From Baghdad to Erbil (II)
2010/09/23
Iraqi Kurdistan
According to the "Society for Threatened Peoples" (GfbV, headquartered in Gottingen, Lower Saxony), members of the committee of its Kurdistan/Iraq section have had a meeting with Green Party chairperson, Claudia Roth, at the end of March. The meeting took place at the German Consulate in Erbil (also spelled Irbil), the "capital of the autonomous federal province of Iraqi Kurdistan" - as the GfbV refers to it. At the meeting, with German diplomats in attendance, the demand was also raised to incorporate "the autonomous region of the Turkmen areas lying outside Iraqi Kurdistan."[1] The GfbV includes the Northern Iraqi town Kirkuk into this region. One of the largest oil reserves in the world with an estimated ten to twelve billion barrels is situated near Kirkuk.
Integration
For years, separatist forces in the Northern Iraqi Kurdish provinces have been supported by the GfbV. Already back in 2007, the organization's president, Tilman Zülch, had described the "Autonomous Region of Kurdistan" as a "political entity", having not only a parliament and government, but also a military at its disposal. At the time, Zülch identified several "ethnic minorities", which - in his opinion - were demanding "integration into the federal state Kurdistan," explicitly naming the resource rich regions around Mosul and Kirkuk.[2]
Ethnic-Political Basis
The FDP affiliated Friedrich-Naumann Foundation (FNSt) - a long time GfbV cooperation partner - is also interested in the Kirkuk region. Following several conferences on the subject and in accord with the German Foreign Ministry and the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) [3], the foundation presented a "Berlin Treaty". According to the FNSt, this treaty was signed "behind closed doors and in the absence of representatives of the media" in Mai 2009 "by leading political policy makers of all the important political tendencies and movements in Kirkuk." The foundation also explains that the treaty regulates "power sharing" in the oil-rich Iraqi "crisis-ridden province" of Kirkuk on an ethnic-political basis, particularly including the "distribution of leadership positions" - "from governor to the administrative bodies."[4]
Blood Borders
Iraq's parceling along ethnic lines, favored by the GfbV, corresponds also to earlier US military plans. To insure the control over the resource rich country, the US military proposed, already years ago, partitioning Iraq along the "blood borders" separating Sunnites, Shiites and Kurds.[5] The European Academy Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC) organized in the fall of 2006 a seminar for high ranking members of the Iraqi administration, which had the break-up of Iraq into "ethnic minority"-zones on the agenda. The "European Academy", located in Northern Italy's Bolzano is financed by the South Tyrol provincial government and has close ties to the "Federal Union of European Nationalities" (FUEV), which was founded by Nazi-collaborators. And the GfbV is one of the FUEV's most important cooperation partners in the field of the ethnically based "minority policy".[6]
