SALAHADDIN, Iraq, 22 July 2004 — Iraqi President Ghazi Al-Yawar assured the country’s Kurdish population yesterday that their existing autonomy would be preserved within the context of a future federal Iraq. “We will support this experience of autonomy by all means,” said Yawar during a visit to the tourist village of Salahaddin, north of Arbil, where he met Kurdish leader Massud Barzani. “Federalism is a way to bring the diverse groups in our country together.”

After the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurds broke away from the central government in Baghdad to set up their own administration in the north under British and US protection. They have continued to enjoy wide autonomy.

Yawar, a Sunni from the northern city of Mosul, said the federal nature of Iraq as outlined in the country’s interim fundamental law passed under the administration of the US-led occupation “would be respected word-for-word.”

For his part Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, hailed Yawar as “a friend of the Kurdish people”. Barzani’s stronghold is in Arbil while that of his rival, now turned ally, Jalal Talabani is Sulaymaniyah.

Iraq’s Kurds have a “natural right” to reclaim their old land in the northern city of Kirkuk after being driven out by Saddam Hussein, Yawar said. Ethnic tensions have risen between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in oil-rich Kirkuk, home to 750,000 people, as groups jostle for advantage following the handover of power in Iraq from U.S. occupying forces to the interim government on June 28.

On a recent visit to Kirkuk, Yawar aroused Kurdish suspicions by declaring that nobody would be forced to leave their homes in the new Iraq. But at the news conference yesterday, Yawar said those who had moved to the city after 1968 would be given financial incentives to leave.

“The government cannot force people to do something unwillingly...but for those that were displaced it is their natural right to go back and take their lands,” Yawar said.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s neighbors discussed high-level cooperation on intelligence sharing to control Iraq’s borders at a foreign ministers meeting in Cairo yesterday, EU officials and diplomatic sources said.

European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, told reporters at the meeting that Iraq’s neighbors would be forming bilateral and trilateral committees to exchange intelligence to control their borders.

“One of the ideas is to try to see if they can start practical cooperation at the level of ministries of the interior on exchanges of information and intelligence,” Solana said. “The prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs have been asking for that in order to control the border,” he added.

A diplomatic source said Iraq had suggested a meeting of ministers of the interior from Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to coordinate on security issues.