Iraq Still at Jammed on Election Law

Baghdad --- Rancorous debate over voting in the disputed Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Thursday once again postponed a parliamentary vote on a new election law.

Parliament convened on Thursday afternoon, but the most important item, a debate on a law to cover voting the January 16 parliamentary elections, was not on the agenda.

Debate over the conduct of elections in the city has forestalled a vote on the law several times in recent weeks.

Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make Kirkuk, and its nearby oilfields, the capital of an independent state, calling it their "Jerusalem." Iraqi Arab and Turkmen politicians regard the city and surrounding al-Tamim province as an integral part of Iraq.

Under the Iraqi constitution, the parliamentary elections must take place by the end of January. Lawmakers missed the October 15 deadline that would provide election workers the 90 days they say they need to organize elections in time for January 16.

Thursday's postponement came after Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told reporters that the Kurdish parliamentary bloc would boycott any vote on a proposal to use the 2004 voter registration rolls for Kirkuk and surrounding al-Tamim province.

The 2009 voter rolls showed a dramatic increase in Kurdish voters in the region. Kurdish politicians have backed a UN proposal that would see Kirkuk vote at the same time as the rest of the country, using the most recent voter rolls.

In a phone interview with the German Press Agency dpa after Thursday's postponement, Kurdish parliamentarian Khalid Shawani again stressed that the Kurdish bloc would boycott any vote on a proposal to use the 2004 lists.

Shawani called such proposals "chauvinist," and warned that, if parliament were to pass them, "it would lose its neutrality and would create problems instead of agreements, and that instead of solving the problems of Kirkuk, it would damage the political process in all Iraq."

Arab and Turkmen lawmakers look with suspicion at a dramatic increase in Kurdish voters in the city recorded in the 2009 voter rolls from the 2004 rolls, and want them examined.

Kurdish lawmakers have said that they would support such a measure if the voting rolls from other provinces were also examined. Arab lawmakers have rejected this as impractical.

"We have made our position clear," Sheikh Abdel-Rahman Manshid al- Assi, a member of the Arab Political Council of Kirkuk, told dpa. "We will not relinquish Kirkuk ... It is up to the Kurds to make concessions."

"The participation of Arabs and Turkmens will give legitimacy to the process," he said, calling for the city and its environs to be given a special status.

Ad Melkert, the UN's special envoy to Iraq, on Tuesday presented a plan that would see Kirkuk vote at the same time as the rest of the country, using the 2009 voting rolls.

A committee made up of Iraq's top politicians from across the country's sectarian and ethnic divides has suggested either postponing the polls in Kirkuk, using the 2004 voting rolls, or separating the province into two voting districts.

Lawmakers have sought a consensus solution to forestall the possibility that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, himself an ethnic Kurd, might veto such a measure.

Tensions have been high in the region as debate on the elections law has come to a head.

A bomb blast shook central Kirkuk's al-Mansur mosque on Thursday morning, but caused no casualties, police told Aswat al-Iraq. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Speaking after the parliament for northern Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region ratified a new cabinet there Wednesday, Kurdish President Massoud Barzani insisted that Kirkuk must be part of the Kurdish region.

"We want (Kirkuk) incorporated into our region, because the majority of the population is Kurdish," he said. "We will not agree to any other solution."

His statements came as Iraqi soldiers moved into the disputed area of Daquq, 45 kilometres to the south of Kirkuk, Amir Khawa Karam, the head of the local council, told the German Press Agency dpa.

Karam, a politician from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the partners in government in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region to the north, said the soldiers had told Kurdish Peshmerga militias to leave the area.

"We will not accept any form of interference from ... the Iraqi army in the administrative affairs of the region of Daquq," he said.