Feud delays Iraq committee Kirkuk recommendations

Mustafa Mahmoud
Reuters
March 29

Iraqi politicians from rival Arab, Kurd and Turkman ethnic groups will delay until June recommendations on the disputed city of Kirkuk, as they have failed to resolve a feud over the issue, they said on Sunday.

Minority Kurds see oil-rich Kirkuk as their ancient capital and want it to be part of their semi-autonomous region in Iraq's north, an idea rejected by the city's Turkmen and Arabs.

U.S. officials say the dispute between Arabs and Kurds over territory and oil has overtaken sectarian tensions as the leading threat to Iraq's long term stability.

So sensitive is the issue that officials were forced to exempt Kirkuk from Iraq's provincial elections on Jan. 31 because rival lawmakers could not agree on how to treat it.

A committee of seven legislators representing Iraq's different ethnic groups -- two Arabs, two Kurds, two Turkmen and an Assyrian Christian -- and another made up of Kirkuk councillors were due to draft recommendations on how to resolve the dispute at the end of this month.

"Both committees have agreed to extend the period of work by two months to secure enough time to reach a compromise," Hassan Toran, a Turkman councillor involved in the draft, told Reuters.

"It's too difficult to reach common ground now. More time is definitely needed to solve such contentious issues."

The struggle over Kirkuk highlights a wider divide across Iraq between Arabs and Kurds nearly six years after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 that ousted Saddam Hussein. Kurds are alarmed at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's call for a strong, central government, which they fear threatens their hard-won autonomy.

The Kurds want to reverse Saddam's policy of "Arabisation" in Kirkuk, which involved expelling thousands of Kurds, but the city's Arabs now complain the pendulum has swung the other way, with the Kurdish government deliberately stacking the city with Kurds and intimidating its Arab minority.

"The Kurds have hampered efforts to reach an urgent solution to the problem of Kirkuk," said Mohammed Jubouri, an Arab councillor. "It's very clear that their final target is to impose full control over Kirkuk. We will never accept that."

But Awat Mohammed, a Kurdish council member, was hopeful.

"There is fundamental agreement between all sides ... The difference is the mechanics how to implement it," he said.

The United Nations is scheduled to deliver recommendations of its own for how to handle Kirkuk some time after mid-April.

The U.N. report on territory disputes between Iraq's Kurds and other communities, primarily in Kirkuk, was originally supposed to be published by October last year, but it was postponed because of the sensitivity of the subject.

A senior U.N. official dismissed what he called speculation in the media over the contents of the report -- which he said were "not finished ... very much work in progress".

One report, quoting diplomats in Kirkuk close to the process, said the U.N. would recommmend a power-sharing deal between both Iraq's central government and the Kurdish government in Arbil giving them joint jurisdiction over Kirkuk.

The other option would recommend making Kirkuk autonomous but reliant on Baghdad for its budget, it said.

"I don't know precisely which options will be in the final version and which will not, and certainly not how we will formulate them," the senior U.N. official said.

"We are continually working on new drafts so my telling what may or may not have been in an earlier one, before any senior officials had reviewed it or approved it would serve no purpose whatsoever -- except raising tensions higher," he said.


The most important question is: are the concepts used in Europe easy or possible to translate in the Middle East?