Talabani, Barzani Affirm Kirkuk Referendum
Won't be Postponed
Sulaimani, (Southern Kurdistan), Jun 3, -VOI- Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and
Massoud Barzani affirmed that they would not accept postponement of the
application of article 140 of Iraq's constitution, which deals with the issue of
Kirkuk.
"We are determined to have article 140, pertaining to the normalization of the
situation in Kirkuk, applied," Talabani, Iraq's president, said during a press
conference held with Iraqi Kurdistan Region's president, Massoud Barzani, at the
resort of Dukan.
The two Kurdish leaders had earlier on Sunday met to discuss ways of unifying
their positions on the enforcement of article 140.
The several hours' meeting was attended by Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister
of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Deputy Premier Barham Saleh, as well as a number
of members of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Barzani's
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Kurds claim that the demographic distribution of Kirkuk's population was
considerably changed after the 1980s, following attempts by the former regime to
encourage Iraqi Arabs to flock to the oil-rich city in a bid to change its
demographic makeup in favor of Arabs.
