|
The
election of the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as
Iraqi President marks an extraordinary reversal of
fortune
for the long-persecuted Kurds of Iraq.
Mr Talabani, the first non-Arab President of an Arab
state, was chosen by the Iraqi parliament after
prolonged
and rancorous negotiations between the Kurdish, Shia
and Sunni communities.
People danced and waved the Kurdish flag in the
streets of Kurdish towns and villages as the news
was
announced. The five million Iraqi Kurds, who fought
Saddam Hussein for decades, are the clearest
beneficiaries
of the US invasion.
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president overthrown by
the US in 2003, was shown the election of Mr
Talabani on
television in his cell.
"After being liberated from the most hideous of
dictatorships ... our people - the Arabs, the Kurds,
the Turkmen
and the Assyrians - want to build a new Iraq free
from dictatorship and and tyranny, a democratic,
unified Iraq,"
said Mr Talabani in a speech after his election.
Mr Talabani and two deputy presidents will now chose
a prime minister which is expected to be Ibrahim
Jaafari,
the Shia leader, but there are still differences
over who should hold the interior and defence
ministries as well
as the oil ministry.
The new President is a burly, mercurial figure who
has shown great ability to survive numerous setbacks
and
defeats in the past. He is expected to live in the
mansion in Baghdad formerly occupied by Barzan al-Tikriti,
the
half-brother of Saddam Hussein who is now in prison.
Mr Talabani is believed to have brought 3,000
peshmerga, elite Kurdish soldiers who are now
members of the Iraqi army, as his bodyguard in
Baghdad.
Mr Talabani is likely to play a far more powerful
role than his predecessor, Ghazi al-Yawer, who will
be one of
his deputies. He already has the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, a powerful political and military
organization,
under his command. Since the Gulf War in 1991 he has
ruled half of Kurdistan and in 1993 his forces
attacked
and captured the oil city of Kirkuk.
He rose to influence as a lieutenant of Mullah
Mustafa Barzani, the founding father of Kurdish
nationalism in
Iraq. He joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party at
the age of 13, trained as a lawyer and by 1958, when
the Iraqi
monarchy was overthrown, he was in the inner circle
of the party.
At the time of the great Kurdish defeat in 1975 -
after the Kurds were treacherously abandoned by the
US and the
Shah of Iran - Mr Talabani broke away to form his
own party called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
For years he
competed with Massoud Barzani, the present leader of
the KDP, a rivalry which periodically led to heavy
fighting and, in the 1990s, to civil war in
Kurdistan.
Although only a fifth of the population, the Kurds
are by far the best organised of Iraq's communities.
Their
leaders are more experienced - the Kurdish ministers
in the outgoing interim government were notably more
effective than their inexperienced Arab
counterparts.
www.independent.co.uk
Top |
® 