top
Iraq
Iraq
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Arab candidates pull out in Kirkuk protest

by rpst
Arab candidates running in Kirkuk's provincial election have pulled out of the race in protest against the government's decision to grant displaced Kurds the right to vote.
"The decision to withdraw came after the Iraq Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) allowed the displaced Kurds to register to vote. That was coupled with the security tensions in Diyala, Tikrit, Mosul and some parts of the Kirkuk," the head of the Arab list, Wasify al-Assy, said.

Assy said his Arab Unifying Front coalition had already decided to skip the national elections.

The boycott by oil-rich Kirkuk's Arab population was the long-awaited fallout from the 16 January decision by the Iraqi interim government and IEC to permit Kurds expelled from the city under Saddam Hussein to take part in the national and provincial vote.

Kurdish dreams

The move effectively tipped the balance of power in the coveted city in favour of the Kurds and further alienated Sunni Muslim Arabs living around Kirkuk's province.

Kirkuk currently lies outside the boundaries of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region but the deal was seen as a boost to Kurdish dreams of an independent state with the vital oil hub as its capital.

The agreement clears the way for up to 100,000 displaced Kurds to vote in this month's election in Kirkuk, giving the long-suffering ethnic group the dominant political voice in the multi-ethnic city.

In the last week, 49,000 Kurds have registered to vote in Kirkuk, the IEC told AFP.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D0847F23-6778-43E1-B660-2926B2BC6054.htm
by Daily Star, Lebanon
BAGHDAD: Kurdish nationalist Barham Saleh, a thin man, with an affable smile, sits in the Iraqi government's halls of power. That a Kurd who champions his ethnicity serves as Iraq's deputy prime minister would have been unthinkable under jailed dictator Saddam Hussein.

"We are talking about a new political and social contract in Iraq. We cannot afford another eight decades of ethnic discrimination and ethnic cleansing in Iraq," Saleh of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) says, explaining his role in the national government.

But mindful of Saddam's past campaign to gas and raze Kurdish villages, men like Saleh have vowed "never again" and want to make loud and clear they are not formally bound to Iraq's Arab majority.

"If they want us to be Iraqis we have to be treated as full citizens of the state and not second-class citizens. Those days are over," Saleh says.

He advocates a federal system for Iraq, a principle already enshrined in the country's transitional constitution.

Saleh embodies Iraq's messy experiment in democracy, brought on with the U.S. invasion in 2003 that shattered the old order of Saddam Hussein and left the country's mosaic of Kurds and Shiites and Sunni Arabs to hammer out a new power structure.

He is both conciliatory and wary of the new co-habitation in Baghdad.

"If Iraq were to turn back toward dictatorship and apartheid and ethnic cleansing I think most Kurds would not feel safe in a country like that," he says.

Saleh and other Kurdish leaders have aggressively pushed their case in Baghdad, playing brinkmanship politics to guarantee their new stature in Iraq. The Kurds played hardball in December and January over the issue of the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk which the Kurds want to claim for their northern self-rule enclave. Saleh and other leading lights of the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic party threatened an election boycott over the Iraqi government's failure to award the vote to those thousands of Kurds expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam.

But faced with growing Kurdish anger, the Iraqi government finally buckled and allowed an estimated 100,00 displaced Kurds from Kirkuk to vote in the city, effectively handing power in the community to the Kurds.

Saleh explains: "We believe Kirkuk is an integral part of the Kurdistan region. We have an abundance of historical and demographic documents and data that proves this point."

The Kurds believed their victory was long overdue and say it presages plans to reclaim land across Diyala, Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Nineveh Province, which were lost under Saddam's policy of expulsion.

Saleh wants to see lost territory taken back and reincorporated into northern Kurdistan via legal means.

"Saddam has imposed that [frontier] line and pursued the most vile and violent ethnic cleansing campaign to affect the demographic characteristics of those territories. The Kurdish leadership has rightly accepted the legal process by which ethnic cleansing would be reversed."

Kurds hold the ministries of foreign affairs, displacement and migration, human rights and public works, and the post of minister of state for women and vice president.

http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=12042
Nichervan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdish administration in Arbil, has ruled out compromise over the disputed northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, raising the prospect of conflict in the weeks following Sunday’s election.

His comments coincided with a warning by Turkey, which neighbours Iraq, that a move by Kurds to take control of the province - shared by Kurds, Arabs and Turcomen - could spark civil war in Iraq.

Yesterday Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, said he was particularly concerned by moves in Kirkuk. "Recent developments in Kirkuk are not positive," he said, criticising proposals to redraw provincial boundaries. He also said Sunday’s elections would not stem violence in Iraq or be fully democratic.

Local elections in the province, held alongside the parliamentary elections, will play a big role in deciding who ultimately controls the area. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Barzani said the US and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, had been mistaken in thinking "time might solve the problem".

"We have realised that neither Baghdad nor Washington realised the depth of the sensitivity and feelings of the Kurds regarding Kirkuk," he said. "This is something that Kurds are not going to make any concessions over."

