Attention,  désinformation  dans cet article publié dans l’Express!!!

Il est FAUX d’écrire:

“Kirkouk, revendiquée historiquement par les Kurdes”

de quelle ‘histoire’ s’agit-il ????????

Où sont les vestiges historiques des kurdes à Kirkouk????

‘Historiquement’  les Kurdes sont des nouveaux-venus à Kirkouk.

Kirkouk est une ville historiquement turkmène et ses anciens monuments, mosquées et cimetières en sont la preuve.

Kirkouk est une ville irakienne et ceux qui prétendent le contraire sont des menteurs et des ennemis de l’Irak.

L’avenir de l’Irak dépend de Kirkouk.

A gauche Dr. Saadetin Ergeç, Abbas al-Bayati (au centre), Fawzi Akram Terzi (4ième à partir de la gauche)  membres turkmènes du parlement irakien.

Le parlement irakien a fini par adopter dimanche une loi électorale très attendue qui ouvre la voie à la tenue, à la date fixée du 16 janvier, d’un scrutin législatif politiquement crucial après des années de tensions intercommunautaires. (Reuters/Mohammed Ameen)

L’Irak adopte un code électoral pour le scrutin du 16 janvier

Par Reuters, publié le 08/11/2009

BAGDAD – Le parlement irakien a fini par adopter dimanche une loi électorale très attendue qui ouvre la voie à la tenue, à la date fixée du 16 janvier, d’un scrutin législatif politiquement crucial après des années de tensions intercommunautaires.

Les désaccords au sujet du mode de scrutin dans la ville ethniquement mixte de Kirkouk, revendiquée historiquement par les Kurdes, avait différé l’adoption de ce texte, mettant en doute le respect de l’échéance fixée.

Les Etats-Unis, qui poussaient depuis longtemps les partis irakiens à régler leurs divergences sur la grande ville pétrolière du Nord, avaient laissé entendre que la persistance de ce litige aurait des effets négatifs sur le programme de retrait de leurs troupes.

Le compromis conclu, approuvé par 141 des 196 députés présents lors de la session de dimanche, retransmise en direct à la télévision, prévoit d’éviter de prendre une décision dès maintenant sur le sort futur de Kirkouk.

Kirkouk est l’un des points chauds du pays où la tension entre Kurdes, d’une part, et les Arabes et Turkmènes qui s’opposent à son annexion par le Kurdistan, de l’autre, peut dégénérer en violences à tout moment.

Avant l’accord intervenu dimanche, plusieurs projets de compromis soumis par les Nations unies et une commission codirigée par le Premier ministre chiite Nouri al Maliki et le président kurde Djalal Talabani avaient été rejetés par les députés.

http://www.lexpress.fr/actualites/2/l-irak-adopte-un-code-electoral-pour-le-scrutin-du-16-janvier_827078.html

The Election Law Is Passed: Open Lists, Kirkuk Recognised as a Governorate with “Dubious” Registers

By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)

8 November 2009

With 141 votes out of the total of 195 deputies that were present, the Iraqi parliament finally passed a revision of the 2005 election law this evening around 8 PM in Baghdad.

The broad outline of the revised law has already been known for a long time and contained few surprises as such: Open lists, governorate-level constituencies and minority seats for Christians, Sabaeans, Yazidis and Shabak. In other respects, most features of the 2005 law (including the procedures for allocating compensatory seats, which this time makes up 5%) are kept in place. This also means that the ban on the use of religious symbols – an important step forward in the 2008 provincial elections law that was included in early drafts – has not been included in the revised law for the parliamentary elections.

The controversy for the three past weeks has focused on how to hold elections in Kirkuk, where the non-Kurdish population complains that the electoral registers have been tampered with by the Kurdish-dominated local government in the period from 2004 until now, with the aim of securing a Kurdish victory in any future referendum about the inclusion of the city in the Kurdistan federal region. For this reason, Arabs and Turkmens in Kirkuk as well as Iraqi nationalists from all parts of the Iraq have been eager to secure special arrangements that would ensure extra scrutiny in the electoral process in Kirkuk; the Kurds, for their part, have been equally adamant that any special status for Kirkuk would be anathema for them and that they would not support any law that mentioned the word “Kirkuk”.

