ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Turkmen Front, which has two seats on the Kirkuk provincial council, said on Sunday that they will file a complaint to the Iraqi judiciary after being left out of the meeting to form the province’s local administration.
"Those who believe that the Kirkuk problem can be solved by distributing positions are delusional. The Kirkuk problem is based on strengthening trust between the components, and what happened yesterday is a sabotage of this trust," Hassan Turan, head of the Turkmen Front, said during a presser.
Nine out of the 16 members of the Kirkuk provincial council held a meeting in Baghdad’s al-Rasheed Hotel on Saturday evening, hours before the legal timeframe to form the province’s local administration was set to end.
In the meeting, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s (PUK) Rebwar Taha was nominated for the governorship of Kirkuk, and Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hafidh of the Qiyada Alliance, an Arab party, was nominated for the post of council chief.
Turan said that the meeting violates the provisions of the Iraqi provincial elections law, which state that the council chief based on seniority must be present at the meeting to elect the governor and the head of the council, and that positions must be distributed fairly between all of Kirkuk’s components.
Former acting Governor of Kirkuk Rakan al-Jabouri, who served as the council’s chief in the first meeting as the eldest member of the body, said that the session did not meet the legal requirements as no request was filed to the head of the council to hold the meeting.
Because of Kirkuk’s status as a multi-ethnic, disputed province with a history of demographic change, the provincial council election law dictates that “power shall be distributed in a fair representation which guarantees the participation of the province’s components regardless of the results of the elections.”
The Turkmen party had suggested rotating the governorship between the three components.
Additionally, the meeting was conducted outside of Kirkuk secretly from other members of the council, and violated the agreements reached following the first session of the provincial council which obliged the parties to negotiate before holding a second session, according to Turan who added that the party will “resort to the Iraqi judiciary” to do justice to the Turkmen community.
"The absence of the Turkmen component in yesterday's session is considered a blatant deficiency in the application of the provisions of the aforementioned law, and this session is considered invalid and violated the law," Turan said.
“The Turkmen are an essential element of the province and no one can bypass this component. We did not attend the session held yesterday and we did not authorize any Turkmen to attend the session,” he added.
No Turkmen council members were present at the meeting in Baghdad, but the session was reportedly attended by a number of Shiite Turkmen politicians linked to the Badr Organization.
All five PUK council members, three Arab members, and the winner of the Christian minority quota were in attendance. No council members of the Turkmen, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), or the Arab Alliance were present.
The absence of a clear majority after the December polls and disputes between the parties hindered the process of appointing the governor and forming the local administration for over seven months. Kirkuk is the only Iraqi province yet to finalize its government.
Nominations for governors must be approved by the Iraqi president.