Kurds who had been displaced by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein have moved back to Kirkuk in large numbers since the end of the war, restoring their demographic strength in the town.

The Iraqi Electoral Commission recently agreed - under pressure from Kurdish parties - that these displaced Kurds would be allowed to vote in the provincial elections, a decision that many officials expect to tilt the balance of the provincial council decisively towards the Kurds.

Mr Barzani said: "Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan geographically and historically." Kirkuk province should be "normalised", with Arabs who had been brought in under the Ba’athist regime’s "Arabisation" programme returned to their original provinces. Many observers view control of Kirkuk’s considerable oil reserves as a central strategic issue that has fuelled low-level ethnic confrontation in the town since the end of the war.

Mr Barzani stressed the need for Iraq to resume "de-Ba’athification" - the expulsion of former Ba’ath party officials from government - and said the Kurds expected one of the leading positions in a new government.

Kurdish leaders expect to win at least 75 seats in the new 275-strong assembly.

Mr Barzani reiterated Kurdish support for a "democratic, federal" Iraq and for "a secular system that would separate politics and religion", but he refused to rule out a prime minister from a religious party.

"Iraq has three main pillars: Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs," he said. "Probably, they [the Shia list supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and topped by Abd-al-Aziz Hakim, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] will get a majority of the votes, but it’s not the case that they can impose religious rule and I don’t think that’s in their minds."

http://kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=6145
by KurdMedia
ANKARA /CRACOW –(TDN) Turkey doesn’t want to be drawn into a conflict that could erupt over a boiling dispute regarding control of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, but nobody should expect Ankara to sit back and watch if developments there spill over, destabilizing neighboring Iraq, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül indicated yesterday.

“Spoiling the demographic structure of Kirkuk would be a serious threat for the future of all of Iraq. Turkey is very worried about the reports of the demographic manipulation,” Gül told the Turkish Daily News in an exclusive interview on his way to Poland, where, along with other foreign dignitaries, he will honor the victims of Auschwitz and commemorate the camp’s liberation by Russian soldiers near the end of World War II.

He made his remarks as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the United States and the United Nations that they would have to pay a heavy price at the end if they allow the tension in Kirkuk to boil over.

The government’s strong-worded statements came two days ahead of the Jan. 30 local elections in Kirkuk, which will take place simultaneously with general elections, following Wednesday’s warnings from Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug, who indicated that tensions in Kirkuk could lead to clashes in Iraq that could draw Turkey into the dispute.

Kurdish leaders, on the other hand, have stood firm in the face of growing Turkish unease regarding the migration of hundreds of thousands of Kurds into the city ahead of the polls. “No country has the right to speak out on Kirkuk. The people of Iraq will decide on the fate of Kirkuk,” Iraq’s interim Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, commenting on Turkish complaints.

http://kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=6148
ANKARA, Jan 28 (AFP) - Iraqis living in Turkey began voting Friday in Iraqi elections, with the majority of them Turkmen expatriates wary over the future of the ethnically volatile oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

In a high school in a residential neighborhood in Ankara, voters cast their ballots amid tight security measures, prompted by fears that tensions between Kurds and Turkmens in Kirkuk might spill over to polling stations in Turkey, a security guard said.

"Kirkuk is our soul and blood. It is indispensible for us," said Cemal Bayatli, a Kirkuk-born engineer who has lived in Turkey for the past 32 years.

"I came here to vote in order to prove the size of the Turkmen community in Iraq," he added.

Both Kurds and Turkmens, an Iraqi minority of Turkish descent, claim Kirkuk as their historical homeland.

Inter-communal tensions in the northern city have recently risen over the influx of tens of thousands of Kurds said to have been expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam Hussein, who are set to vote for the local government in Sunday's elections.

The population shift has effectively tipped the balance of power to the Kurds, triggering a series of warnings from Ankara that more Kurds than those expelled in the past have illegally settled in the city.

The Kurds want to incorporate Kirkuk into their enclave in northern Iraq and even see it as the capital of a future independent Kurdish state, a nightmare scenario for Turkey and other Iraqi neighbors.

"I'm voting for the first time," said a visibly excited Tahsin Saatci, 63, who immigrated to Turkey in the 1960s.

"I don't believe the elections will bring stability to Iraq, but I'm here to protect the existence and the rights of the Turkmens.

"Kirkuk has been a Turkmen city for 300 years. How come that the Turkmens are the minority now? It is impossible," he exclaimed.

Pointing to his 19-year-old daughter who was also casting her ballot, Saatci proudly said: "She was born here but if you ask her she will say she is from Kirkuk."

About 4,000 Iraqis -- far fewer than the 30,000 originally projected -- have registered to vote in Turkey in the election for an Iraqi legislature, according to the International Organization for Migration, which is in charge of the vote in 14 foreign countries.

They were also voting in two polling stations in Istanbul.

Most of the Iraqis in Turkey are Turkmens.

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?ID=36581
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network