Ninewa’s Arabs, Kurds start US-sponsored negotiations
VOI | The Kurdish Globe
August 8, 2009
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“We were never opposed to dialogue and negotiations for solving problems,” Khisru Kuran, leader of the Ninewa List. The US Embassy sponsored yesterday the first session of direct negotiations between Al-Hadba bloc that has an Arab majority and the Ninewa Fraternity bloc that has a Kurdish majority which boycotted the Mosul-based Ninewa Governorate Council’s tasks since April.
The negotiations are aimed at achieving rapprochement between the two sides and forming a joint administration for the governorate which has been suffering from a real administrative crisis since the elections of the governorates’ councils in January in which Al-Hadba List won 19 out of37 seats and got most of the sovereign posts in the local government after excluding the Ninewa List.
Khisru Kuran, leader of the Ninewa List which won 12 seats in the council, said: “We welcome any meeting with Al-Hadba even if it was just a matter of courtesy, such as a joint fast breaking dinner, so as to break the ice in the two sides’ relations.” He added in an exclusive statement to Asharq Al-Awsat at the end of the meeting between the two sides’ representatives: “We held a meeting which was attended by two members from Al-Hadba and Ninewa Lists, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, and several American friends. The session was dedicated to an exchange of views about the reasons of the estrangement between us and a discussion of the current situations in the governorate in general.”
Kuran, who is also in charge of the Ninewa branch of the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s organizations which is led by Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani, added: “We were never opposed to dialogue and negotiations for solving problems. Our doors were and remain open and our hands extended for peace because we want what is good for this governorate. But we believe that the problems in the new Iraq cannot be solved except through rational dialogue, common understanding, and political accord.”
Regarding his bloc’s threats to split Ninewa Governorate into two, one following Baghdad and the other the Kurdistan Region, if the situations remained as they are now, Kuran said: “The governorate is already actually split. There are 16 administrative units like districts and sub districts which have been boycotting for months the orders, instructions, and sessions of the new administration in Ninewa. This is in itself a split in the governorate’s administrative structure but we are seriously seeking to solve the existing problems so as to avoid perpetuating this split.” He added: “There is no doubt that if the efforts and negotiations sessions bring positive results then the causes for the split or division taking place will disappear and the opposite is true also.”
Mosul, capital city of Ninewa province in Iraq, near the border with Kurdistan region, lies 405 km north of Baghdad. The Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds located near Mosul. A Kurdish Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds located near Mosul. Some 350,000 Yazidis live in villages around Mosul near Kurdistan autonomous region border.
Kurdish Yazidis look to Kurdistan region, the Kurdish Yazidis are concentrated in key areas for the referendum, including lands coveted by the Kurds north of Mosul and around Sinjar on the Syrian border. The Kurds see the referendum as a chance to right Saddam Hussein’s historic wrongs of forced population transfer and Arabization.
“We hope that the land now lived on by the Yazidis will join the Kurdish area,” the community’s leader, Amir Tahseen Beg, told the Associated Press in 2007 from his residence in Sheikhan. “This will depend on the referendum, but our areas must return to the original motherland.”
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution states that there will be a referendum in the areas bordering the Kurdistan autonomous region, including the northern oil city of Kirkuk, so that people can choose whether to be ruled by the central government or the Kurds.
The Yazidis are a dominant group in the northwest region, a historically oppressed people who speak Kurdish and are ethnically Kurd but follow their own religion. In fact, they are reputed to be devil worshippers, not just by Iraqi Muslims but they’ve been characterized that way by Western scholars over the years.
On November 1, 2008, hundreds of Iraq’s Shabak people took to the streets in Mosul-Ninewa calling for including them in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, according to a local official.
Tagged in: Ninewa, U.S. troops and Iraq
