March
16, 2010
KIRKUK, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
— The Kurdistan Alliance accuses the Iraqiya list of
Allawi of fraud in the province of Kirkuk. Iraqiya
was leading by 3,500 votes over Kurdistani Alliance,
an alliance of the Kurdish autonomous region's two
long-dominant parties.
Kurdistan TV and Radio Kurdistan report that in the
Arabic cities of Kirkuk like Hawije, Zab and Reyadh,
there was major fraud. In Hawije there was a turnout
of 130%, claim the Kurdish media. In Zab, there was
one electoral district with 5 times of the maximum
number of votes.
The Iraqi Electoral Commission (IHEC) is still busy
with counting the votes and solving the complaints.
Kurds are very critical of the outcome. "With this
fraud, there is no other solution of then destroying
the votes and boycott the result. This is unjust,"
says Khalid Shiwani, member of the Kurdistan
Alliance in Baghdad.
Preliminary results of IHEC show that after counting
60% of the votes, Allawi's Iraqiyya list got 123.000
votes, while the Kurdistan Alliance got 121,000
votes. This while in 2005,www.ekurd.netthere
were 312.000 votes for the Kurdistan Alliance and
the other parties only got 130.000 of the votes.
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,
rudaw net | ekurd net | Agencies
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