
southern Iraq.
The article also calls for conducting a census to be
followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants
decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed
to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having
it as an independent province.
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.
The last ethnic-breakdown census in Iraq was
conducted in 1957, well before Saddam began his
program to move Arabs to Kirkuk. That count showed
178,000 Kurds, 48,000 Turkomen, 43,000 Arabs and
10,000 Assyrian-Chaldean Christians living in the
city.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
DPA | Agencies
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