What was agreed in the end is a compromise that gives something to each side. Kirkuk is indeed mentioned in the bill several times, as an area whose electoral registers are recognised as being “dubious” and therefore should be subject to extra scrutiny in a one-year investigation after the elections, with a possibility of modifying the results. As a result of Kurdish insistence, that kind of arrangement is also enabled for any other governorate whose registers are deemed dubious (and the Kurds will probably try to nominate several other governorates for this status); however Kirkuk is the only such explicitly recognised governorate in the law (which therefore in some ways preserves the “special status” that the Kurds fought against). If any other governorate is to be treated on par with Kirkuk it would need to be demonstrated that it has experienced an annual population growth of more than 5 per cent, and each case must be approved by a simple majority in the Iraqi parliament after a request by more than 50 deputies.

At the same time, this is a highly symbolic and therefore weak kind of special status. Most crucially, the entire reasoning that the initial election result in Kirkuk can be decoupled from the broader debate about Kirkuk’s future is erroneous. The future disposal of Kirkuk is likely to be settled by the next parliament whose job it will be to fulfil the promise of a one-off revision of the 2005 constitution; the composition of the next constitutional committee, in turn, may well be influenced by the composition of the parliamentary delegation from Kirkuk. Those seeking to dismiss the significance of the Kirkuk issue in the context of the election law portray it as a “a matter of a couple of seats only”, but the truth is that it does matter whether Kirkuk returns a contingent of deputies broadly supportive of the Kurdish position or whether it includes several representatives with an Iraqi nationalist orientation. Not least because of its expected centrality in the constitutional revision process, there will be a particular focus on how Kirkuk is represented in the next committee charged with handling this issue. Additionally, in the final version of the bill the process of scrutiny seems first and foremost focused on establishing the correct number of representatives for the governorate, apparently reclassifying any undue “surplus” representatives as “national” ones (although various drafts and press reports differ on this). This leaves the focus on the only other “hard” implication of the arrangements: “That the result should not form the basis of any future electoral process or serve as precedent for any political status before the conclusion of the investigation of the registers.” Which in turn means that the 2010 results cannot be used in an argument about Kirkuk’s future. But in addition to misrepresenting what is actually going to happen (confer the political impact of the deputies that obtain representation next January and will sit for at least one year), this stipulation also ignores the fact that the fate of Kirkuk will be decided either by article 140 of the constitution (which demands a new census, thus making the election result entirely irrelevant) or whatever alternative solution the next constitutional review committee may come up with.

The parliamentary developments that enabled the Kirkuk compromise to emerge apparently started with rapprochement between the Kurds and those non-Kurdish parties in the assembly that do not seem to worry too much about what happens to Kirkuk: Above all the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), but more recently also the Sadrists and apparently even Maliki’s State of Law coalition. The Sadrists used to be quite nationalist about Kirkuk, as did Maliki’s party, but yesterday Dafir al-Ani complained that the Daawa had been among the strongest forces in calling for an immediate vote. In a move somewhat reminiscent of the old Kurdish–Shiite-IIP alliance, those groups prepared a revised draft of the law which included the Kurdish demand for other governorates as potential and theoretical candidates for additional scrutiny, and the compensatory seats earlier promised for Arabs and Turkmens were unceremoniously dropped. Baha al-Aaraji, the Sadrist head of the legal committee in the parliament, tried to gather enough deputies for a quick vote before other parliamentarians had had the time to acquaint themselves with the new proposals. In another possible echo of the past, Aaraji also quoted support for Iraqiyya in hammering out the latest proposal; whether this is in fact correct remains unclear (some Iraqiyya deputies have criticised the proposals on Kirkuk from a nationalist point of view), but if true it reflects more or less the same constellation that in April enabled the current speaker of parliament Ayad al-Samarraie (who mysteriously decamped to Qatar for an official visit only hours before the vote!) to replace Mahmud al-Mashhadani who was ousted a year ago. Mashhadani was of course a central figure in the 22 July movement, whose crime it was to care too much about Kirkuk.

