Statement of the Society for Threatened Peoples International on the Iraqi Elections

• welcomes the considerable success of the Iraqi elections as a first step towards the establishment of a democractic, pluralist, federal, and multi-ethnic system in a country dominated by a dictatorship since the beginning of the British colonial rule and which experienced the genocide of the Kurds and the Assyro-Chaldeans in Northern Iraq, of the Shi’ites, and the oppression and persecution of people from every religion and ethnic communities.
  


• announces that the important participation of the population implies a clear disavowal of the fundamentalist islamist terrorists and of the Iraqi Baath Party.
  


• establishes that the international society no longer has an argument not to participate in the reconstruction of the economy, society, and state of the new Irak.
  


• utters its disappointment over the fact that various breakdowns and attacks prevented several thousands of voters – in particular Assyro- Chaldeans, Kurdish-speaking Yesidens, Turkomen, Muslim Kurds, and Shabaks in the province of Nineveh – from voting.
  


• designates as the new parliament’s chief task agreeing on an Iraqi constitution whose dispositions should be processed and approved by representants of all ethnic and religious minorities, especially Assyro-Chaldeans, Yezidens, Shabaks, Mandeas, and Turkomen. Only thus can further discrimination of these minorities be avoided.
  


• considers it an accomplishment that, after its success both in the Iraqi state-wide and in Kurdistan state elections, the Kurdistani alliance, which also includes Assyro-Chaldeans, Yesidens, Turkomen, and Arab-Sunni groups, will undertake everything to establish a federal system in the country.
  


• supports the demands of those Kurds who were dispelled by Saddam Hussein, of Assyro-Chaldeans, of Turkomen, and of the Yesidens from the regions that were controlled and ethnically cleaned by Saddam until the beginning of 2003, namely Sindja, the plain of Ninive, the city and province of Kikuk after Kanakuin and Mandali.   
  


• commends the demands of the Assyro-Chaldean community concerning the return of their members in the once Christian villages of the autonomous region Kurdistan, which became occupied by Kurds after the flight of their Christian inhabitants in 1991.
  


• condemns how Turkey for a second time after the occupying the Republic of Cyprus in breaking international law and after practising ethnic cleansing in the North of this island in the Mediterranean Sea threatens a neighboring state, thereby abusing the Turkomen minority in northern Iraq as well as threatening the Kurdish majority in northern Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan with a military intervention.