ARBIL, Iraq - In a strongly worded
statement, the president of Iraq's northern
Kurdistan region rejected in its entirety the
report by the United States' Iraq Study Group
(ISG), and threatened that Kurds would opt for
secession from Iraq should Washington try to
implement some of the key recommendations of the
report regarding Kirkuk, federalism and the
constitution.
The ISG, co-chaired by
former US secretary of state James Baker and
former chairman of the House of Representatives
International
Relations
Committee Lee Hamilton, "made some unrealistic and
inappropriate recommendations under the pretext
that they are going to get the US out of the
current crisis in Iraq", read the statement,
signed by Massoud Barzani.
"If under this
pretext they want to impose their inappropriate
recommendations on us, then on behalf of the
people of Kurdistan, we announce this report is
against the constitution and interests of Iraq and
Kurdistan and we will not accept it."
Similarly, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani
rejected the recommendations by the group.
"I think the Baker-Hamilton report is
unfair and unjust," Talabani, a leader of one of
the two main Kurdish factions, said in Baghdad.
"It contains very dangerous articles that
undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and its
constitution," he said. "I consider the report to
be an insult to the Iraqi people."
Barzani
called for a "real national reconciliation"
originating from Iraqis themselves instead of the
ISG report. The 96-page document was released last
Wednesday.
"The report has been affected
by Arab states and especially Saudi Arabia, and I
don't think it will have any chance of success,"
Saadi Barzinji, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi
Parliament, said in a phone interview from
Baghdad. He criticized the report for being
"unilateral and biased" in its views.
"From a Kurdish and Iraqi perspective, the
report is not precise and has not taken many
objective factors on the ground into
consideration."
The report has also
divided politicians in Washington.
President George W Bush said, after a
meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
that he wouldn't talk to Syria and Iran about Iraq
and would not follow all the recommendations in
the report.
But Baker told the Senate that
his group's report must be treated as a whole and
not "a fruit salad and where one can say, 'I like
this but I don't like that.'"
While Baker
insists on treating the ISG report as a
comprehensive strategy, the Kurds' threats could
pose a serious challenge to US efforts to improve
the situation in Iraq in preparation for the
gradual withdrawal of troops - as the report
suggests - by the end of the first quarter of
2008.
On several principal matters the
approaches advised in the ISG report "are in
serious collision" with Kurdish interests and
trespass Kurdish redlines.
The report
advises against holding a referendum on the
disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which Kurds want
to be incorporated into their own region. "As long
as Kirkuk issue is postponed, Iraq will not
witness stability," Barzinji warned.
Iraq's constitution, approved by the
country's majority Shi'ites and Kurds, has set a
three-step roadmap to "normalize the situation in
Kirkuk" and hold a referendum on its fate by the
end of next year.
The report urges the
White House not to support devolution of Iraq into
three semi-autonomous regions "as a policy goal or
impose this outcome on an Iraqi state".
Experts in Kurdistan fear that would
restore Iraq to the old era of strong central
regimes in the country.
"A strong central
government for Iraq, as recommended in the report,
is in opposition to a federal-regional structure,
which is a major Kurdish demand," said Azad Aslan,
a history lecturer from Arbil's Salahaddin
University. "In fact, this report is nothing but
an acknowledgment of the defeat of the United
States in Iraq."
The national constitution
facilitates the creation of semi-autonomous
regions in Iraq. But Sunnis, mainly concentrated
in central and western parts of the country, worry
that powerful federal regions - for Kurds in the
north, and Shi'ites in the south - would leave
their relatively barren areas impoverished.
Larger roles for regional powers such as
Iran, Syria and Turkey "to contain sectarian
warfare" in Iraq, as prescribed by the report,
implies a limited role for Kurds, they worry.
The three neighboring countries have
sizable, restive Kurdish populations that have
been influenced by developments in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Last year, a major opposition party,
the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran, adopted a
goal of federalism for Kurdish areas in Iran
instead of limited self-rule that it was calling
for before.
"If the US is going to leave
Kurds in the lurch as in 1975, then it should know
that Kurds can make US business - not only in Iraq
but also in neighboring countries - harder than
any Sunni insurgency can do," Aslan said.
In 1975, Iran and Iraq reached an
agreement in Algeria in which Iraq gave up its
claims to some islands in the waters between the
two countries in return for Iran's withdrawal of
support for the Kurdish revolt against the Iraqi
government. That led to the displacement of
hundreds of thousands of Kurds to Iran and the
collapse of the Kurdish self-rule system in
northern Iraq.
The issue, however, is not
only confined to Kurds: Iraq's Shi'ites have not
welcomed the report either.
The leader of
Iraq's largest Shi'ite party, the Supreme Council
for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, rebuked the report for its
"impreciseness" and bluntly said, "I disagree with
them [ISG]."
He dismissed a link drawn by
the Baker-Hamilton group between Iraq and the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict as "non-existent",
stressing that "Iraq's dossier has its
particularities".
