ANKARA - TDN with Wire Dispatches
Kurdish leaders were busy trying to put together a response to Arab Shiite insistance that Kurds should be denied having veto power in Iraq while Jalal Talabani gave a cautious welcome to a U.N. resolution on Iraq's future, despite earlier threats to quit the interim government over the document's failure to recognise Kurdish autonomy.
"We are happy that the Security Council resolution mentioned federalism, but we regret that it did not mention the Kurdish people," Talabani told a television station run by his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party.
In a late development Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said hursday Iraq has resolved the dispute over Kurdish autonomy.
Kurds have campaigned hard to win guarantees that Iraq's new government will not be able to take away the autonomy in the north that they have enjoyed since the 1991 Gulf War.
The Security Council resolution adopted on Tuesday endorses a transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, but does not mention a provisional constitution signed in March that enshrined Kurdish self-rule.
However, the resolution does welcome the Iraqi government's commitment to work toward a federal state, a core demand of Iraq's minority Kurds.
The resolution also mandates a U.S.-commanded multinational force to keep the peace in Iraq.
Speaking in New York, U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said on Wednesday he felt Iraqi Kurds and Shiites could find "common ground" in their dispute over minority and majority rights.
Kurdish leaders say they refuse to be called a minority in Iraq and demand to be seen as a partner to the Arabs.
The interim constitution gives Kurds in three northern provinces an effective veto over any attempt to encroach on their autonomy -- a clause Iraq's top two Kurdish leaders, Talabani and Masoud Barzani, had fought hard to have included.
Before the U.N. vote, Talabani and Barzani, had threatened to withdraw Kurdish members from the interim government, boycott national elections due next year and bar central government representatives from the Kurdish-run northern Iraq if autonomy was not guaranteed.
"This issue has been resolved," Allawi told reporters, saying he had discussed it with Kurdish leaders in Baghdad. He gave no further details.
U.N. diplomats said the decision was made to keep a reference to the interim constitution -- the Transitional Administrative Law -- out of the resolution to appease Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who grudgingly accepted the charter when it was approved in March.
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