Postponement of General Census satisfactory for Turkmen

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: A number of Arab and Turkman officials in Kirkuk Province have expressed satisfaction for the postponement of the General Census in Iraq, whilst the Kurdish side expressed their expectations for the occasion, according to the Chairman of Kirkuk‘s Hawija Council’s Chairman, Hussein Ali Al-Saleh on Wednesday. “The postponement of the General Census was a blessing that took place in response to the country’s interest in relation to the ambitions of the political blocs in Kirkuk,” Saleh told IraqiNews.com news agency. “The Arab parties in Kirkuk, Ninewa, Salah al-Din, Diala and different areas in Iraq, reject that the General Census take place at its previously scheduled time, whilst the Kurds alone support that it takes place on its scheduled date of Dec. 5, 2010, for political motives,” he said. Saleh demanded that the government “check the records of the electorates, the identity cars, and carry out a survey to raise the violations against private properties in Kirkuk, before carrying out the General Census.” The Council of Ministers had decided in its Session No. 47 on Nov. 30, 2010 to assign a new date for the General Census, rather than Dec. 5, 2010. The new time proposed for the census is following a meeting of the political blocs, scheduled for next week. “We Turkmen have been struggling over the past five months to postpone the Census to another date, in order to reach a correct version to carry it out, in such a way that responds to the demands of everybody,” the representative of the Turkmen in Kirkuk Province’s Council, Turhan al-Mufti, said. “The Turkmen welcome this step, considering it as a step in the right direction to carry out a new General Census in the future,” Mufti said. “The Turkmen don’t have any problem with the census being carrying out, if the current administrative problems in Kirkuk are settled, but we bless the step of postponing it at the present time,” he noted. SKH/SR 27