A couple more Kurdish articles. First, one that exhibits the current level of tension between the CPA and the Kurds.
U.S. Presses Iraqi Kurds to Compromise on Issue of Autonomy
The Bush administration, increasingly fearful of Iraq's breaking up along ethnic lines after the American occupation ends, is urging Kurdish leaders to compromise in their demand for a fully autonomous state in the north, administration officials said Wednesday.
The officials said that L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, met Friday with top Kurdish leaders to convey the concerns of senior members of the administration that a Kurdish state with all its current powers, plus some authority that it does not have now, posed a threat to the future unity of Iraq.
American officials said the Kurdish reaction was not conveyed back to Washington by Mr. Bremer.
But a Kurdish representative said the Kurdish leaders were adamant in rejecting Mr. Bremer's request. Kurds, the spokesman said, will continue to demand nothing less than the autonomy that the Kurdish area has had since 1991, when the United States decided to protect it as a breakaway part of Iraq.
"It was totally rejected," said the Kurdish representative. "Bremer's proposal didn't even meet the minimal things that the Kurds have been fighting for all these years."
The official said that Mr. Bremer held a second meeting with Kurdish leaders on Wednesday and backed off considerably on his own demand for a less than autonomous Kurdish state. "It was a real turnaround," the Kurdish official said.
The varying comments about American negotiations reflected what administration officials said was a fast-moving and fluid situation among aides to President Bush, and between Mr. Bremer and Iraqi leaders.
Rather suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, administration officials say that the issue of Kurdish autonomy has risen to the top of the list of difficulties that the United States is struggling to resolve as it returns Iraq to self-rule under a tight deadline. The target for Iraq regaining sovereignty is June 30.
Last week, administration officials said there was a growing recognition in the administration that some form of Kurdish autonomy was inevitable, if only because it was impractical to devise a new law to change the status quo in the next two months, the deadline for writing a new interim constitution for Iraq.
That view, reported in an article in The New York Times on Monday, has been modified, with at least some in the administration saying that the Kurds needed to be advised that their demands for the greatest possible autonomy had gone much too far.
Kurds wish to retain not only their own armed forces, the pesh merga, but also control over taxing power and oil revenues in Kirkuk and Khanakin, two oil-producing centers that the American occupation does not view as part of the traditional Kurdish region.
In a memo to top administration officials, Mr. Bremer recently advised that fighting the Kurds over their demand for the greatest possible autonomy might infuriate them and upset political stability in the north. But in Washington, officials reacted by insisting that the Kurds be told of American opposition to a separate Kurdish state in Iraq.
"Bremer really lowered the boom on them," an American official said of Mr. Bremer's first meeting with the Kurds. "He told them they're going to have to be flexible, and to recognize the existence of a federal state of Iraq and to disband their militias."
nytimes.com
lurqer |
