CaptnKirk
Lifer
Kurds open Oil Drilling to Outside Interests
More stunning than a slap to the face, but not quite a kick to the jaw, the Kurds are intent on upsetting the applecart.
This may be the harbringer of breakdown of political solidification of the formative government
just weeks before the scheduled election of their designated puppets.
The northern state of Kurdistan is asserting it's rights to be autonomus, which is alienating Baghdad's
policy makers, and setting off alarms in neighboring Turkey, who does not want to see the Kurds influence expand.
<LA TIMES>
A controversial oil exploration deal between Iraq's autonomy-minded Kurds and a Norwegian company got underway this week without the approval of the central government here, raising a potentially explosive issue at a time of heightened ethnic and sectarian tensions.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls a portion of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, last year quietly signed a deal with Norway's DNO to drill for oil near the border city of Zakho. Iraqi and company officials describe the agreement as the first involving new exploration in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Drilling began after a ceremony Tuesday, during which Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish northern region, vowed "there is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources," according to news agency reports.
In Baghdad, political leaders on Wednesday reacted to the deal with astonishment.
"We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution," said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. "Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers' council. It has not been on their agenda."
The start of drilling, called "spudding" in the oil business, is sure to be worrisome to Iraq's Sunni Arab minority. They fear a disintegration of Iraq into separate ethnic and religious cantons if regions begin to cut energy deals with foreign companies and governments. Sunnis are concentrated in Iraq's most oil-poor region.
Iraq's neighbors also fear the possibility of Iraqi Kurds using revenue generated by oil wells to fund an independent state that might lead the roughly 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran and Syria to revolt.
Iraqi legal experts and international oil industry analysts have questioned the deal. Oil industry trade journals had expressed doubts that it would come to fruition.
Iraq's draft constitution, approved in an Oct. 15 national referendum, stipulates that "the federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate" energy policy. However, it also makes ambiguous reference to providing compensation for "damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime."
Iraq's Kurds have argued that the country's existing oil fields and infrastructure, such as those in the largely Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, should be divvied up by the central government but that future oil discoveries should be controlled by each oil-producing region.
In his speech Tuesday, Barzani, the nephew of Kurdish politician and former guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani, eschewed the language of the law and couched the deal in political terms. He invoked the Kurds' years of deprivation at the hands of the Sunni Arab-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.
"The time has come that instead of suffering, the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country," he said during the ceremony in the western portion of Kurdish-controlled territory.
The Kurds, who during the last several years of Hussein's rule maintained sovereignty in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S. warplanes, made millions in transit and customs fees as the Baghdad government smuggled oil to Turkey in violation of United Nations sanctions. Since the end of the sanctions, the Kurds have sought ways to make up for that lost income.
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More stunning than a slap to the face, but not quite a kick to the jaw, the Kurds are intent on upsetting the applecart.
This may be the harbringer of breakdown of political solidification of the formative government
just weeks before the scheduled election of their designated puppets.
The northern state of Kurdistan is asserting it's rights to be autonomus, which is alienating Baghdad's
policy makers, and setting off alarms in neighboring Turkey, who does not want to see the Kurds influence expand.
<LA TIMES>
A controversial oil exploration deal between Iraq's autonomy-minded Kurds and a Norwegian company got underway this week without the approval of the central government here, raising a potentially explosive issue at a time of heightened ethnic and sectarian tensions.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls a portion of the semiautonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, last year quietly signed a deal with Norway's DNO to drill for oil near the border city of Zakho. Iraqi and company officials describe the agreement as the first involving new exploration in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Drilling began after a ceremony Tuesday, during which Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish northern region, vowed "there is no way Kurdistan would accept that the central government will control our resources," according to news agency reports.
In Baghdad, political leaders on Wednesday reacted to the deal with astonishment.
"We need to figure out if this is allowed in the constitution," said Adnan Ali Kadhimi, an advisor to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. "Nobody has mentioned it. It has not come up among the government ministers' council. It has not been on their agenda."
The start of drilling, called "spudding" in the oil business, is sure to be worrisome to Iraq's Sunni Arab minority. They fear a disintegration of Iraq into separate ethnic and religious cantons if regions begin to cut energy deals with foreign companies and governments. Sunnis are concentrated in Iraq's most oil-poor region.
Iraq's neighbors also fear the possibility of Iraqi Kurds using revenue generated by oil wells to fund an independent state that might lead the roughly 20 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iran and Syria to revolt.
Iraqi legal experts and international oil industry analysts have questioned the deal. Oil industry trade journals had expressed doubts that it would come to fruition.
Iraq's draft constitution, approved in an Oct. 15 national referendum, stipulates that "the federal government with the producing regional and governorate governments shall together formulate" energy policy. However, it also makes ambiguous reference to providing compensation for "damaged regions that were unjustly deprived by the former regime."
Iraq's Kurds have argued that the country's existing oil fields and infrastructure, such as those in the largely Kurdish cities of Kirkuk and Khanaqin, should be divvied up by the central government but that future oil discoveries should be controlled by each oil-producing region.
In his speech Tuesday, Barzani, the nephew of Kurdish politician and former guerrilla leader Massoud Barzani, eschewed the language of the law and couched the deal in political terms. He invoked the Kurds' years of deprivation at the hands of the Sunni Arab-dominated government of Saddam Hussein.
"The time has come that instead of suffering, the people of Kurdistan will benefit from the fortunes and resources of their country," he said during the ceremony in the western portion of Kurdish-controlled territory.
The Kurds, who during the last several years of Hussein's rule maintained sovereignty in northern Iraq under the protection of U.S. warplanes, made millions in transit and customs fees as the Baghdad government smuggled oil to Turkey in violation of United Nations sanctions. Since the end of the sanctions, the Kurds have sought ways to make up for that lost income.
</ Read the rest>
