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BAGHDAD — Hoshyar Zebari, the pistol-packing
foreign minister who will represent Iraq at a summit
beginning today in Egypt, says his country will
become a "graveyard for democracy" if the world does
not help its leaders establish a stable and
representative government.
"If we lose, the region will be hell," Mr. Zebari
told The Washington Times recently at his office in
the Foreign Ministry building in central Baghdad.
"It will be a graveyard for democracy."
The plain-talking Kurd hopes to get that message
across to his counterparts from 20 countries when
they meet today and tomorrow in Sharm el Sheik,
Egypt, to discuss Iraq's future.
The participants range from the United
States and Britain to opponents of the Iraq war such
as France, Iran and Syria.
Mr. Zebari says he is particularly upset at Persian
Gulf states such as Qatar, which publicly say they
want peace and democracy for Iraq but allow fiery
clerics to encourage resistance and permit
television stations such as Al Jazeera, which he
likened to a mouthpiece for the insurgency, to
operate from their soil.
He said he plans to publicly raise these issues at
Sharm el Sheik.
"I will explain, 'We need more from you,' " he said.
" 'More cooperation, more intelligence sharing, more
coordination to fight terrorism, to prevent people
from crossing your borders. And that's what we
expect from you.' "
For years, Mr. Zebari was a guerrilla diplomat,
secretly shuttling from country to country in
attempts to win good will for Iraq's Kurdish
minority and to procure weapons, recruits and
political support for their decades-long struggle
against dictator Saddam Hussein.
Now he is meeting as an equal with the world's
diplomatic heavyweights. But he describes himself as
simply a soldier, carrying out the orders of his
boss, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, which rules the northwestern half
of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish enclave.
Throughout the 1980s, Mr. Zebari was a "peshmerga"
warrior, battling Saddam from the mountains of
Kurdistan. Saddam executed two of Mr. Zebari's
brothers in retaliation for his activities.
The warrior years, Mr. Zebari says, prepared him for
life as Iraq's top diplomat, an experience akin to
dodging gunfire in a battlefield. Last month in
Baghdad, his guards stopped a car filled with
hundred of pounds of explosives as it headed toward
his convoy.
"The one strain is that here you are always on
alert," says the 52-year-old native of Aqrah, a town
near Mosul. "I learned how to deal with this as a
peshmerga. I waited days, nights, hours, for a
gunship to appear or a bomb to explode."
Although he travels in diplomatic circles around the
world, his old habits die hard. Underneath his gray
suit, he packs a Smith & Wesson revolver.
"This is small and very effective for self-defense,"
he said, while fidgeting with the five-chamber
weapon. "It's not an offensive weapon."
Mr. Zebari, educated in Jordan and England, built a
reputation as a hardworking and amicable politician
among Iraqi exiles and regional political leaders
with his excellent command of English and his
ability to be both soft-spoken and direct. He was
long the London representative for Iraq's rogue
Kurds.
Once, after a visit to Tehran several months before
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq last year, he
announced to reporters that he had met with Iran's
ultrasecretive clerical rulers and learned that they
supported regime change in Iraq.
He described details of his trip, naming those with
whom he had spoken and disclosing details of
conversations with some of Iran's most mysterious
figures — the chiefs of intelligence, defense and
the Expediency Council. Former President Hashemi
Rafsanjani is the chairman of the council.
A few weeks later, Mr. Zebari was spotted wrapped in
a trench coat on a barren Kurdish mountain road at
dusk, awaiting a convoy carrying Danielle
Mitterrand, the wife of the late French leader
Francois Mitterrand and a longtime champion of the
Kurdish cause.
These days, Mr. Zebari says, he attempts to practice
candor when speaking with world leaders. He has made
repeated trips to Iran and Syria, both of which are
suspected of supporting the Iraqi insurgency and
whose leaders he knows intimately from years of
back-channel talks.
"I have told them, 'The U.S. is now your neighbor
... and you want them out,' " he says. " 'We, as
Iraqis, want foreign troops out. If you want these
forces out, help the Iraqi government accelerate the
democratic process. If you have a representative
Iraqi government through elections, this government
will not allow these troops on its soil to fight
against you.' "
But Iraq's many security woes — which include
rampant car bombings, a kidnapping-for-ransom wave,
highway banditry, sabotage and guerrilla warfare —
cannot be blamed entirely on its neighbors, he
concedes.
"We need to perform, to be more aggressive, to have
a very clear security plan," he says. "And that
depends on ourselves, on our resources. And then if
they insist on continuing to interfere, that will be
an act of war."
http://washingtontimes.com
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