Keep your distance; Turkish government is told !

Turks told not to meddle in oil-rich Iraqi city
Associated Press December 10, 2006

Turkey renewed its frustration on Sunday with the Kurdish bid for dominationof Iraq's oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, which lies on Iraq's volatileethnic fault lines between Arabs and Kurds.Mehmet Vecdi Gonul, Turkey's defense minister, said Kirkuk's future statuscarries major implications for Turkey and Iraq's other neighbors no matterwho controls the city and its surrounding oilfields. Gonul asked the IraqiShiite and Kurdish-led government not to impose an "unrealistic" future onKirkuk.But Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, an ethnic Kurd, warned Turkey not to meddle in "our Kirkuk.""You speak of Kirkuk as if it is a Turkish city," Zebari said told Gonul."These are matters for Iraq to decide."Turkey wants to prevent the city and its giant pool of underground oil from becoming an economic engine that could fund a bid by Iraqi Kurds forindependence, a move would threaten to draw Turkey, with its 15 millionKurds, into a regional war."We hope the natural resources of Kirkuk would be used by all groups in Iraqwithout discrimination," Gonul told the International Institute of StrategicStudies conference in the Bahraini capital.Kirkuk is an ancient city once part of the Ottoman Empire, with a largeminority of ethnic Turks as well as various Christians, Shiite and SunniArabs, Armenians and Assyrians.Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Kurdish forces in northern Iraq haverallied to reverse what they claim to be an Arabization policy of SaddamHussein, which purged Kirkuk and other oil-rich areas of Kurds and replacedthem with Arab settlers.Thousands of Kurdish settlers from northern Iraq have flooded back intoKirkuk, colonizing the city's desert outskirts. Many believe the influx is abid to change the city's ethnic balance ahead of a 2007 census andreferendum that aims to decide whether Kirkuk will be annexed to Iraq'sautonomous Kurdistan region.The grim Iraq Study Group assessment issued in Washington last weekdescribed Kirkuk as a "powder keg" and recommends the referendum be delayed.Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt warned those in favoring in thepartition of Iraq that they were treading on dangerous ground."Every partition is written in blood," Bildt told the security conference inBahrain. "The carnage we see today is only the beginning of the bloodshed wewill see if there is a partition."Gonul agreed, saying Iraq's fragmentation "will be the beginning of adisaster that will engulf the whole region."The International Institute of Strategic Studies conference has broughttogether some 200 security representatives from more than 20 countries,including Iran, Iraq and the United States.