Of particular interest, and concern, are the international roles in the settlement of all of this. Without any Iraqi protest being heard, international diplomats and other representatives have been in and out of the Iraqi parliament for the last few weeks, with different degrees of success. To some extent the Americans succeeded in using their influence with the Kurds to change Arbil’s position, and they also seem to have put pressure on (and demanded greater neutrality from) UNAMI, whose early proposals for unclear reasons were more or less identical to the Kurdish ones. However, the US never pushed particularly hard. Into that vacuum was apparently allowed ambassadors representing other countries, including Turkey, Iran and the UK. Frankly, if “multilateralism” and “regionalisation” in Iraq means that the Obama administration is happy to see Iranian and Turkish diplomats and agents crawling all over the place creating some kind of Turkish–Kurdish–Iranian grand bargain over Kirkuk while Washington jumps into the back seat in its eagerness to secure smooth surfaces as it withdraws, then this is probably not a good sign for those who care about Iraqi territorial integrity. Right now it does not seem as if the United States fully appreciates the wider regional ramifications – both in terms of stability of the state system in the Gulf and the creation of fertile soil for violent protest movements – of a failure to stand up for Kirkuk as a multi-ethnic, Iraqi city. If the Obama administration is sincere in its commitment to “non-condescending dialogue” with the Arab and Islamic worlds, it is precisely issues like Kirkuk that need to be better understood.

It is an worrying symptom of the degree of external influence in this process that one element of the new law has apparently been lifted almost verbatim from the statement by Ambassador Christopher Hill and General Ray Odierno last week to the effect that “the rules, procedures, and decisions adopted for the January elections should apply only to that election. They should not serve as precedents for future elections or for future political settlements.” The Iraqi version is more logical in that it makes it clear that it is “the results” that will not serve as precedents – no one was thinking of using the election law for directly deciding Kirkuk’s future anyway – but one does get the impression that the text may have originated in American circles. Also Hill’s comments today that the “elections law should not be used to solve the Kirkuk question”, a thinly camouflaged appeal to those asking for a special status, seems to reflect a misunderstanding of the Iraqi nationalist position. The nationalists never intended to “solve” the Kirkuk issue in this way; rather to them this is about holding elections in an area where large segments of the population deem the election registers to be fraudulent and where the subsequent election results in turn may have an impact on the way Kirkuk will be dealt with in the future.

Two other entities heavily involved in the settlement of the election law – and now severely tainted by their partiality during that process – are the Iraqi elections commission (IHEC) and the UN agency in Iraq, UNAMI. Had it not been for a little bit of American pressure, it seems both of these factions would have remained entirely on the Kurdish side in the dispute. With regard to the IHEC, its sudden discovery last week of the “loss” of the 2004 registers for Kirkuk (which had been part of the debate over an election law as a compromise solution even before the summer), as well as its rather strained series of arguments that those registers could not be used “even if they were found” are scandalous enough to raise doubts about its ability to do any more business in the Tamim governorate in a neutral fashion. For its part, UNAMI reportedly at one point proposed a compensatory seat for the Kurds in Mosul despite the fact that the Kurdish representation there has never been threatened – another indication that it may not fully comprehend the unique political dynamic of what is going on in Kirkuk.

