President Barzani: we should preserve Iraq's federal system

Shafaq News / The President of the Kurdistan region, Nechirvan Barzani, issued a statement on the 52nd anniversary of the March 11 Autonomy Agreement.

The President said in a statement that the March 11 Agreement was the first official document in Kurdistan’s modern history that recognizes some of the rights of the people of Kurdistan.

"If Iraqi authorities at the time respected the agreement, it would have protected the country and its generations' future from many wars and ordeals, and Iraq would have become an independent, prosperous, developed country."

He added, "We should all learn the lesson to preserve the federal system, the conditional rights for all communities, and provide a better future for the next generations."

After Saddam returned to Baghdad, the KDP and the Iraqi government signed an accord that granted the Kurds autonomy within Iraq.

The parties agreed that Kurdish would be recognized as an official language and that this autonomous region would consist of three Kurdish governorates with a Kurdish majority.

A 15 point plan was agreed by Saddam Hussein and Mullah Mustafa Barzani, with the signed statement concluding, “History will bear witness that you [Kurds] did not have and will never have as sincere a brother and as dependable an ally as the Arab people.”

However, Kirkuk remained a disputed territory that continued to fall outside the purview of the 11 March agreement, which reserved judgment on the territorial extent of the Kurdish autonomous region pending a new census. As a stalling maneuver, the Iraqi government agreed that the region’s final boundaries were to depend on whether the census showed that a proven majority of Kurds resided in the disputed areas.