ERBIL, Kurdistan-Iraq, -- While
daily car bombs and political upheaval roil Baghdad, Iraq's northern
region of Kurdistan has enjoyed a reputation as an oasis of security
where terrorist attacks are rare, families picnic on holidays, and
Westerners can travel the countryside unscathed.
But residents of Kurdistan's three provinces, lying along Iraq's
mountainous borders with Iran and Turkey, say that security has come
at a price.
Iqbal Ali Mohammed said that although his income has increased and
his material life has become more comfortable, his spiritual life
suffers.
"Even though the majority of the Kurds are Muslims, I am not able to
practice my religion as openly as I want to because they might
accuse me of being a terrorist," he said.
Sroosh Janab Mohammed, a government employee in Sulaymaniyah, said
her life has become easier in some ways.
"Security is good. I can travel outside the country if I want. There
are more job opportunities," she said.
"But sometimes the police disappear people and say they are
terrorists," she added. "And the parties control everything.
Everything serves their interests."
Power in the largely autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq is divided
between two longtime ruling political parties, largely to the
exclusion of dissenters. A heavily policed state strictly limits
political opposition and speech, residents and human rights
advocates say.
In a war-ravaged country where sectarian violence has become the
norm, officials of Kurdistan's ruling parties make no apologies.
"Here if you are suspected, you will be detained, it's as simple as
that," said Mohammed Tofiq, a high-ranking member of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, the party that largely controls eastern
Kurdistan.
"People here don't have a problem with that," he said. "Here, if
that happens, everybody claps."
Not everybody. Critics of the ruling parties — the PUK and the
Kurdish Democratic Party, which controls western Kurdistan — say the
squelching of political dissent goes too far.
Some of the critics are officials of Kurdistan's nominal government,
who say that party affiliated militias, intelligence services and
security agencies operate largely outside their control.
"The security forces are like political tools in the hands of the
parties," said Hadi Ali, justice minister for the KDP-controlled
administrative center in Erbil.
The parties "each have their own secret agencies and their own
courts. I'm the minister of justice, and they're arresting many
people in my party without my approval."
Ali is a member of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, a small opposition
party, which has been sharply criticized by both ruling parties in
recent months.
In December, hundreds of people attacked the KIU's headquarters in
the western Kurdish city of Dahuk, throwing stones and firing guns
into the building.
In a videotape of the incident that was reviewed by the Los Angeles
Times, dozens of militia members and security agents could be seen
standing idle as rioters destroyed cars parked outside the office,
pelted the building with stones and eventually set the structure on
fire.
More than two hours into the riot, a storm of automatic weapons fire
could be heard. At least one KIU member was shot to death.
Nawzad Hadi Mawlood, governor of Erbil province, said he regretted
the violence, but that KIU members were to blame. KIU members had
spoken out against the two main political parties and had withdrawn
their support from the Kurdish alliance in Baghdad before the
country's Dec. 15 election, he said.
"You can't control people when they say bad things about the KDP and
PUK," Mawlood said. Divisions within Kurdish ranks could weaken
Kurdistan's bargaining power in Baghdad, he added. "Maybe in 10
years it will be OK to say such things, but not now."
A second violent incident recently took place in the eastern
Kurdistan village of Halabja, where in 1988 about 5,000 Kurds died
in a poison gas attack for which former President Saddam Hussein's
air force is believed to be responsible.
Last month, high school and college students and others staged a
protest against government corruption at an annual commemoration of
that incident. PUK security forces fired into the crowd, killing a
15-year-old boy. Amid gunfire and chanting of anti-government
slogans, the mob torched a memorial museum dedicated to the 1988
massacre.
In recent weeks, both parties have jailed journalists who have
written articles alleging government corruption. A day after the
Halabja riot, PUK guards arrested Hawez Hawezi, a teacher and
reporter for the independent Kurdish weekly Hawlati, for criticizing
the two parties. Hawezi has charged the security forces with
"abducting" him without a warrant. He was later released on bail.
