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Kurds Talk Unity, But Aggressively Pitch
"The Other Iraq"
13.10.2006
By Bridget Johnson |
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October 13, 2006
There's a place (Region) in Iraq where people can
have barbecues on a lazy weekend and kids can frolic
in front yards without getting mowed down in
sectarian warfare.
It's up north, commonly referred to as Kurdistan.
As shops are being blown up in Baghdad and business
owners dress in rags to avoid being kidnapping
targets, shiny strip malls à la suburban America are
popping up in another part of Iraq.
That would be Kurdistan.
As many Iraqis find themselves shut in by curfews or
the latest Sunni-Shiite suicidal squabble, other
Iraqis find themselves in the midst of a bright,
shiny building boom, snapping up condominiums in
complexes that look like they belong in Orange
County.
Yep, the Kurds.
It's not a hotbed of anti-Americanism; on the
contrary, a Kurd told me that "Bush" was a popular
baby name after the ousting of Saddam Hussein. It's
not a region to second-guess the overthrow, but is a
place where "liberation" reigns over "occupation,"
as the Kurds were favored targets of Saddam and bore
the brunt of his brutal chemical weapons attacks and
midnight roundups. In fact, a commercial featuring
all walks of Kurds thanking America for democracy
has been making the rounds on U.S. and U.K.
television sets.
The ad campaign, run by the Kurdistan Development
Corporation and hailing from the land of the three
wise men, pitches the Web site
www.theotheriraq.com , which features a primer
on the history of the land, what Saddam did to the
people and -- most importantly -- what the Kurdish
region can now do for you.
The campaign even has a logo, a happy sunburst
superimposed with "Kurdistan: The Other Iraq" framed
by red and green ribbons. Left-leaning blogs have
been buzzing with chatter about a Republican ad
conspiracy, because a year ago the regional
government hired Russo Marsh & Rogers, a
Sacramento-based company with GOP ties. Not like
this was an earth-shattering move, because if it
weren't for a Republican administration's foreign
policy the Kurds would still be living under the
threat of Saddam (albeit still poking forward on
development under the shield of the post-Gulf War
U.N.-sanctioned no-fly zone).
"Our job is to carry out a public relations campaign
that will thank the American people for supporting
the war in Iraq, and encourage Americans to visit
and invest in the Kurdish region," RM&R's Joe
Wierzbicki told journalist Bill Berkowitz at the
outset of the Kurdish P.R. campaign.
The message, intended to lure business and tourism
to the region, is basically "Come to Iraqi Kurdistan
and you won't get killed!" Instead of planting IEDs,
they're looking to cultivate industry; instead of
imposing curfews, they're increasing nightlife with
multi-screen cineplexes. For the first time last
year, Iraq entered a film for consideration in the
foreign film category at the Academy Awards --
"Requiem of Snow," from Kurdistan. Iraq also had its
first entry at Cannes 2005 -- "Kilometre Zero." Yep,
from Kurdistan. This year, the Kurds have already
submitted their Oscar hopeful, "Half Moon," to the
Academy to represent Iraq.
While the Kurds are going Hollywood, Baghdad is busy
running itself into the ground. While the rest of
the country falls prey to sectarian violence, the
Kurds can run a state in a region with Christians,
Jews, Shiites and Sunnis, as well as Arabs,
Armenians, Turkmen, Assyrians and Chaldeans.
Security is not the only key difference between the
north and the rest of the country. The development
divide is only getting bigger as Kurds, unencumbered
by the murderous whims of Saddam, are taking what
their land has to offer and telling the rest of the
world to come on in, too, and help the region
achieve its full economic potential.
This kind of common sense in a country where you
just want to gag Muqtada al-Sadr makes one wish that
Kurdistan could just somehow ideologically swallow
up the rest of Iraq (as Turkey weeps in the corner).
But if you offered all of Iraq to the Kurds, they'd
probably turn it down. They'd rather clear the bad
guys out of Kirkuk and pull it into their sovereign
territory.
And that requires the slickest P.R. campaign of all.
Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice
was in the autonomous Kurdistan region last week
to encourage national reconciliation instead of
separatism, a sentiment most recently in evidence
when the Kurds were reluctant to run new oil deals
past the Arab-led national government. Many Kurds
believe revenue created at home should stay there,
despite regional president Massoud Barzani's pledge
to Rice to share with the south.
Not that everyone would be upset with a Kurdish
split. Two years ago, columnist Amir Taheri
anonymously quoted an Iraqi Arab leader as saying,
"The Kurds have been the source of all our national
miseries from the start. We became involved in
several wars because of them. We also had to submit
to dictators because we believed they would prevent
the Kurds from secession. |
Photo: eKurd.net
All Photos: eKurd.net |
But now that Iraq is free why should we return to
the failed policies of the past just to keep the
Kurds under our flag?" Incidentally, the Kurdish
government just said they don't need Iraq's stinkin'
flag,
effectively banning it.
A nonbinding referendum last year in Kurdistan was
nearly unanimous in favor of independence. Even as
Kurdish leaders say they favor staying one big happy
family in their rhetoric to Rice, encroaching Arab
violence -- fighting in Kirkuk, where Saddam
displaced Kurds in favor of "Arabization," and Sunni
terror against Kurds in Mosul -- may push minds as
well as hearts toward secession, the equivalent of a
straight-A student breaking off ties with her
bratty, delinquent brother.
But for now, Iraqi Kurdistan is harvesting
opportunity, rapidly becoming Iraq's Beverly Hills
next to southern Iraq's Compton. More than 800
companies from 27 countries came to the "Rebuild
Iraq 2006" trade show in the Kurdish capital of
Erbil last month, including Motorola, FedEx,
Showtime, General Motors, Ford, Toyota and
Mercedes-Benz. A $250 million expansion of Erbil
International Airport is in the works, designed to
turn the region into a gateway hub to the rest of
Iraq.
And time will tell if "The Other Iraq" becomes
"Iraq's Other Neighbor."
Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles
Daily News.
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