MOSCOW/BAGHDAD, Oct 24: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Tuesday that Iraq would break up if nothing were done to unify the country.
“If there is no breakthrough and real unity does not begin, this situation (break-up) will become reality,” Mr Lavrov was quoted as saying by the ITAR-TASS news agency.
British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett on Monday said it was a decision for Iraqis themselves about whether they wanted to continue as a single state or divide along ethnic lines.
She said that while unity was the most important short-term objective, in the long run Iraqis had had enough of arbitrary borders being imposed on them from outside, in apparent reference to the country’s colonial past.
However, US President George Bush said last week that a division of Iraq would bring about more ‘disorder’ and further Kurdish autonomy would especially irk Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish minority.
SHIA LEADER’S CALL: The leader of Iraq’s largest Shia bloc called on Tuesday for the country to be divided into federal zones, to the dismay of Sunnis who fear losing out on Iraq’s vast oil wealth.
Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told hundreds of supporters that a federal system with only loose central control would prevent the return of dictatorship.
“Federalism will guarantee that the injustice of the past will not revisit our children nor our grandchildren,” Mr Hakim said in an Eid message.
Mr Hakim and his supporters argue that in order to prevent a resurgence of Sunni dominance of Iraq, such as that which prevailed under Saddam Hussein’s rrule, the Shias of south and central Iraq must have self-rule.
He accused opponents of federalism of wanting ‘to bring back dictatorship and unjust central power’, while insisting that SCIRI did not want to destroy or partition Iraq but to strengthen it.
Mr Hakim’s Sunni opponents and many Shias, including radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, fear SCIRI’s vision of an eight-province autonomous Shia zone would put the Iranian-backed party in command of Iraq’s oil wealth.
Iraq’s northern Kurdish region is also oil-rich, and while Kurdish leaders there have stopped calling for complete independence they are attached to the degree of autonomy they have enjoyed since the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraq’s post-Saddam constitution, passed by referendum in October last year, describes the country as a ‘democratic, federal, representative republic’ but a decision on what kind of federal system to use has yet to be taken.
Earlier this month Iraq’s parliament adopted a law to institutionalise federalism within 18 months at the earliest to give time to amend the constitution to ease Sunni concerns about the distribution of national wealth.—AFP
