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Baghdad: Veteran Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani,
named Iraqi president yesterday, has spent his adult
life
fighting successive regimes here and can now defend
the rights of his people from inside the halls of
power.
In his inaugural speech to parliament, Talabani
pledged "to erect an independent and united Iraqi
state based
on democracy, federalism and human rights".
A veteran nationalist known simply as "Mum (Uncle)
Jalal" in his fiefdom in Iraq's northern mountains,
the
imposing, barrel-chested Talabani, a man who has
marched to his own drum, comes to the capital on a
mission
to ensure the Kurds are never again persecuted by
Iraq's central government.
The success of his presidency could greatly improve
Kurdistan's ties with Iraq's Arabs. A stormy tenure
could
poison the strained relationship.
"We are happy that the first elected president of
Iraq is coming from a community that has been
persecuted for
years," said influential Shia MP and deputy
parliamentary speaker Hussein Shahrastani.
Talabani was born in 1933 in Kalkan village 400km
north-east of here and quickly came under the spell
of the
Kurdish struggle to carve out a homeland for the
hardy mountain people scattered across Iraq, Iran,
Turkey and
Syria.
He served in the Iraqi army before being inspired to
join the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mullah
Mustafa Barzani and took to the hills when the
pioneering nationalist leader led a first uprising
against Baghdad
in 1961.
But he fell out with Barzani when he sued for peace
with the government, joining a KDP splinter faction
in 1964
and fleeing to neighbouring Iran in protest at a
ceasefire order. The split was to mark the start of
a long and
costly internecine feud among Iraqi Kurds.
Talabani formalised the breakaway in 1975,
establishing the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)
in the wake of
the Iraqi army routing Barzani's forces after Iran,
the US and Israel had abandoned their support.
The rival movements have dominated Kurdish life for
40 years and witnessed some of the lowest moments in
their people's history.
A renewed uprising in the 1980s against Saddam
Hussein sparked the notorious Anfal campaign of 1988
in
which the army razed hundreds of Kurdish villages
and gassed thousands of people.
Kurds were driven from their homes across
north-central Iraq as Saddam set out to Arabise the
region.
Worse was to come in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf
War, when the Kurdish uprising collapsed. Western
intervention was to allow the Kurds to re-establish
control over Iraq's three far-northern provinces,
but the rebel
enclave fell far short of Kurdish claims.
Despite repeated mediation attempts by London and
Washington, there was also no let-up in the rivalry
between Talabani and the Barzanis, now led by Mullah
Mustafa's son Massoud.
Their rivalry degenerated into all-out war in 1993
as Talabani challenged the KDP monopoly over customs
revenues levied at the Turkish border.
The two groups finally agreed to a ceasefire in 1996
and a formal peace treaty in 1998, but true
rapprochement
came only in 2002, when it became clear US President
George Bush intended to topple Saddam.
Since the US-led invasion of March 2003, the two men
have sought to set aside their rivalries and make
common cause as they look to guard their hard-won
gains in post-war Iraq.
Sapa-AFP
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