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Kurdistan Wants You!
20.9.2006
By Jessica Holzer |
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Washington, D.C.
- Why put up with the crowds in Europe or settle for
another ho-hum week at the beach? Next summer, head
to lovely Kurdistan, the pearl of Iraq, where you
can soak in the lush mountain scenery and admire
antiquities dating to Alexander the Great.
That's the appeal made by the government of Iraqi
Kurdistan in a new video that beckons tourists to
the "other Iraq" and touts the place as the
"greatest opportunity in the world" for investors.
The film is part of a public relations blitz
featuring ad campaigns in Britain and the U.S.
designed to spur foreign investment in Kurdistan's
tourism and agriculture sectors--but also to forge
an image of the Iraqi Kurds as a peace-loving and
industrious people who shun militant Islam and live
worlds away from Baghdad's brutal violence.
By shading the Kurds' image in the minds of ordinary
Westerners, the hope is that the world won't cruelly
turn its back on them as it has done in the past and
might even begin to sympathize with Kurdish
ambitions for their own state. Kurdistan is home to
some 5 million of the 30 million Kurds who are
scattered throughout Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq,
and together constitute the world's largest ethnic
group without a state.
"It's a way of cementing friendships and doing PR,"
explains Bayan Rahman, chairman of the Kurdish
Development Corp., the arm of the regional
government heading up the campaign.
To lure businessmen and tourists to Kurdistan, it
helps to draw a sharp contrast between the calm of
the autonomous region and the chaos in the rest of
Iraq. Among other things, viewers of the film learn
that "not a single coalition soldier has lost his
life" in the region since the spring of 2005 and
that the Iraqi Kurds feel an "unshakable gratitude"
for the coalition forces that liberated them from
Saddam Hussein.
This is not all propaganda. Enticed by the relative
peace, migrants and tourists from other parts of
Iraq have been pouring into Kurdistan. And there is
a construction boom in the capital city of Erbil,
where office buildings and partments are sprouting
up and a new airport terminal is being planned.
The regional government believes the autonomous
region, which boasts clement weather and arable
land, could ramp up its agriculture production to
provide vegetables and grain to other parts of the
Middle East.
It also sees Kurdistan, with its rushing rivers and
snow-capped mountains, as a potential destination
for adventure seekers or tourists interested in
Biblical and archaeological sites.
"We see ourselves as the commercial gateway to the
rest of Iraq," says Rahman.
That may be a touch optimistic. The U.S. State
Department has a travel warning in place for all of
Iraq and hasn't watered it down for Kurdistan. And
so far, Kurdistan has attracted investment mainly
from neighboring Turkey, its biggest trade partner,
though some Middle Eastern cash is trickling in. One
Lebanese company, the Monseur Brothers, has a
contract to sell General Motors (nyse: GM - news -
people ) cars in northern Iraq.
To encourage more investment, the regional
government has just passed a law granting a ten-year
tax holiday and other perks to investors. It is also
setting up two free-trade zones. But one hurdle is
the lack of data on market size, employment figures
and other measures that factor into investors'
decisions.
Another problem is the region's isolation. Remote
and landlocked, Kurdistan will have trouble becoming
the breadbasket of the Middle East, much less a
mecca for European backpackers, says Bulent Aliriza,
director of the Turkey Project at the Center for
International and Strategic Studies in Washington.
To get there, one must fly through Dubai in the
United Arab Emirates or Amman, Jordan.
But the biggest obstacle to Kurdistan's ambitions is
political. Any leap toward greater prosperity and
autonomy will only aggravate Kurdistan's neighbors,
who fear that an independent Kurdistan will stir up
the separatist desires of their own Kurdish
populations.
Even with coalition forces in the region, some Iraqi
Kurdish villages are getting shelled by Iran.
Meanwhile, Kurdistan's claims to the disputed
oil-rich territory of Kirkuk have inflamed Turkey,
where terrorism linked to Kurdish separatists is
flaring up again. Members of the group blamed for
the violence are known to be hiding in Kurdistan
near the Turkish border.
"There's a real risk that the Kurds are going to
overplay their hand," says Aliriza. "The more they
push, the more the others are going to react."
But for the time being, the Iraqi Kurds are pressing
on. Rahman brushes off the recent uptick in rhetoric
coming out of Turkey as bluster related to the
Turkish election season. And she parses Kurdistan's
intentions in a way that would give little
reassurance to its neighbors--much less to the
central government in Baghdad.
"Every Kurd in their hearts wants a unified,
independent Kurdistan," she says. "What we want
today is to be part of a democratic federal Iraq."
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