KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region — The Kirkuk Provincial has voted to call on the Iraqi government to hold the long-delayed referendum in the province to determine the future of disputed areas, including Kirkuk, claimed both by Baghdad and Erbil, the acting Head of the Council Rebwar Talabani told reporters in a press conference following a majority vote on Tuesday.
Talabani warned that Tuesday’s call to the Iraqi government, and in particular to the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, is “the last message” from the Council, which if ignored, will be followed by every legal and constitutional step the Council can take to implement the article.
Talabani said that council voted that “the [Iraqi] federal government should be committed to hold referendum in Kirkuk in accordance with the Article 140 of the constitution,” referring to Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, which calls for normalization of areas it refers to as disputed, to be followed by a referendum on whether or not those regions want to be part of the Kurdistan Region.
Kurdish President Masoud Barzani said in a press conference as he received then British foreign minister William Hague in June 2014 in Erbil that from a Kurdish point of view the article had already been implemented.
Barzani said then that the Kurds waited for about 10 years to resolve this issue of the disputed areas according to the Iraqi constitution. But it did not happen. He also added that the Kurdish Peshmerga were forced to deploy their forces to Kirkuk to defend its people as the Iraqi security forces started to withdraw and flee in the face of the advancing ISIS group.
“Now Article 140, from a Kurdish perspective, has been implemented, and finished,” Barzani said in the joint press conference. “We will not talk about this article anymore.”
According to the Iraqi constitution, the article should have been implemented by the end of 2007, and so far no referendum has been conducted on this issue.
The multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk is home to Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen among others. It has been secured by Kurdish Peshmerga forces since mid-2014 after Iraqi government troops left the city ahead of a possible attack by radical Islamic insurgents when they took over large swathes of the country. The province has one of Iraq’s largest oil fields within its borders.
The Kirkuk Council also voted to reject the Sunday’s decision from the Iraqi parliament that had called to take down the Kurdistan flag.
Talabani said that the Council voted with a majority vote to reject what he described as “the illegal and unconstitutional decision of the Iraqi parliament” over the flag raising issue. Some Turkmen and Arab members of the council boycotted today’s session.
Talabani earlier said on Saturday, following the vote from the Iraqi parliament, that “It is impossible for Kurdistan’s flag to be lowered again.”
The Council vote comes a day after the Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi claimed on Monday night that both the President Barzani and the Kirkuk governor Najmadin Karim have shown their readiness to take down the Kurdistan flag over state buildings in the province, a week after the flag was officially raised since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
PM Abadi told the Arabic Al-Mayadeen TV that the two Kurdish leaders told him that the decision to raise the flag “was imposed on them in a certain way,” without giving details as to who may have put pressure on the Kurdish leadership.
The Kurdish leaders, Abadi said, are now trying to find a certain formula to do so.
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