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THERE is a telling
moment when travellers from Baghdad arrive at Arbil
airport in Kurdistan: a policewoman asks for their
passports, but someone has half-hidden the plastic
sign with “passports” written on it behind a cabinet
and Iraqis can show their domestic identity cards.
But the impression is of landing in a foreign
country.
That feeling is reinforced on the streets of
Kurdistan, Iraq’s northern region, which has been
autonomous since 1991. While the rest of Iraq is in
fear of car bombs, assassins and kidnappers, in
Kurdistan the peshmerga militia are everywhere,
ensuring stability with an iron fist.
“Kurdistan will be independent. It could be a month,
it could be ten years, but I’ll live to see it,”
said Farhad Owni Mowaht, 58, the head of the
journalists’ union in Arbil and an MP for the
Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) of Masoud Barzani,
the President of the region. Mr Barzani will meet
Tony Blair in Downing Street today, having travelled
to London from Washington where he held talks with
President Bush.
Faisa Abdullah, 27, a mother of two, grew up in
Baghdad and raised her two Arabic-speaking children
there until last year, when the lack of security and
playground slurs against her children as American
“collaborators” drove her back to her homeland. “I
think Kurdistan should be independent,” she said.
“It’s one community, with no spies, traitors or
collaborators. But the ‘when’ is a question for the
politicians to decide.”
It is a sentiment expressed the length of Kurdistan.
After decades of fighting with the regimes in
Baghdad, attempted genocide by Saddam Hussein and a
bloody power struggle between the KDP and its rival
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the 1990s, the
Kurds feel that they have earned the right to
self-determination.
But many acknowledge that the time is not yet right.
An overt drive for independence could cause mayhem
in a fraught region where 40 million Kurds are
spread across northern Iraq, neighbouring Turkey,
Syria and Iran. But ordinary Kurds insist that they
trust their leaders.
In Akre, which is a pretty, leafy town pinned to a
mountainside by a large white mosque, Kamal Ramadan,
the head of the local television news, has a map on
his wall of a country that starts with Sulaymaniyah
in the south, snakes round to the Turkish coast and
ends in Syria in the north. The name of this
mythical land — larger than the reality — is
Kurdistan. “It’s not a dream, it is a right for the
Kurds,” he said. Jufiar Akree, a professor at Arbil
University’s politics department, said that more
time was needed to develop democracy in Kurdistan.
“The difference between here and the US or Europe is
that the political regime is directing public
opinion, whereas in the developed world it’s the
other way round,” he said.
A LAND APART
There are around 5 million Kurds in Iraq,
representing about 20 per cent of the Iraqi
population
Kurds were first promised a state of their own by
the international community in the 1920 Treaty of
Sèvres
There are two main Kurdish dialects, Kurmanji and
Sorani
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