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The governing council of a disputed province has presented a "timetable" for the application of a provision in the Iraqi constitution stipulating that a referendum be held on the administrative future of the contested territory.
In a statement, the provincial council of ethnically diverse Kirkuk province, whose inhabitants include Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, and other Iraqi ethnic and religious minorities, issued a veiled threat the Kurds of the province could resort to extra-constitutional measures to decide the future of the oil-rich governorate if Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is not applied before May of this year, Aswat al-Iraq writes in Arabic.
The Kirkuk council has been dominated by a pro-Kurdish bloc after ethnic Arabs and Turkmen largely boycotted elections in the province of 2005.
The statement, published Thursday, said, "The Kirkuk provincial council convened an exceptional meeting presided over by Rizkar Ali, the head of the council, and decided to demand that the Iraqi government and the agencies which are related to the implementation of article 140 of the constitution according to the steps specified by the council," Aswat al-Iraq reports.
According to Article 140 of the constitution the problem of these areas including oil-rich Kirkuk will be decided by the return of some of the inhabitants to their "original" provinces, followed by a popular referendum on the question of absorbing these regions into the Kurdistan autonomous region.
The Kirkuk council's statement demanded that the Iraqi government, through the independent high electoral commission, take measures to prepare for the poll in the province "before the end of the third month of 2008" including the preparation of the "mechanisms of the poll and the voting," and that the vote itself take place "before the end of the fifth month" of 2008.
The statement also demanded that a high implementing committee be granted the full administrative capacities, as well as the identification of those officials who neglect to implement the decisions of the committee.
The statement also demanded that the poll cover the official borders of Kirkuk province as they stood before July 17, 1968.
Kurds and other Iraqi parties accuse the former Iraqi regime, which came to power in a coup on July 17, 1968, of implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing of many non-Arab inhabitants in Kirkuk province in order to bind the oil-rich area to the Arab heartland of Iraq, including Kurds, Chaldo-Assyrians, and Iraqi Turkmen, and then replacing these residents with Arabs from other areas of Iraq, particularly the southern provinces.
Similar accusations of ethnic re-engineering are leveled against the former regime regarding parts of nearby Diyala and Ninewa provinces.
Some of the borders of Kirkuk province were also redrawn by the deposed Ba'thist regime, shifting land of that was formerly part of Kirkuk province to neighboring governorates.
The council warned in its statement that the timetable "cannot be extended or postponed" and in the case of a failure to implement the vote "The original inhabitants of these areas covered by article 140 according to the pre-July 17, 1968 borders will have the right to decide the administrative future of their areas according to the mechanisms that they find appropriate."
The statement also said that if provincial elections are conducted in Iraq, Kirkuk province should be exempted from these elections until the implementation of Article 140.
Kirkuk's Kurds generally insist on the application of Article 140 while the Turkmen and Arabs of the province refuse the poll, some demanding that Kirkuk not be governed in a different way than the other non-Kurdish provinces of Iraq, and others demanding that a self-governing area within Iraq be created just for Kirkuk province, separate from the Kurdistan autonomous area.
The council also demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki present an official apology to the Iraqi people for the Iraqi government's "lack of commitment" to the implementation of article 140 especially in the areas disputed between the Iraqi ethnicities.
The controversial referendum was originally required to be held by the end of 2007, but was postponed for up to six months in according to a United Nations-brokered plan.