On the balance, then, despite its many weaknesses as well as the unimpressive numbers (141 out of 275 members in total), it is probably a good thing that this bill passed at all. The open list is unequivocally a step forward for Iraqi democracy and it is a relief that the biggest parties who used to prefer the closed list in the past are now on board with the new system – though one cannot help wondering whether the rather sudden upsurge of speculation about a (re-)unified Shiite list following the visit by Iran’s Ali Larijani may have sweetened the pill considerably for some of these forces, since the prospect of a unified Shiite list would also mean almost unrestricted control by these groups and their allies over the IHEC. Also, Kirkuk is kept on the agenda, maybe in only a symbolic way, but Iraqi voters will have seen which parties are serious about keeping the city Iraqi and which ones are not so interested, and this will make it easier for them to make their choice in a contest where deafening shouts of unspecified dreams of “national unity” abound. As for the prospect of a presidential veto either by Jalal Talabani (because of the special status for Kirkuk) or Tariq al-Hashemi (not strong enough status for Kirkuk), another president – Barack Obama – seemed to try to shoot that possibility down even before the ink on the new amendments had dried: Hours later he promptly declared the new law a “milestone” whose early adoption by the presidency council he looked forward to (15 days is the legal maximum according to the Iraqi constitution).

Alas, to Iraqis, the focus on the election deadlines and getting the formalities right will be a reminder of the same “muddle-through” approach that was seen in Afghanistan recently, where the antics around Abdallah Abdallah’s acceptance of a second round was immediately construed by the Americans as immediately having bestowed full legitimacy on the process. Possibly the hopes and expectations about real change are greater among Iraqis than in Washington with regard to these next elections.

http://historiae.org/election-law.asp

IRAQ: Food insecurity on the rise, says official

BAGHDAD, 8 November 2009 (IRIN) – More and more people in Iraq are being affected by food insecurity, a senior official has said.

Reduced domestic agricultural production, inflation, unemployment and a crumbling system of subsidized food distributions have hit poor people the hardest.

“There is still a big percentage of Iraqi people who can’t secure enough food. With unemployment running at 18-20 percent they can’t buy what they need,” said Muna Turki Al-Mousawi, head of the state-run Centre for Market Research and Consumer Protection, adding that about 20 percent of Iraq’s 25 million people live below the poverty line.

Domestic agricultural production – already affected by reduced rainfall – has also been hit by a lack of government support and lax controls on cheap food imports, with which farmers cannot compete in some cases, she said.

On 31 August, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Iraq had its worst cereal harvest in a decade and that its wheat harvest was set to fall to one million tonnes, from an average of 3.5 million tonnes per annum over the past decade. Domestic rice production also fell from an average 500,000 tons a year to an estimated 250,000 tons this year.

Iraq imports more than 80 percent of its food needs, al-Mousawi told IRIN.

The crumbling subsidized food distribution scheme which was set up in the 1990s and designed to supply basic food items to poor people as part of the UN oil-for-food programme is making matters worse. At least 60 percent of the population depends on the subsidized food, according to Iraqi Trade Ministry figures.

There are quality and distribution problems: “We have comments on the quality of the food items. And it never reaches the families in time or in sufficient quantities. Some of its items are only distributed 8-10 months a year,” she said, contrasting the current situation with that prior to 2003 when “there was a kind of stability with regard to food security nationwide as there was control of imported food and government support to agriculture.”

Government support for farmers?

Photo: ACTED

Drought in al-Awaileen village in al-Muthanna Governorate. Because of a lack of rainfall, Iraq had its worst cereal harvest in a decade

After 2003, she said, the borders were opened to random imports without real scrutiny, and government support for farmers diminished, adversely affecting domestic production, which could not compete with cheaper imports.

“The government has realized these dangers over the past two years and started to support the farmers and impose restrictions on food imports, and yet we are still far from the self-sufficiency we had, as we are only producing 20 percent of our food needs,” she said.

Three draft laws which aim to protect local production and regulate imports, if approved, could dramatically improve the situation, al-Mousawi said.

Abdul-Zahra Al-Hindawi, spokesman for the Iraqi Planning Ministry’s Central Organization for Statistics and Information Technology (COSIT), estimates that about 23 percent of Iraqis live below the poverty line, meaning they earn US$66 a month or less.

