2012 Kirkuk

CONTENTS:

• Director’s Welcome
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Outcomes
• Reports

The Kirkuk Forum welcomes you to the 3rd Annual Conference of the Forum for Cities in Transition

The Forum for Cities in Transition hosted its third annual conference in Kirkuk, Iraq, 6-11 October 2012.

This year’s conference brought together international delegates from 10 cities to share information, discuss models of best practice, examine ways of improving community relations, and identify programmes and projects that delegates developed and declared on the final day of the conference to implement in their home cities or as joint projects within their sister cities. Over two dozen outcomes were pledged.

Delegates included mayors, councillors, municipal officers, and representatives of the business, voluntary and community sectors. The participating cities are:

• Baghdad
• Belfast
• Derry-Londonderry
• Kaduna
• Kirkuk
• Mitrovica
• Mostar
• Nicosia
• Ramallah
• Tripoli

At last year’s gathering in Derry-Londonderry, Kirkuk pledged to host the 2012 gathering. Kirkuk has been a member of the Forum since the 2009 founding conference held at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Members of the Kirkuk Forum, which organised the 2012 gathering, consists of representatives of local authorities, political parties, executives, the voluntary and community sectors, police, health directorate and civil defence.

The conference programme was a mixture of panel discussions with experts and practitioners; workshops for delegates to discuss what they hd seen and heard; and site visits to local communities across the city.

Conference themes

This year’s main conference themes included:

• Provision of municipal services
• Constitutional issues affecting Kirkuk
• Policing and security
• Women in transitional socieites
• Youth and social media
• Agriculture and economic development

Welcome

The Kirkuk Forum worked tirelessly to ensure the success of the 2012 gathering of the Forum for Cities in Transition.

The organisation of such a prestigious conference took a lot of hard work and effort from a lot of people, to ensure it would be successful and met the objectives of the organisers, participants and funders. We are very proud of the programme that was developed for the conference, and confident that it met the expectations of the interest groups.

ALL Kirkuk Forum members are really excited to be hosting such an important international conference in the city of Kirkuk, and we will make every effort to ensure that all participants enjoy and benefit from the experience of being here.

HASSAN TURAN

Kirkuk Provincial Council Chairman

DIRECTOR’S WELCOME

Each year, your city’s forum is reminded that the Forum for Cities in Transition (FCT) only works if the conferees carry out the commitments they made at the close of the previous year’s conference. Each conference is a continuation of the work of the previous year. At the end of this year’s Kirkuk FCT conference, during the final plenary, each city will report back to delegates on how successful it was in completing the outcome(s) it committed itself to in Derry-Londonderry in 2011, and commit to — in some cases continuing or implementing — a new project before the 2013 conference. In this sense, the Kirkuk FCT conference is not a conference per se, but a continuation of the proceedings that began in Mitrovicë/Kosovska Mitrovica in May 2010, and Derry-Londonderry in 2011.

The FCT is action driven. Without cities agreeing to make commitments and then following up to ensure their implementation, the conference becomes a chattering box — much said, great ideas exchanged, some friendships made, some fun, shopping and sightseeing and then home, and on to the next conference.

Or in more stark terms: when forum cities stop implementing outcomes and do not go to any great lenghts to do so, that city’s forum is no longer welcome at the following year’s conference. The FCT has to raise at least $250,000 each year to make a conference possible and cannot afford to give cities a free ride. They must keep their end of the bargain or exit the process. They have an obligation to be accountable.

These outcomes conform to the principles drawn up by the founding cities — Derry-Londonderry, the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities in Nicosia, Kirkuk and Mitrovicë/Kosovska Mitrovica — at the FCT’s founding gathering at the University of Massachusetts Boston in April 2009. These principles are enumerated in the “Call to Action”, to which all participants are asked to append their signatures as a mark of their seriousness of intent.

I am stressing the completion of outcomes because the announcement of the outcomes to which the 12 cities attending the Derry-Londonderry conference in 2011 and similar announcements at the Mitrovicë/Kosovska Mitrovica conference in 2010, with a designated member of each city standing before their peers at the conference’s final plenary and affirming what project(s) their city will implement before the following year’s conference were the high point of both conferences, an acknowledgement that the huge effort and infusion of money raised by the FCT and the contribution by donors to ensure a successful conference was worthwhile; proof that the FCT is an ongoing process, not a once in a lifetime experience. These commitments involved the attending cities undertaking projects that would either strengthen relations among their once warring communities, thus furthering reconciliation and ongoing recovery, or undertaking a project(s) that would benefit a sister city on a lower rung of the latter of transition to transformation.

Without this process of bonding, of identification with devastating consequences of your sister cities’ conflict (because it mirrors your own in so many ways), and a willingness to learn from each other’s experiences, to find common paths facilitating transition, and in the absence of an understanding that collectively you can undertake projects that individually you would not be capable of, the quintessential reason for the existence of the FCT is abrogated; the conference simply gets lost in a cauldron of idle talk.

The Kirkuk Provincial Council Forum has gone to great lenghts to ensure that the programme you will be part of over the next four days leaves you with indelible impressions of how the communities of Kirkuk — Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, Arab, Turkmen, Christian, Assyrian and the smaller minorities have come together to try and build on common ground to resolve the multiple problems, including constitutional ones, that have hampered development and put obstacles in the way of their achieving harmonous relationships at all levels among their diverse communities. Kirkuk has successfully surmounted some of these problems, other remain contentious. You will see that much still needs to be done and that you can help the city forge a path to a better future for the city’s often beleaguered residents.

Kirkuk will share with you its experiences of transition and you will share yours; you will explore how you can help each other to move forward to a future where reconciliation is more firmly rooted, for succeeding generations. YOu will share where you once were, where you now are and how you got there, and what your aspirations for the future are.

It is for you, sister cities in the Forum for Cities in Transition, to listen, question, learn, cooperate and work together.

PADRAIG O’MALLEY

Director, Forum for Cities in Transition

DAY 1: SUNDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2012

Welcome:

• Mr Hasan Turan Bahaeldin (Chairman of Kirkuk Provincial Council)
• Dr Najmaldin Karim (Governor of Kirkuk)
• Mr Turhan Hassan Al Mufty (Minister of Regions Affairs)