Kurds warn of rift with al-Maliki

SALAHADDIN, Iraq – The president of Iraq’s Kurdish region warned Saturday that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is drifting toward authoritarian rule, in the latest sign of the dangerous rift that has emerged between the Iraqi leader and his partners in the country’s ruling coalition.

“One gets lost in absolute authority,” said Massoud Barzani, the leader of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq’s north. “You become too authoritarian, you lose yourself.”

In a wide-ranging interview at his palatial office here, Barzani accused al-Maliki of working to purge Kurds from the Iraqi security forces, and he refused to rule out the possibility that Kurdistan could declare outright independence from Iraq, citing concerns about changes to the constitution.

“For sure, we will not accept an Iraq ruled by dictatorship,” he said from a room with a view of the snow-topped Zagros mountains.

The Kurds, who are scattered across much of the Middle East, have long fought to establish their own state. Iraq’s Kurdistan is the closest that the ethnic minority has come to achieving its nationalist dreams. But now, 18 years after the Kurds achieved nominal independence, the population once again is worried that Iraqi Arabs could turn on them.

Barzani said he was stunned by al-Maliki’s behavior. The prime minister, whose Dawa party joined the Kurds in fighting Saddam from the mountains of northern Iraq in the 1980s, has courted Arab nationalists hostile to the Kurds and called for the strengthening of the central government, which the Kurds fear could rob them of their autonomy.

“I never expected that he would be opposing the rights of the Kurdish people, or he would be opposing the existence of … peshmergas or Kurds within the Iraqi army and he would be marginalizing them,” he said.

Barzani said he hoped that an upcoming visit by al-Maliki to Kurdistan and a series of working groups formed by the sides in November would go a long way toward finding solutions to the problems. His comments came in an hourlong interview with the Los Angeles Times.

He denied rumors that efforts were under way by parties in the government to replace al-Maliki.

Members of al-Maliki’s Dawa party warned Saturday that Barzani should be careful with his words.