ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Kurdish villagers in some areas of the disputed territories were barred from registering for Iraq’s census in their hometowns, a Kurdish member of parliament said on Thursday.
“In Khanaqin and the surrounding villages, problems occurred during the census,” Suzan Mansour, an MP representing Diyala province in the Iraqi parliament, told Rudaw.
“In nine villages in the Balani district, security forces prevented Kurdish citizens from returning to their homes on the grounds that they had left the village and did not allow them to register for the census in their villages,” she said.
Iraq is conducting a census of its population for the first time in decades. The process began on Wednesday and has been extended until the end of Friday.
The census has raised concerns among some Kurdish officials about what effect historic demographic changes in the disputed areas will have on the results. Many Kurds and other minorities who have been displaced due to conflict or policies of Arabization returned to their home villages for the count.
Mansour said that almost all enumerators in some areas are Arab, which may have contributed to registration problems.
“In Kulajo and Galala, problems arose in different ways for registering Kurdish citizens. Part of the problem stems from the fact that out of 350 enumerators for the census, only one was Kurdish and 349 were Arab,” she said.
Ahmad Ali, a farmer from Kulajo, said that security forces barred him from returning to his village for the census.
“Arabs are being recorded, Kurds are not being recorded,” he told Rudaw.
Mansour said that most Kurdish villagers in these disputed areas were not registered in their original villages and had to be recorded elsewhere.
Khanaqin, a historically Kurdish-populated district, was a key location for the Arabization policy of the former Iraqi Baath regime in the 1970s. It has faced more demographic changes with Kurds leaving the area after the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014 and with Iraqi forces retaking control of Khanaqin in October 2017 following the withdrawal of the Peshmerga forces.
Hasan Majid, Diyala governor’s second deputy, visited a village where there were complaints about the census in the company of a large security detail.
Asked about not registering Kurds who had returned to their village for the census, he told Rudaw, “This is the law, not Arabization. The law applies to everyone. We do not have Arabization or Kurdishization in Diyala.”
Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Planning Minister Dara Rashid has said that according to census instructions from the Iraqi government, enumerators must record people based on where they are at the time of the census.
Hunar Hamid contributed to this report.
