Local officials admit “ethnic conflict” in Ninewa

NINEWA / IraqiNews.com: Local officials from different parties and political movements in Ninewa converged that there is an “ethnic conflict” due to the demographic diversity that characterizes the province, where Arabs, Kurds, Chaldo-Assyrians, Shabaks, Yazidis, Turkmen, and Armenians have lived together for hundreds of years. An official in Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Akram Hormuz, told IraqiNews.com that the new elections will outline the grassroots popularity for each party, adding the party that provided most services to the people will be relied on by the man in the street in this stage. “We wish to have transparent and democratic elections,” Hormuz replied when asked about his expectations regarding the forthcoming provincial council elections, scheduled for January 31, 2009. Salem Korkis, an official in the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), told IraqiNews.com that the ongoing conflict in Ninewa is an ethnic one between the Arab and Kurdish blocs. “The dispute, however, lessened at present due to pressures practiced by the state on the conflicting parties,” he said. He said after the elections, the council will be radically changing and there will be a new balance of power there. Qusai Abbas Mohammed, the leader of the Democratic Shabak Grouping Party, said the conflict in Ninewa can be described as ethnic-sectarian because the province has a different array of ethnicities, religions and sects. He expressed belief that there will be a new change in the coming provincial council but there will be no problems to overshadow the voting process. “The Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) is working actively but it still has a long way to go as far as the issue of Shabaks relocated from Mosul is concerned because so far they were not registered in the IHEC papers,” Mohammed said. Moreover, he added, there is no representation for the Shabaks in the current council, noting the Shabaks in this council represent the parties they belong to. Fahmi Isahaq, a leading member of the Chaldo-Assyrian Union Party, also agreed in statements to IraqiNews.com that the conflict is ethnic, adding “event though the conflict is inter-Christian, it is ethnic in the first place”. Isahaq said that the Assyrians’ representative in the council, Ramzi al-Aam Bulus, is marginalized, but there has to be a change in the council in the coming period.   AmR (S)/SR 1