There has been much media focus on the inauguration of U.S. President George W. Bush for his second term as well as on the Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30. But the ethnically divided city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq remains a dangerous tinderbox. Even the losing U.S. presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, who voted against the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as the next secretary of state in the Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee, felt compelled to warn of possible turmoil in Kirkuk, which has been a bone of contention between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens -- Turkey's ethnic cousins -- with Ankara regularly taking up their cause.

Kurdish influx into Kirkuk:

Namık Tan, the Turkish Foreign Ministry's spokesman, told a press conference on Jan. 19 that the Iraqis, the United Nations and the entire international community should take measures against "faits accomplis that will not contribute to lasting peace in Iraq ... and [will] have negative impact on the stability of the region." "No one in the 21st century can subject others' land to an illegal fait accompli," Tan said, without explicitly naming the Kurds. "It is unacceptable for groups that object to the wrong policies and practices of the past to commit the same mistakes themselves now, under the cover of freedom, justice and democracy," he added.

Tan said that many people in Kirkuk were concerned that "some elements are drifting toward a mistake that may have serious consequences. They say that hundreds of thousands of settlers are being shifted to Kirkuk and that the majority of them have neither personal nor family bonds with Kirkuk. The methods and mechanisms of return have been clearly determined. They should be implemented in a legitimate way," Tan concluded.

Last week, the Kurds reached a deal with the Iraqi government that will allow nearly 100,000 Kurds, said to have been expelled from Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein's regime, to vote in the Jan. 30 elections. This agreement would change the demographic balance and risks the eruption of tensions in the ethnically divided and volatile city between Kurds and Arabs and a large number of Turkmens. Ankara is strongly opposed to Kurdish control of Kirkuk, which many Kurds would like to make the capital of an independent Kurdish state.

Located in northern Mosul province about 250 kilometers north of Baghdad near the foot of the Zagros Mountains, Kirkuk has more than 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves lying underneath it. It has key oil sites, although pipelines connecting it to Ceyhan terminal in Turkey have been repeatedly sabotaged. Often compared to Jerusalem because of conflicting claims, Kurds claim Kirkuk as a symbol of their heritage. Many Kurdish leaders, such as Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), claim that Kirkuk is historically Kurdish.

There have been repeated clashes between Turkmens and Kurds over the past 50 years. In 1959, there were bloody riots between poorer and communist-led Kurds and the Turkmens. The latter belonged to the ruling elite in the Ottoman era and are still prosperous. In 1996, during a brief rapprochement with the Baghdad regime, the Iraqi military executed 17 Turkmen activists and officials in the nearby city of Arbil. Iraqi Turkmens blame this event on the Kurds. There were ethnic flare-ups between 1998 and 2000 as well.

According to U.N. officials and a Human Rights Watch report, it is claimed that between 120,000 and 200,000 Kurds as well as Turkmens and Assyrians were expelled from the city after 1991; tens of thousands were squeezed out earlier. Iraqi Kurds claim that Kirkuk was overwhelmingly Kurdish in the 1950s before the "Arabization" of the city.

In April 2003 it was estimated that the Kirkuk population was composed of 250,000 each of Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds. Many of the Arabs resettled there are Shiites from the south. The Turkmens are also generally Shiites, like their ethnic kin, the Alawis in Turkey, but many have given up Turkmen traditions in favor of the urban, clerical religion common among the Arabs of the south. Kirkuk is therefore a stronghold of Muqtada al-Sadr. The influential Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), also has good support. Kurds are mostly Sunnis and were the dominant population in Kirkuk up to the 1960s and 1970s, when many were forced to move further north.

According to some reports, over 70,000 Kurds have entered Kirkuk in the past two years, and about 50,000 Arabs returned to the south. It can be said that until recently there were about 320,000 Kurds and 200,000 Arabs in the city. The number of Turkmens has also been augmented. During Ottoman rule, the Turkmens dominated the city, and so it remained until the discovery of oil.

According to the U.S.-crafted interim constitution of Iraq, Kirkuk's final status will be settled only after Iraq's final constitution is ratified at the end of 2005, followed by a census. [hh] Turkey's Kurdish problem:

Turkey has serious problems with its own Kurds. A separatist campaign since 1984 against the Turkish state led by Abdullah