Arabs, Turkmen offer fresh proposal on Kirkuk

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Arabs and Turkmen on Saturday tabled a new proposal regarding the status of Kirkuk in the elections law and was referred to the Presidential Board (PB) to study it, a lawmaker from the Independent Arab Dialogue bloc said. “The proposal has to do with the endorsement of the 2005 voters registers in Kirkuk,” Abad Motlak al-Juburi told IraqiNews.com news agency. “The proposal also envisaged that the elections in Kirkuk would be repeated if rigging hit 10% in the forthcoming ballots,” he added. Juburi noted that his bloc accepted the 2005 voters registers because they contained “less rigging than that of 2009, which the bloc categorically rejects”. Earlier, the Kurdistan Alliance (KA) bloc, the second largest in the Iraqi parliament, rejected that two seats would be given to Arabs and Turkmen otherwise this would “run counter to the Iraqi constitution”. The Iraqi parliament will hold a decisive session on Saturday to vote over the parliamentary election law, delayed over differences among legislators on the status of the disputed oil-rich province of Kirkuk. Today’s session will be convened after an agreement was reached on Thursday on a new proposal that was the outcome of several ones by the UN, the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front (IAF), the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and Arab and Turkmen representatives of Kirkuk. The proposal envisages that parliamentary elections would be held in Kirkuk as scheduled on condition that a panel would be set up in one year to verify the voters’ registers and the holding of re-elections if excesses proved to have gone beyond 15%, in addition to granting Arab and Turkmen two compensatory seats. The problem of Kirkuk represents a stumbling stone before the adoption of the parliamentary election law, scheduled to be held on January 16, 2010, after political blocs were up to their ears in tough wrangling that did not help reach an agreement on the way elections should be held in the disputed province. Kirkuk, a city of mixed Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen population, lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad. AmR (S) 1