Sunday, 15 June 2008, 04:04 EDT
WKI President criticized the UNAMI over disputed territories
Dr. Najmaldin Karim, Neurosurgeon, Falik & Karim, Greenbelt, Maryland, and President, Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI), Washington, D.C.
WKI Press Release
The President of WKI criticized the UNAMI for its arbitrary recommendations regarding the issue of disputed territories.
The President of Washington Kurdish Institute, Dr. Najmaldin Karim, criticized the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) for its arbitrary recommendations regarding the issue of disputed territories.
Dr. Karim underscored that UNAMI was brought into the process to provide UN resources to assist in the mechanism for implementation of article 140 of the Iraq Constitution. So far, UNAMI has elected not to release the complete text of its report and has merely released a brief press release, available on its website.
Dr. Karim said: "From what we can surmise, UNAMI has offered nothing more than its unbalanced preference for arbitrary criteria to allocate certain areas of the disputed territories. Seemingly, it has ignored the fundamental injustices of ethnic cleansing and state-sponsored Arabization, perpetrated by successive Iraqi regimes, with the specific purpose of changing the demographic structure of the region.
UNAMI has failed to address the core elements of Article 140 of the Iraq Constitution that commit the Iraqi government to reversing past racist policies through the process of normalization and referendum,www.ekurd.net which was negotiated and decided as a fair way to resolve the territorial issues.
"If UNAMI aims to bypass the Iraq Constitution and announce bureaucratic acronyms, as they had indicated thus far, then the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) leadership should pursue the resolution of Article 140 without their assistance. Their recommendations are non-binding and should be received as such.
The issue is too important to the future of Kurdistan and Iraq as a whole to accept further equivocation and procrastination. We urge the leadership of Kurdistan Alliance and the KRG to stand firm against the deliberate encroachment upon historical and legitimate Kurdish rights."
Dr. Karim added: "The Kurdish people have not forgotten the dismal record of the UN bureaucracy, in its past silence against genocide and gross human rights abuses committed against the people of Kurdistan during the 1980's. Its role in the scandal of Oil for Food and its complicity with Saddam's regime in abusing Iraqi oil resources, to the detriment of the Iraqi people, has yet to be fully accounted. UNAMI can play a relevant and positive role by facilitating the mechanism for the practical implementation of Article 140."
