Iraq’s President can be summoned by Parliament if he violated constitution, Kurdish MP says.

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com – The Legislature from the Kurdistan Coalition, Mahmoud Othman, has said on Sunday that the Iraqi President could be “summoned” by the Parliament if he had violated the Constitution, saying that President Jalal Talabani’s statement about Kirkuk “wasn’t a violation of the Constitution.”   “President Jalal Talabani can be summoned by the Parliament if he violated the Constitution,” Othman told IraqiNews.com news agency, saying “that when Talabani said that Kirkuk was the ‘heart of Kurdistan ,’ he expressed his viewpoint, being the chairman of a party..So, there is no need to gather signatures to summon him by the Parliament.”   The Legislature for al-Iraqiya Coalition, Wihda al-Jumeily, had said on Saturday that a number of Parliament members had began collecting signatures to summon President Jalal Talabani by the Parliament, in the background of his statement that described Kirkuk as “Kurdistan’s Jerusalem .”   Othman, on his part, said: “the statement of the President towards Kirkuk had been entirely natural, as firstly, he was speaking in a festival of his party, being the Chairman of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party that had always described Kirkuk as the “ Jerusalem of the Kurds.”   “Even the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), repeats that Kirkuk is the “Heart of the Kurds,” Othman said, adding that “each party has its own mottos, being natural issues and not constitutional violations.”   President Jalal Talabani had said in a speech on the occasion of the anniversary of the Kurdish 1991 uprising in Sulaimaniya city against Iraq ’s former ruling Baath regime, that Kirkuk was the “Jerusalem of Kurdistan,” calling on the Kurds to conclude a strategic Kurdish-Turkoman Coalition, to liberate the city from what he described as “terrorists and neo-occupiers.”   RT / SKH 1057