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Hero of the people
22.6.2006
By Allegra Stratton
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Monday 26th June 2006
She spends half her time with the president in
Baghdad, and half in Iraqi Kurdistan. So who exactly
is the latest member of the Arab leaders' wives'
club? Allegra Stratton reports
If you're an Arab first lady, then chances are the
British government has flown you over to London,
plumped up the pillows in a Mayfair hotel room and
stationed a burly bodyguard outside the door in
return for a favour - that you address a Department
of Trade and Industry conference called Women in
Business. Suzanne Mubarak of Egypt, Asma al-Assad of
Syria and Queen Rania of Jordan have all taken part.
It's Davos for Arab leaders' wives, and giving a
speech is a good opportunity to dazzle with economic
erudition.
That is, if you are a political science graduate or
have spent your productive years before marrying the
president as an intern at Goldman Sachs. But, for
one of the newer recruits to the Middle East's first
sorority - the wife of Iraq's president, Jalal
Talabani - it's not coming so naturally.
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Hero Talabani, Iraq first lady - wife of Iraqi
President Jalal Talabani
Photo: Internet |
Talabani and his wife, Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, have spent most of their lives
in the mountains of north Iraq as "peshmergas", the
term coined by Hero's father (himself peshmerga
aristocracy) to describe those Kurds fighting Saddam
Hussein for independence. During this time, Hero
didn't do much trading in oil shares or market
speculating.
Two days after making her speech
(in Kurdish, with translation - since Saddam was
deposed, Kurdish has become an official language of
Iraq, and speaking it is no longer punishable with
torture), Hero told me: "I know nothing about
businesswomen in the Arab world. I only know about
simple women. I told them I don't think they will be
able to find as unsuccessful a businesswoman as me."
She was, in fact, being very modest. Though she
doesn't have a BlackBerry or talk about bull and
bear markets, she runs a TV station in Iraqi
Kurdistan, edits newspapers and leads charities.
Since 1991 and the establishment by international
forces of a no-fly zone over the north of Iraq,
Iraqi Kurdistan has managed to operate the kind of
government that the United States would like to see
rolled out across the Middle East. In this safe
haven, there is a free press, and Hero has made hay.
One cartoon in her satirical magazine Sekh urma
("nudge") depicted a woman in a burqa trying to milk
a cow, and the cow being scared off. Conservative
religious leaders elsewhere in Iraq rail against her
TV coverage for polluting nascent Iraqi
imaginations. These business endeavours seem to be
exactly the sort of spirited secular stuff that
distinguishes the Kurds of northern Iraq from people
in the more religiously aligned south. I'm not sure
we have the same definition of "simple women".
The seeds of Hero's media empire were first sown by
the side of Iraq's current president, in the
mountains. In the mid-1980s an Iranian friend gave
her a video camera and she set about recording the
everyday lives of Kurdish villagers under daily
bombardment by Saddam. During the 1986-87 Anfal
campaign - chemical attacks, ordered by Saddam, to
cleanse northern Iraq of Kurds - the films changed
from anthropology to evidence-gathering. Hero
remembers her husband, on reaching the scene of one
attack, saying: "OK, you said you are very important
- go and take this picture." When she entered the
room, she found two peshmergas lying on the floor
dying. The doctor gestured to their wounds and said:
"Take a picture of this body area - it is very
important. People will know from this what was
used." The smell of the chemical was so strong that
she fainted.
Soon she was lugging hundreds of videotapes around
the mountains with her. To get them to safety, she
designed a special donkey saddlebag to fit
bubble-wrapped videos and despatched the tapes to
Europe - though not before another near-fatal
bombardment. "I was lucky," she said. "Saddam
attacked and I nearly lost them. They are more
important than me: they are the history of a
nation."
In Europe, people said her footage shook too much,
to which Hero responded: "I'm taking a picture of an
airplane. Of course it will shake." To her, this was
simply an excuse not to use her tapes. At that time,
western governments were supporting Iraq in the
Iran-Iraq war and weren't too interested in her
evidence indicting their ally. Eventually some of
her videos made it on to ITN, but the Iraqi
ambassador sprang up quickly to damn them as "a very
nice piece of Iranian fabrication".
The west has still not been forensic about crimes
against the Kurds during this period, and the
current charges against Saddam Hussein do not
include the poison-gas attack on the town of Halabja.
"There were many big companies that brought
chemicals to Saddam," Hero told me. "I don't know
where the pressure is coming from to leave it out.
But Halabja should be included."
Hero lives half of every month in Iraqi Kurdistan,
"among the people", and the other half with the
president in Baghdad. From these vantage points, she
has developed a critique of Iraqi and Arab economies
as being too reliant on the government as an
employer. "There is no way that everybody should be
employed by the government. When the Ba'ath Party
was in power one school had 45 cleaners for a
six-room building. This is how Saddam kept his
workforce employed, and they are still thinking this
way. Half of the [present government's] employees
are just sitting drinking tea. This will bankrupt
the government for sure."
In her speech, however, Hero also warned that Iraq's
levels of unemployment had "exceeded all limits" and
swollen the ranks of extremists. So does she think
that Iraq's main job-destruction scheme - disbanding
the Iraqi army - was a good idea? "I didn't like it
to be done. They [Iraqi soldiers serving under
Saddam] knew one thing in the world and that thing
was to serve Saddam. Then suddenly people come and
tell them to go home. It was a very bad idea.
Standing in the sun in long, long queues, in the
middle of the street, just to get a few pennies. I
told everybody this was not right. Those people
fought against me all of my life, but when I saw
them like this in the street, I cried for them."
Although Hero is a founder of umpteen Kurdish
women's organisations, her London speech indicated
that she didn't see Iraq's development as dependent
on women. Perhaps her real reluctance in giving the
Women in Business speech was the women bit, not the
business bit. People in the west have concerns about
the south of the country, where women are reportedly
forced to wear the hijab and threatened with death
if found playing sports; and the presence in the
constitution of sharia law (albeit beside English
and French law) stokes fears that the new Iraq will
be more Taliban than Talabani. Yet Hero isn't so
troubled. "The start of the hijab is from Saddam's
time - it is not new. The return to faith started at
the end of his era. I don't know if women are being
forced to wear the hijab. I have never heard of
this. Maybe the women themselves are afraid."
To a young Iraqi woman who said her life is worse
than it was under Saddam, Hero would say: "Your life
is not worse now." Perhaps she just doesn't know,
living as a president's wife, mostly in the calmer
north of the country? No, she counters. It isn't
just a problem in the south of Iraq: she sees it in
Iraqi Kurdistan, too. "In Sulaymaniyah, this also
happened. A few hardline guys went through the
streets throwing acid on the legs of girls. But they
were captured."
These are teething problems, and Hero asks for Iraq
to be given time to work things out. "The west
thinks democracy is like a tablet, but it is a huge
process." A lot of things need to change. In Iraq at
the moment, "each boss in the smallest office of the
government is thinking about himself as a dictator".
Lowly ministers in Iraq's new government should take
note. The latest addition to the Arab first wives'
club is, at the very least, keeping an eye on
things.
Allegra Stratton's "Muhajababes: meet the Middle
East's next generation" will be published by
Constable & Robinson on 29 June
Newstatesman com
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