He has a disconcerting facial tic and
opens his cellphone with an odd jerk of the left wrist, as if barely
controlling his muscles. Yet he is vigorous, razor sharp, and
articulate, and holds a commanding presence. This is Kosrat Rasoul
Ali, popularly known as Kosrat, a storied peshmerga (guerrilla)
leader and now the incoming vice president of Iraq's Kurdish
regional government. His ailment derives from shrapnel deeply lodged
in his body. Its provenance: a shell fired by forces of a rival
Kurdish party, whose leader, Massoud Barzani, is now the regional
government's president.
On Sunday, the Kurds announced the formation of their government, 16
months after the January 2005 elections to the Kurdistan National
Assembly. The main reason for the long delay was the inability of
Kurdistan's two principal parties, Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic
Party and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, to reunify
their parallel administrations, one in Erbil, the other in
Sulaimaniyah.
The two parties fought each other in the mid-1990s -- the context to
Kosrat's disability -- but under heavy pressure from Washington to
put their differences aside in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
Today, Kurdish leaders are choosing peace, but many Kurds,
especially the young, are fed up with these leaders' wrangling, and
time may be running out for this
national-liberation-movement-turned-regional-government.
The movement was founded by Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Masoud's father,
in the 1940s. It resisted central power for decades, facing village
destruction and Arabization of the oil-rich Kirkuk region to which
it laid claim. When an autonomy agreement with Baghdad broke down in
the mid-1970s, Iraqi forces crushed the Kurdistan Democratic Party,
sending its fighters into exile.
In 1976, young activists impatient with the Barzanis' tribal rule
set up the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Its leader was Jalal
Talabani, who in 2005 was appointed president of Iraq in a strong
vindication of the Kurds' long struggle.
These two parties have worked together to fight a common enemy, as
during the Iran-Iraq war, when their escalating insurgency was met
with brutal Iraqi repression. And they have fought each other when
there was no enemy to distract them, as after the 1991 establishment
of a US-controlled safe haven and parliamentary elections a year
later.
The collapse of the 50-50 power-sharing arrangement that emerged
from those elections led to armed conflict, which only Washington
was able to a halt in a 1998 cease-fire. Relations since then have
gradually improved, but nothing did more to shape a common vision
than the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. Suddenly powerful in
Baghdad, the Kurds needed a unified front to convince their Arab
partners they deserved a federal region of their own.
The two parties' greatest challenge will be to turn their one-party
mini-states, which they have ruled with an iron hand, into a single
two-party region, and -- over time -- to allow for multiparty
democracy. To metamorphose from hardened peshmergas into able
administrators will prove a tall order. Old animosities continue to
divide them. Distrust runs so strong that the ministries of the
interior and ''peshmerga affairs" (defense), along with the finance
and justice ministries, will remain separate for at least another
year, with parallel headquarters in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah.
Other forces are tugging at the aging maquisards. A new urbanized
generation of Kurds is pressing for their society's material
progress while their elders bask in the glories of past struggles,
some amassing personal fortunes through corruption. Moreover, the
children of those who fled in earlier years are returning to
Kurdistan, with technical skills, democratic ideals, and great
aspirations. Grumbling about the two parties' rule has become
widespread, occasionally breaking out into open violence, as during
the recent commemoration of the March 1988 chemical attack on
Halabja, when townspeople angered by government corruption dodged
the bullets of local security forces of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan and destroyed the Halabja monument.
Repression remains a serious problem, as editors of independent
newspapers and opposition activists will attest. Late last year,
mobs apparently spurred on by the Kurdistan Democratic Party
attacked the offices of a competing party, the Kurdistan Islamic
Union, killing several of its officials. But the Kurdistan Islamic
Union's emergence as an Islamist alternative to the Kurdistan
Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's secular rule --
it won five seats in Iraq's national assembly -- may be difficult to
reverse.
As Iraqis confront the specter of civil war, many look with envy
toward the Kurds, whose region has experienced unprecedented growth
and prosperity. But the Kurds' deep economic dependence on a
disintegrating Iraq could undo these gains: oil may stop flowing,
electricity from the national grid may be cut, the Kurds' 17 percent
share of the national budget may evaporate.
This will offer an opportunity to the two parties' many critics, who
have been mostly silent so far, to challenge their rule. If and when
this happens, Massoud Barzani, Kosrat Ali, and other Kurdish leaders
may face not each other's mortar shells but their nation's
discontent, a spreading disaffection they may still be able to allay
today through wise, open, and pluralistic governance.
Joost Hiltermann is Middle East project director of the
International Crisis Group
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