Monday, June 04, 2007
Talabani and Barzani will not accept postponement on Kirkuk
Kurdistan
(VOI) - Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani affirmed that they would not accept postponement of the application of article 140 of Iraq's constitution, which deals with the issue of Kirkuk. "We are determined to have article 140, pertaining to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk, applied," Talabani, Iraq's president, said during a press conference held with Iraqi Kurdistan Region's president, Massoud Barzani, at the resort of Dukan.
The two Kurdish leaders had earlier on Sunday met to discuss ways of unifying their positions on the enforcement of article 140. The several hours' meeting was attended by Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Deputy Premier Barham Saleh, as well as a number of members of Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Kurds claim that the demographic distribution of Kirkuk's population was considerably changed after the 1980s, following attempts by the former regime to encourage Iraqi Arabs to flock to the oil-rich city in a bid to change its demographic makeup in favor of Arabs.
Labels: Article 140, Barham Saleh, Jalal Talabani, Kirkuk, Massoud Barzani, Nechirvan Barzani
