Iraqi Kurds Call for Referendum

Ethnic Minority Seeking Vote On Independence

BAGHDAD, July 22 -- Kurdish leaders have requested that the new Iraqi constitution guarantee the Kurdish minority the right to vote on independence in eight years, a Kurdish member of the constitutional committee said Friday.

The call for a referendum on secession from Iraq is the Kurds' most overt push toward independence since the fall of president Saddam Hussein.

Saadi Barzanchani, a Kurdish member of the national committee drafting the constitution, said Kurds would probably vote to remain part of Iraq if the country became the democracy that Iraqi and U.S. leaders have promised. "Eight years will be sufficient time to see," he said in an interview.

Barzanchani said Kurdistan's regional parliament made the decision to push for a guaranteed right to vote in the new constitution, which the committee is trying to piece together by Aug. 15.

Many Sunni Arabs, a minority group that had ruled the country for eight decades, oppose Kurdish independence and a drive for autonomy by some Shiite Arabs in the southern part of the country. Shiites make up the majority of Iraq's population.

"Iraq is a united country. I call on patriots to stand against this brutal campaign and insist that Iraq should be one country, one land and one rule," Mahmoud Sumaidaie, a Sunni cleric, said in a sermon during Friday prayers at a mosque in Baghdad. "We don't want the separation. Iraq will be the homeland of the Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and other minorities."

Countries that border Iraq have long opposed statehood for the estimated 3.5 million Iraqi Kurds, who represent a fraction of the approximately 20 million Kurds living in a region that stretches from Turkey through the former Soviet Union to Iran. Iraq's neighbors fear that allowing independence for Iraqi Kurds would fuel separatist drives in their own countries.

U.S. officials have consistently opposed the secession hopes of their Iraqi Kurdish allies, saying a landlocked Kurdistan, surrounded by hostile neighbors, would not be viable.

Barzanchani said secession was "the legitimate right of each part of Iraq." He argued that granting all regions the right to break away if the central government neglected them was "one of the strongest guarantees of unity" for Iraq.

Kurds make up 15 to 20 percent of Iraq's population. In the 1980s, Hussein unleashed a campaign of violence against the Kurds that killed more than 100,000 in northern Iraq, according to international human rights groups. Hussein also crushed a Kurdish revolt following the Persian Gulf War. U.S. forces later enforced a no-fly zone that gave Kurds enough protection to declare autonomy.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, has said he wants the Kurdish region to remain part of Iraq. But separatist sentiment pervades his homeland.

More than 90 percent of voters questioned in Kurdistan during January's national elections said they wanted independence, according to a frequently cited survey conducted at polling places.