“One quarter of the whole population is not a small percentage. It needs a lot of thinking and economic strategies to help change this reality and improve it,” he said.

COSIT is set to present a national five-year anti-poverty strategy to the Cabinet by the end of November.

sm/ed/cb

http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportId=86926

irish4palestine.blogspot.com/2009/11/israeli-lobby-to-be-investigated.html

KERKUK 1952 :

KING FEISAL OPENS GIANT NEW PIPE LINE (video)

Link to the video:

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=30592

Link to video in Arabic:

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=30594

Kerkuk, Iraq

GV. Refinery at Kirkuk. A/S Refinery.

SV. Pipe line being laid from Kirkuk to Banias. SV people in Arab dress look on. Pipes being lowered into position. Mechanical welder joining pipes. Pipe lowered by crane. LV. Comet jet aeroplane arriving at Kirkuk airstrip.

Officials waiting. SV. Mr. H. S. Gibson (Managing Director of the Iraq Petroleum Company) alighting from Comet plane. SV. More passengers deplaning. SCU.Pan more passengers alighting. LV. Even more passengers alighting. SV. Gibson standing by plane (nearest). LV.SV. Baggage being unloaded from Comet. Information packs handed out. Yet more people get off the plane. Former Prime Minister Nuri Pasha el-Said is amongst the guests. SV King Feisal with Regent Prince Abdul Illah alighting from plane. The King inspects a guard of honour. Crowds look on before ceremony. King Feisal arrives for ceremony. SCU King Feisal and Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Cunningham (Chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company). King Feisal meets people. The King and the Regent turn a wheel to open the pipeline.

 Lots of men in Arab dress look on. SCU Regent helps King to turn wheel. CU pressure gauge. CU Prince and King smile as they turn the wheel. People applaud. CU. “No Smoking” in two languages. Interior shots of pumping office.

Exterior of Inauguration hall. Flags hang down. Sir John Cunningham. King Feisal arrives for luncheon. SV. Pan up from only uncovered section of pipe to filled in bit. GV. Mound of sand covering pipe. LV. Number One well. (2 shots). CU. Number One well, board with information about well. GV. Refinery at Kirkuk.

New dam for Iraq’s oil-rich Kerkuk

 Azzaman, November 6, 2009

 The oil-rich city of Kirkuk is going to have a new dam with a storage capacity of 39 million cubic meters of water.

 Work on the dam has just started. It was inaugurated this week by Water Resources Minister Abdullatif Rasheed.

 “The target is to regulate the flow of water in the Khassa River, a tributary of al-Khalis,” the minister said.

 Kirkuk, though an agricultural province, is known more for its massive oil reserves which many believe are one of the causes for current ethnic and sectarian tensions in Iraq.

Iraq’s three largest ethnic groups, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, are at loggerheads over the fate of the city and whether it should be administered by the central government in Baghdad or the regional Kurdish government in Arbil.

 Despite its huge oil riches, the city suffers from lack of clean water, mainly due to the scarcity of its water resources.

 The minister said he hoped the new dam will store enough water to meet the city’s needs.

 The dam is being built 10 kilometers north-east of the city. It is 1,160 meters long and 58 meters high.

http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news%5C2009-11-06%5Ckurd.htm

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=35554

Iraqi Consultation Meeting in London

The Muslim Youth Association of the United Kingdom is holding a public panel between the representatives of the political movements in Iraq, regarding the upcoming elections.

