The Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq accused UN envoy Staffan de Mistura of dragging his feet on issuing a report on the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds would like to add to their autonomous region.

"We are near the end of 2008 and the UN envoy has yet to put forth his recommendations," the ministry of affairs for territories outside Kurdistan said in a statement.

"He has no vision or clarity about how to achieve the implementation of Article 140," the statement added, referring to an article in the constitution that calls for the fate of Kirkuk to be decided by popular referendum.

In August De Mistura had said he would issue a package of recommendations in September or October to cover eight areas disputed by the Kurds and Iraq's central government, after issuing a report on four such regions in June.

But the Kurds slammed the first report, saying it "was aimed at implanting the policy of Arabisation applied by the previous chauvinistic regimes," referring to Saddam's policy in the 1980s of forcibly displacing Kurds and encouraging Arabs to move into the disputed areas.

De Mistura declined to address the charges directly.

"I don't want to enter into polemics with the Kurdish leaders, but I decided to postpone until next year the announcement of my proposal to avoid creating tensions before the provincial elections" on January 31, he told AFP.

Representatives from Kirkuk's Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen communities plan to begin meeting next year under UN auspices to try to find a way to organise elections in the city and to partition the seats among the communities.

Iraq's parliament has proposed evenly dividing powers in the local parliament between the three groups, but the Kurds bitterly oppose the plan, pointing to their superior numbers.

Under the Iraqi constitution, a referendum was to have been held by December last year, but Kurdish leaders agreed to a six-month postponement of the vote at the recommendation of the United Nations. The vote has still not been held.