By Baghdadhope
Crowd of Iraqis at the Vatican this January. The Syriac Catholic bishops will meet tomorrow in synod to elect the new patriarch, the Chaldean ones are expected for the visit ad limina from the 23, and a delegation from Kirkuk made up of representatives of all ethnic and religious groups in the city, and among them, of course, some Christians, are expected in the next days.
The delegation that according to some sources will visit the Vatican and to others will meet the Pope will bear a message of peace and coexistence. According to Mala Bakhtiyar, head of the political bureau for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the visit to Rome will serve "... to mobilize international support on the issue of Kirkuk, of vital importance for Iraq ...." and to "confirm to the Holy Father the will of the people of Kirkuk to continue and live in the framework of a democratic and pluralistic Iraq" recognizing to the Pope an "important role in the effort to establish peace in the world."
As for the Christian minority in Kirkuk, the Iraqi president, founder and secretary general of the PUK, Jalal Talabani, reiterated the desire to maintain for it the 4% percentage of government jobs in Kirkuk as well as to ensure its representation in the governmental institutions at national level. The percentage of 4% to which Talabani refers to was established in 2007 and is part of the broader discussion on the future of Kirkuk, a city still disputed among the different groups living there. The provincial elections held in Iraq on January 2005 saw the victory in Kirkuk of a Kurdish political coalition, a victory that led to accuses of gerrymandering and to the consequent political paralysis that seemed to be resolved on December 2, 2007, when according to an agreement the governmental jobs had to be assigned to members of the different communities (Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians) according to a precise percentage of 32-32-32 and 4%. Agreement that how denounced by some members of the Council has never been implemented with a resulting predominance of Arabs among the government employees and Kurds between government officials, a kind of numerical representation of the growing political importance that the Kurds gained in the city since the fall of the regime. Kirkuk, as the three Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq, will not elect its provincial council on January 31. The electoral law concerning these political entities established for the contested city the creation of a commission of 7 lawmakers (2 Arabs, 2 Kurds, 2 Turkmen and 1 Christian) that, among its various task, must find a solution to the difficult problem of consensus in Kirkuk preparing a draft electoral law for the city to be presented in Baghdad for parliamentary approval by 31 March 2009.
To date the committee, although created, has not started its work and another time it seems unlikely that in such a short time a solution can be found for Kirkuk but that of postponing it indefinitely. The trip of the delegation to the Vatican then, although having a strong symbolic value, is unlikely to help in practice the solution to the problem of a city that floats on one of the largest deposits of crude oil in the country, and that for this reason has always been mentioned as a future casus belli in the history of the country.
