| Description | Folder of papers on the relationship between the PUK and the KDP, including a PUK statement against the Barzani leadership (5 November 1977) and another one issued by the PUK Suleymaniya branch against the provisional leadership of KDP (22 June 1978), joint statements (1977, 1978, 1983) and the text of the agreement between the PUK, KDP provisional leadership and the left Baath party (1 March 1977), copies of secret documents of the KDP provisional leadership concerning the execution of PUK activists Ali Askari, Dr Khalid Said and Sheikh Hussein in 1978, formal condemnations of KDP collaboration with the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, numerous documents relating to the peace initiative and negotiations to end PUK-KDP conflict (1995) including copies of the 'Drogheda Statement' and formal press releases by both parties, a faxed summary of seven documents written by Jalal Talabani and seized by the KDP in Erbil (dated 1 September 1996), and a document reporting on Barzani family business activities that lists connected companies and links the KPD to drug smuggling (1999) and various PUK writings on Mustafa Barzani, his family and KDP politics. There is also some material on relations between the PUK and other Kurdish political parties, such as the PKK.
There is also a larger folder of miscellaneous material - mainly presscuttings - covering the 'civil war' between the KDP and the PUK that was fought in Iraqi Kurdistan during the mid-1990s. The cuttings are from the international press, including newspapers from Sweden, the UK and USA, Europe and Turkey, and document the progress of the fighting, peace negotiations, historical perspectives on the Kurds, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, contemporary developments among the Kurds in Iran, Turkey and Syria, with some discussion of its wider significance for the Middle East. In addition to the newspaper and magazine articles, there are a number of documents, including faxes to PUK and KDP leaders appealing for peace, statements from the White House and other western governments, a four-page 'Report by a Dutch Aid Worker on Recent Events in Sulaimanya' that includes his eyewitness account of the funeral procession of Osman Qhadir that provoked an outbreak of gunfire on 13 June 1994. |