ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—A planned visit by former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to the city of Halabja today was canceled by his official hosts without specifying the reasons while a number of local people gathered to stage a protest against his visit. Maliki who arrived in Sulaimani on Monday with meet with leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was scheduled to visit Halabja and meet Hamay Haji Mahmoud, head of the Kurdistan Socialist Party for lunch in his village of Gulakhana. “I was contacted a week ago by the PUK that he will come here for lunch,” Hamay Haji Mahmoud known as Kaka Hama told Rudaw. “We had prepared ourselves but a short while ago the governor and mayor of Halabja came here and said he wouldn’t come.” Kaka Hama said that the governor and mayor of Halabja had told him at the last minute that Maliki’s visit to Halabja had been cancelled “without specifying the reason” and therefore he wouldn’t make it to the planned luncheon. The Socialist Party leader said that he had planned to raise with Maliki a number of topics related to Baghdad’s budgetary policies towards the Kurdistan Region. “I wanted him to come and I had prepared a list of things to discuss with him,” he said. “About cutting the salaries of the people of Kurdistan and the Peshmerga budget and buying Kurdistan’s wheat by Baghdad.” Kaka Hama added: “The Iraqi PM is from Maliki’s party and he’s the head of a bloc that has 91 seats in parliament and of course he has his own influence. He has the majority in parliament and therefore can have an impact.” The former Iraqi government under Maliki decided to block the share of Kurdistan Region of the national budget two years ago, causing severe shortage of funds in the region and putting immense pressure on the Kurdish government to make monthly payments of its civil servants. Before the news of the cancellation of Maliki’s trip a number of young men from Halabja prepared to protest against his trip, and according to Hardi Hussein the protest organizer, the local police banned the gathering and detained two of his friends. “After we gathered to march, the security forces dispersed us and two of our friends were arrested,” Hussein told Rudaw. A Halabja security source said they stopped the protest because the protesters had chosen a wrong location for their gathering. Mustafa Chawrash, a high-ranking member of the PUK said that he was not ready to welcome Maliki to Halabja even if he was officially asked to do so. “Maliki’s visit to Kurdistan is to create conflict and tensions because and so far his intentions towards Kurds are not clear,” Chawrash said. “In 2008, Maliki deployed an army to seize Khanaqin and only one week ago he commented against the Kurdish referendum,” he said. “It is normal to receive him but we should not forget his intentions.”
