KurdistanObserver.com

Crisis Looms In Kirkuk Over Power-Sharing
By Neil MacDonald in Baghdad
March 9 2005

American diplomats were trying to avert a political crisis in Iraq's ethnically volatile northern province of Kirkuk this week, amid Sunni and Turkoman claims of being strong-armed out of key government posts by the Kurdish majority in the newly elected provincial council.

After a series of meetings between council members from the three mainly ethnic-based blocs, six Sunni Arab members are threatening to boycott the new council unless the Kurds agree to an equitable ethnic power-sharing deal.

Frustrated by the Kurds' alleged intransigence, the Sunni and Turkomans asked US officials to intervene, preferably by appointing a different council based, like the interim one, on ethnic quotas.

The Sunni, in particular, decry the results of the January 30 elections as “unfair”, after logistical glitches deprived them of ballots at rural voting stations in the west of the province.

While the Americans refuse to undo the election results, they are trying to persuade the Kurds to be “as inclusive as possible” when the council decides on appointments for top government and police posts. “We hope they will recognise that you can't run this province by poking other people in the eye,” one US diplomat said.

The Kurdistan Alliance, a multi-party electoral bloc closely tied to the Kurdistan regional government, scooped up 26 seats on the 41-seat council, up from just 11 on the previous, US-appointed body.

Western diplomats agree that the Kurds' overwhelming majority is probably not reflective of the province's true population makeup, where no ethnic group is thought to constitute a majority.

The Turkoman bloc now holds nine seats, while the Arab parties are down to six. These results deprive the Arab and Turkoman parties of any leverage in the council.

Kurdish members had apparently dangled the provincial governorship in front of the Arabs, but only in return for an agreement that Kirkuk was part of Kurdistan, local Sunni Arab politicians said.

Mishan al-Jabbouri, a national assembly member closely linked to Kirkuk's Sunni Arab council bloc, said that such an accord would bring the province just a whisker away from annexation by the KRG, an autonomous enclave that has existed since the 1991 Gulf war. “No respectable Arab could ever sign it,” he said.