Kurds Reach Tentative Deal To End Boycott of Kirkuk Elections

"The Kurds have decided to participate in the vote after we settled the problem of displaced Kurds. They will be allowed to vote in Kirkuk," said Farid Ayar, the spokesman for Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission.

"We had delayed the printing of the ballots in the province for this reason," Ayar said.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan threatened to lead Kirkuk's sizable Kurdish population in a boycott of the January 30 election over the failure to resolve the status of Kurds who lost their homes in Kirkuk's Tamim province under Saddam Hussein.

The agreement is now awaiting formal approval from the Kurdish regional parliament.

"It's significant, but the deal is not final. Tomorrow there will be discussions in the Kurdistan regional parliament," said the KDP's official Dilshad Miran, the Kurdistan regional government's representative in Baghdad.

Nineteen parties had been on Tamim's provincial list, only five of them Kurdish. Outsiders feared the absence of the major Kurdish parties would aggravate tensions among the city's almost even mix of Kurds and Arabs.

Miran said the KDP now planned to put candidates forward, but it would take another week to know how many voters were added to the rolls in Tamim, which already has more than 460,000 voters on its rolls.

The US army puts the number of displaced persons in Tamim province at more than 46,000.

The Kurdish parties have ambitions to annex Kirkuk, with some of Iraq's richest oil reserves, to Iraqi Kurdistan. They have identified the city with their struggle to find justice after the fall of Saddam.

Starting in the 1960s, Saddam's regime brutally oppressed the Kurds and expelled tens of thousands of Kurds from their homes around Kirkuk, replacing them mainly with Arab Shiites from the south.

The move to grant displaced Kurds the vote could tip the balance of power in Kirkuk in the direction of the Kurds and enflame relations with Arabs in Tamim province.