BAGHDAD, Dec 28: Arabs should not oppose the Kurdish drive for rights, Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani told a visiting Arab League delegation, the KDP’s newspaper reported on Sunday.

“Our Arab brothers must not oppose rights for the Kurdish people because the Kurds and the Arabs are allies and not enemies,” Barzani told the league’s deputy secretary general Ahmed Ben Helli in the northern city of Arbil on Saturday night.

“What the Kurdish people are demanding today is a voluntary union in the framework of a democratic and federal Iraq under which the Kurds would be the equals of the Arabs and not second-rate citizens,” the KDP daily Al-Taakhi quoted Barzani as saying.

“The Iraq of tomorrow must be far removed from the policies of the past,” he said, recalling that ousted president Saddam Hussein “used the worst type of oppression against the Kurds, including forced transfer and Arabisation”.

“The Kurdish people has experienced democracy over the 12 years of autonomy” in three northern provinces and now seeks “a union on the basis of voluntary coexistence and not violence and the imposition of the will of the minority over the majority,” Barzani said.

The Arab League delegation also held talks on Saturday in Sulaimaniyah with officials from the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan that rules the province of the same name 330 kilometres north of Baghdad.

The delegation on Friday visited the town of Halabja where 5,000 Kurds were gassed to death during Saddam era in 1988.

Ben Helli refused to comment on the Kurds’ push for Iraq to become a federal state, saying it was a matter for the Iraqi people to decide.—AFP