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Two parliamentarians from the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and the Dialogue Front have called for a law that regulates Kirkuk's provincial council elections, which was rejected by a Kurdistan Alliance (KA) lawmaker who said the provincial council law would be more appropriate.
"There is a law proposal to enact a special law on Kirkuk's provincial council elections, which is based on equal percentages for all constituents," MP Abbas al-Bayati told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
According to the law, Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds will have 32 percent, while the Christian minority will have 4 percent, the parliamentarian noted.
Mohammed Tamim al-Jabouri from the Dialogue Front said there is no other option but to adopt the proposal.
"The provincial council elections law uses population as a basis to determine the number of seats for the province's constituents," Jabouri added.
Expressing a different view on the issue, Mahmoud Othman from the KA said that Kirkuk, like all other Iraqi provinces, must conform to the provincial council elections law.
Othman added that putting Article 140 of the constitution into practice will solve many problems.
Kirkuk city is historically a Kurdish city and it lies just south border of the Kurdistan autonomous region, the population is a mix of majority Kurds and minority of Arabs, Christians and Turkmen, lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad. Kurds have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk, which they call "the Kurdish Jerusalem." Kurds see it as the rightful and perfect capital of an autonomous Kurdistan state.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is related to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk city and other disputed areas through having back its Kurdish inhabitants and repatriating the Arabs relocated in the city during the former regime's time to their original provinces in central and southern Iraq.
The article also calls for conducting a census to be followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having it as an independent province.
The former regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had forced over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city and the region's oil industry.
The last ethnic-breakdown census in Iraq was conducted in 1957, well before Saddam began his program to move Arabs to Kirkuk. That count showed 178,000 Kurds, 48,000 Turkomen, 43,000 Arabs and 10,000 Assyrian-Chaldean Christians living in the city.