A picture taken on September 12, 2013 shows an Iraqi Kurdish man walking past electoral campaign posters of candidates running in the Kurdistan parliament election, in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. (AFP)
Erbil, Asharq Al-Awsat—The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has sought to play down discrepancies in its population estimates for the region and those of Iraq’s federal government, denying that they are due to any “political agenda” on the part of Baghdad.
The latest figures issued by the federal government of Iraq place the total population of Iraqi Kurdistan at 5,100,087, whereas the KRG has stressed that more than 5.3 million people live in the region.
In exclusive comments to Asharq Al-Awsat, Mohamed Amin, chairman of the KRG’s Census Bureau, denied that the difference in figures is due to a political agenda or a miscount by Baghdad. However, he confirmed that the Iraqi government’s failure to count the extra 100,000 residents of the Kurdistan Region is due to a “contrasting perception over the Kurdistan Region’s borders.”
Amin said: “The Iraqi Ministry of planning does not account for some districts and areas that the Kurdistan Regional authorities are adamant are part of the region, particularly in the Erbil and Duhok provinces.”
He told Asharq Al-Awsat that KRG Census Bureau figures show that population figures have increased between 2.7 and 3.1 percent over the past years. He said: “These are good growth rates compared with other Iraqi provinces.”
Amin did not rule out the idea that demographic growth rates might represent “a controversial issue in the upcoming electoral campaigns for the Council of Representatives of Iraq in April 2014.” He also affirmed that the figures issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning “came directly from the Iraqi Minister of planning and not from the Census Bureau.”
He added: “These figures have been calculated based on old methods used by the former regime, rather than scientific methods that take into account likely demographic growth.”
All figures relating to the census are unreliable unless a proper census is conducted to cover all Iraq at the same time with no political inference and a good system of international monitoring. This is so because no full and reliable census has been conducted covering all Iraq since 1978. The federal government has been creating excuses constantly to avoid a proper census to be conducted and all their estimates are based on projections of previous estimates from the figures that Saddam made up to cheat the UN oil for food program by creating false documents for about three million people that did not exist to get more from the public distribution system while in only Kurdistan the process was overseen by the UN. The most recent figures are those obtained form the enumerations that was conducted in 2009 to precede a census that was blocked by the Federal government for political reasons. Even that set of figures were totally illogical and unreliable for several governorates including Mosul as population increase even broke the exaggerated figures that were collected from the mouth of the property owners in order to in increase their share of members in the Federal Council of Representatives.
The counting or not counting some areas under the Kurdistan Region is only a Small and easy part of the game that seem to continue being played by the Federal Government.