Last year, KDP security forces arrested Kamal Karim Qadir, an
Iraqi-born Kurd with Austrian citizenship, who had written an
article alleging that Masrour Barzani, a leading member of the KDP's
founding family and the head of the party's intelligence service,
had hired prostitutes to spy on Qadir while he was in Austria.
Last month, a judge reduced Qadir's 30-year prison sentence to 18
months. Then last week, he was pardoned by Barzani's father, Massoud,
who is the president of the Kurdish regional government and head of
the KDP. The party was founded by Massoud Barzani's father, Mustafa,
in 1946. One of Massoud Barzani's other sons, Nechirvan, is the
regional government's prime minister.
For much of the second half of the 20th century, the KDP — and the
Barzani clan — led armed resistance to Iraq's central government,
pushing for an independent Kurdish state.
In 1975, the PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, who is now Iraq's interim
president, split off from the Barzani-led party.
For years, the two groups fought Hussein's government. During the
1990s, they also fought each other. Both supported the 2003 U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq and have allied themselves with the Shiite Muslim
political bloc in Baghdad to form the central government's ruling
faction.
But in Kurdistan, the two parties have maintained their distance
from Baghdad and from each other. Each maintains a massive party
machine in its administrative base — Erbil for the KDP, and
Sulaymaniyah for the PUK. And each has stymied attempts to form an
effective, unified regional government.
Both factions have thousands of paramilitary soldiers, or peshmerga,
and security agencies known as Asayish. The newly trained police
officers of the Kurdish Ministry of Interior are also split along
party lines.
The parties each have their own intelligence agencies: Parastin for
the KDP, and Zanyari for the PUK. Those agencies conduct
surveillance, control media outlets, influence judges and run secret
detention facilities, according to human rights activists and
government officials.
Most of the region's trade unions and professional associations are
closely linked to, if not run by, the parties and closely monitored,
as are local nongovernmental organizations. Even private businesses
are often dominated by individual party members. One example: The
region's leading construction mogul is also a Barzani — Saed.
Compared with the pervasive influence of the two dominant parties,
the institutions of the nascent Kurdistan Regional Government look
paltry and stunted.
"The government should be making the policies, but right now the
parties are creating the policies, and the government simply carries
them out," said Mawlood, Erbil's governor. "The peshmerga, the
Asayish, the ministries are all implementing the policies of the KDP
and PUK. It will take time for the government to mature."
"This area is just coming out of a Baathist model," in which the
government was subordinate to the governing party, as was the case
with Hussein's Baath Party, said Tom Hardie-Forsyth, a British
advisor for Nechirvan Barzani, the regional prime minister.
"Nechirvan told me that in 10 years' time he wanted to have a
robust, transparent government that wouldn't need the name Barzani
or any other name to run it," Hardie-Forsyth said. But so far, the
parties have brooked little opposition by individuals or minority
parties.
Human rights activists say party control runs deep. Most Erbil
neighborhoods have at least one party-affiliated Asayish office
where residents must register their names and party affiliations,
they say. Anyone who wants to apply for a government job or benefits
must get a letter of good standing from his local party official,
according to residents and human rights advocates.
Asayish forces routinely conduct undocumented arrests and influence
judges to rule against suspects with scant evidence, said Ali, the
justice minister. He acknowledged that party security services have
prisons that even he does not know much about.
"We know that people have been held in prison for as long as six
months," said a Kurdish human rights activist, who asked that his
name not be used because he fears government reprisals. "Sometimes
they're held on terrorist charges, but often they are very far from
terrorism. They have only criticized the government."
Tofiq, the PUK official, acknowledged that smaller political parties
have little opportunity to participate in government.
"Frankly, small political parties are not genuine political
parties," he said. "All of them either support the PUK or the KDP.
This is the fault of the system — the small parties know they don't
have a chance. The KDP and the PUK dominate the different regions.
Both areas are one-party systems."
But Tofiq said that in time, a new generation of Kurds would demand
more than security from their leaders.
"The younger people didn't live under Saddam, and they're going to
be more concerned about government services and the economy and
jobs," he said.
"This generation is going to base their votes on the actual
achievements of the government."
www.latimes.com Top |
® 