The participants are:

- Mrs. Sundus Abbas: Representative of the Iraqi Turkmen Front
- Mr. Emmanuel Yakoub: Representative of the Assyrian Democratic Movement
- Dr. Imad Hameed Şhaltagh: President of Mandean Association of Britain
- Mr. Fuad Jamal Seleem: Kurdistani Change List
- Dr. Muhammed Ali Al- Nasiri: Islamic Da´wa Party

Rania Attar will chair the meeting.
There will be a supper after the panel.
Saturday, 7/11/2009
7 pm
Dar-ul Islam Hall- London
61 Anson Road, cricklewood, NW´ 3UY

[Update 7 November 12:50 CET: The Iraqi parliament began its session shortly after 1 pm local time and adjourned again after a brief meeting. Reportedly the assembly will reconvene later today at 4 pm Baghdad time (14:00 CET) in order to vote on the election law]

The Constitutionality of Compensatory Seats for Arabs and Turkmens in Kirkuk

Posted by Reidar Visser on November 6, 2009

As Iraqi parliamentarians prepare for a possible vote on the draft election law tomorrow Saturday, their minds seem to be increasingly focused on the revised UNAMI/US-inspired compromise proposal for Kirkuk. The proposed arrangements are perhaps a little convoluted, but they do seem to constitute a real compromise in that they offer something for everybody: Voter rolls from 2009, as per the Kurdish preference; a one-year investigation of those registers followed by a possible re-vote, to address Iraqi nationalist concerns; two compensatory seats for Arabs and Turkmens respectively, geared at the more local interests of those two communities in Kirkuk.

Whereas there seems to be general agreement among Iraqi parliamentarians that this is the most promising solution, some Kurdish politicians have been expressing doubts about the “constitutionality” of the proposed arrangements. However, it is clear that in this case the constitution is unlikely to be a problem. The idea of compensatory seats was established as part of Iraqis proportional representation election system back in 2005, and the notion of special representation for selected communities (with which it is now being merged) was adopted in the provincial election law last year, and is also part of the current draft. Crucially, the definition of what constitutes “selected communities” has been completely ad hoc and situational in both cases – i.e. a limited number of seats are offered in certain areas to guarantee minimum representation for communal interests which it is feared may not gain representation in the open electoral contest. This is done on an asymmetrical and case by case basis and is not intended as an exhaustive subdivision of Iraq according to ethno-sectarian identities. For example, Christians may be allocated seats in Baghdad without being allocated seats in Basra and so on.

In other words, the only difference between existing laws (also supported by the Kurds) and the new proposal is that Arabs and Turkmens in Kirkuk are designated as a group that will get a guaranteed minimum representation much in the way the Shabak of Mosul will. This is done because of an expressed concern that changes to the electoral registers of Kirkuk in the period between 2004 and 2009 may have marginalised these communities to the point where their representation in the ordinary constituency is at risk. Conversely, no one doubts that Kurdish interests will have benefitted from those same demographic changes and will be amply rewarded in the ordinary constituency for Kirkuk; accordingly, the Kurdish demand for a compensatory seat of their own makes no sense.

For these reasons, the possibility that the Iraqi federal supreme court will reject the new Kirkuk proposal is close to zero. If the court did that, it would find it exceedingly difficult to argue for the constitutionality of the 2008 provincial powers law and indeed the minority clauses of the current draft election law (where for example Christians in Dahuk and Arbil will get one seat each according to the latest publicly available draft; quite possibly these will go to pro-Kurdish politicians). True, the supreme court has in the past rejected the idea of four separate constituencies for Kirkuk on an ethno-sectarian basis, but an ethno-sectarian quota system and a compensatory seats regime for selected communal groups are two very different animals. The former would lead towards the “Lebanonisation” of Iraq which most Iraqi politicians reject (note that the previous demand for quotas in the administration of Kirkuk by Iraqi nationalists has always been presented as a temporary arrangement pending a more wide-ranging settlement); the latter is a far more dynamic device that secures the continued potential for cross-sectarian politics while at the same time guaranteeing a certain minimum representation to avoid the complete marginalisation of certain political forces. So far, the definition of those forces – by community and governorate – has been the prerogative of the Iraqi parliament. There is therefore no reason to question the ability of the existing framework to accommodate compensatory seats for the Arabs and Turkmens of Kirkuk in a sound constitutional manner.

http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/