“These people are afraid to face hard facts, including a public acknowledgement of the true size of their constituency in Iraq. Attempting to distort facts about the social and ethnic makeup of Iraq is a red line to us. Furthermore, we totally reject attempts to distort the size of the Kurdish nation by giving Failis, Shabaks, and Yezidis categorizations that do not reflect their status as Kurds,” the statement read.
Statements by those in charge of conducting the census reveal that the delay is politically-motivated and designed to impede the progress of Iraq’s democracy. In 2009, the Iraqi Minister for Planning Ali Baban announced his Ministry’s total readiness to hold the census in 2009. On July 7, 2009, he announced that “the Ministry of Planning has completed all the preparations for holding the national census in all parts of Iraq,” even boasting that the census would be the best the country had ever witnessed.
At the time, he also dismissed calls for any delays from a few representatives of Kirkuk and Ninawa provinces as being of a political nature and reaffirmed his Ministry’s commitment not to delay the census further.
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