Political meeting of Iraqi Kurdistan parties to form joint electoral list , Erbil, September 28, 2019. Photo: NRT
HEWLÊR-Erbil, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— Major Kurdish parties have declared a joint Kurdish list will run in the April 2020 provincial election in Iraq’s disputed areas, in a bid to consolidate Kurdish votes.
The decision was taken during a meeting at the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s (KDP) political bureau in Erbil.
“We as Kurdistani parties met today to form a joint list for areas covered by Article 140 such as Kirkuk, Mosul, Nineveh, Diyala, and Saladin. We have all agreed to run as one list in order to prevent losses in Kurdish votes. It was a successful meeting and we approved all points,” Kakamin Najar a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) politburo said in a joint press conference with other parties in Erbil.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution was written to address the issue of lands disputed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil and the federal government in Baghdad. It calls for normalization of these areas, to be followed by a referendum on whether or not those regions want to be part of the Kurdistan Region.
According to the constitution, the article should have been implemented by the end of 2007, yet so far no referendum has been conducted.
The main Kurdistan Region parties – KDP, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), Change Movement (Gorran) and Islamic Group (Komal) – are part of the joint list.
The new list will be named the “Kurdistan Alliance List.”
Opposition party New Generation (Newey Nwê) did not participate in the meeting because it believes that the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have not created any common ground upon which all parties can unite, the Movement said in a statement.
“We think the plans that the KDP and PUK have for areas outside of the Kurdish region are the same that they have for inside it. They should create that common ground, so that opposition parties can meet with them about all the issues.”
A similar meeting had been scheduled for last Saturday, but was cancelled following an incident where senior PUK leader Mahmoud Sangawi was prevented from entering Erbil.
The announcement of a joint list for across the disputed territories comes after attempts by Kurdish political parties to form electoral coalitions in some of the disputed provinces.
The parties that form part of today’s announced joint list had agreed on September 9 to run in Kirkuk under the name “Kirkuk is Kurdistani.”
However, the name was rejected by the Iraqi electoral body who claimed the name could stoke further ethnic tension in the province.
Ethnically diverse Kirkuk is home to Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen, and Christian inhabitants. It has not held provincial council elections since 2005, mainly due to its disputed nature and disagreements between the province’s ethnic communities.
The ethnic Kurds consider the northern oil-rich province of Kirkuk and parts of Nineveh, Diyala and Salahudin provinces as disputed areas and want them to be incorporated into their Kurdish region, a move fiercely opposed by the Arabs, Turkomans and the Baghdad government.
Kurds were able to win 26 out of a possible 41 seats in the election held 14 years ago, when they ran on the joint Kurdistan Brotherhood List that also included some Turkmen parties.
A joint Kurdish party list for Nineveh province had also been proposed, but failed to materialize.
Saadi Pira, a member of the PUK politburo, said during the press conference that the list aims to “save” each and every Kurdish vote.
Kurdish political groups that have yet to join the coalition are welcome, Pira added.
“The doors are open for all existing groups and political organizations which intend to run for elections in these areas, we will happily welcome them,” he said.
Kurds control an autonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq’s north, and they also held the disputed Kirkuk province from 2003 until they were driven out in October 2017 by Iraqi federal forces after Baghdad rejected the Barzani’s controversial independence referendum.
In 2014, the Kurdish forces take full control of Kirkuk after the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq and the withdrawal of Iraqi army form the province and some other northern region of the state, including second-biggest city of Mosul.
In 2017, Iraqi Army and Hashd al-Shaabi Shiite also retook all disputed areas from Kurds and Iraqi forces took control of the two largest oil fields in the disputed northern province of Kirkuk dealing a heavy blow to the finances of the Kurdistan government.
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