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Who is Jalal Talabani?
9.2.2007
By Jon Lee Anderson
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A gift for power
Iraq's Kurdish president is impossible to pin down.
He's friends with the Americans - but also with
Iran. He calls himself a Maoist - yet enjoys immense
wealth. Who is Jalal Talabani? Jon Lee Anderson
meets him in Baghdad
February 9, 2007
On November 5, the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced
to death, Jalal Talabani, the longtime Kurdish
guerrilla leader, who is currently Iraq's president,
was in Paris, on a state visit. He was installed in
the sumptuous presidential suite at Le Meurice, a
gold-and-marble Louis XVI hotel on the Rue de Rivoli,
overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries.
I watched the verdict with Talabani in his suite, on
a large plasma-screen television tuned to the
satellite channel Al Arabiya. He sat in a gilded
chair, and his expression betrayed nothing. Soon,
after a few curt words, Talabani got up and wandered
off to his bedroom. One of his aides tiptoed behind
him. The aide reappeared a moment later to say that
Talabani was sitting in an armchair, deep in
thought. |
Iraqi
President : Jalal Talabani, a Kurd |
Saddam's death sentence put Talabani in an awkward
position. Saddam had been convicted for the mass
killing of 146 people in the Shia village of Dujail
in 1982. If he was executed, he would not face a
second trial, for the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which
as many as 186,000 Kurds were killed. Talabani was
on the record as being opposed to capital
punishment, but, according to the Iraqi
constitution, one of his duties was to approve death
warrants. In public statements, he had finessed this
problem by saying that he would respect any
decisions made by Iraq's judiciary. Still, he was in
a predicament.
After a while, Talabani returned, in a better mood.
He sat down next to me, but we were interrupted by
the arrival of two superbly dressed Frenchmen
carrying large shopping bags from Façonnable and
Ermenegildo Zegna. They approached Talabani, bowed
deferentially, and took a pair of dark suits from
the bags. One man brandished a measuring tape, and
explained that they needed His Excellency to remove
some of his clothes for a fitting. Talabani stood up
and began struggling to take off his jacket. A valet
rushed over to help.
Talabani, who is 73 and has the fat cheeks, brush
moustache and large belly of a storybook pastry
chef, is renowned for his political cunning, his
prodigious love of food and cigars, his sense of
humour, his unflagging optimism, and his inability
to keep a secret. He is known as Mam Jalal, which
means Uncle Jalal in Kurdish. It is a term of both
endearment and cautious deference; Talabani has a
mercurial personality, with extreme mood swings. He
has survived in Iraqi politics largely owing to an
ability to outfox his opponents and, sometimes, his
allies. Over the years, he has made deals with
everyone from Saddam Hussein to Ayatollah Khomeini
and both Bush presidents. He is probably one of the
very few people in the world who can claim,
truthfully and unapologetically, to have kissed the
cheeks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Talabani
refers to George W Bush as his "good friend" but
regards Mao Zedong as his political role model.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shia politician who is Iraq's
national security adviser, told me, "He's very
difficult to define. If you are an Islamist, he
brings you Koranic verses; if you're a Marxist,
he'll talk to you about Marxist-Leninist theory,
dialectics and Descartes. He has a very interesting
ability to speak several languages, sometimes" - he
laughed - "with a very limited vocabulary. He has a
lot of anecdotes and knows a lot of jokes. He is an
extraordinarily generous person, and he spends like
there is no tomorrow."
Rubaie mentioned a period in the 60s when Talabani
was allied with Saddam. "One day he was a good
friend of Saddam, and then he became a staunch
enemy," he said. (In fact, Talabani flirted with
Saddam twice more.) Rubaie saw nothing contradictory
in this; Talabani, he said, was the ultimate
pragmatist.
No other Iraqi politician has Talabani's experience,
contacts, and savvy. As a result, he has made the
presidency, which was meant to be more ceremonial
than the prime minister's job, a powerful post. Yet
this role, too, carries contradictions. After
spending decades fighting for "self-determination"
for Iraq's Kurds, Talabani finds himself defending
Iraq's unity. He now has a choice to make: either he
can be a founding father of the "new Iraq" - the
elder statesman who will help rescue it from civil
war - or, if Iraq falls apart, he can be a founding
father of an independent Kurdish state. As always,
Talabani has hedged his bets. "I am a Kurd from
Iraqi Kurdistan, but now I am responsible for Iraq,"
he told me. "And I feel my responsibility." In
another conversation, he said, "It's true that I am
an Iraqi, but in the final analysis I am a Kurd."
Under Saddam, the Kurds "were facing a dictatorship
in Baghdad that was launching a war of annihilation
against the Kurdish people," he said. "We were in
need of all kinds of support from anybody in the
world. When war starts, and you participate in it,
you will need support from anyone. There is no
supermarket where you can go and choose your friends
in a war."
In the current war, some of his unreconciled
friendships have been troublesome. Iran was once one
of the Kurds' greatest allies, and Talabani had
planned to fly from Paris to Tehran. But he abruptly
postponed the trip at the request of the Bush
administration: he would have arrived in Tehran on
November 6, and the prospect of pictures of
America's Iraqi ally visiting Iran the day before
the midterm elections made the White House
uncomfortable.
In Baghdad, Talabani lives in a yellow- brick
mansion on the eastern shore of the Tigris river,
outside the Green Zone. Until April 2003, when
Talabani seized it, the mansion belonged to Barzan
al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half brother and the
former chief of the secret police, who, like Saddam,
was sentenced to die for his role in the Dujail
massacre. (Barzan was executed on January 15, but
his hanging was bungled when the rope ripped off his
head.) The presidential offices are next door, in a
palace that once belonged to Saddam's wife, Sajida.
Talabani's complex sits on the north side of the
ramparts of the Jadiriya Bridge; on the south side
is the home of his political ally Abdul Aziz
al-Hakim, the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim's house is where
Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister, once
lived. The approaches on Talabani's side are heavily
guarded by Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face
death") fighters - Talabani commands some 50,000
peshmerga in the militia of his party, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - and on Hakim's by
militiamen of the Badr Organization, his party's
armed wing.
The two leaders and their militias work closely on
political and security matters, though in other ways
the Kurds, who are largely secular, and the Shias,
who are very devout, present a sharp contrast in
styles. During weeks spent in Talabani's company, I
never saw him or any of his aides pray. Talabani is
not averse to alcohol, either, and he enjoys playing
cards with a small group of his cronies.
Talabani's wife, Hero, does not live in Baghdad with
her husband. She stays in their home city of
Sulaimaniyah, where she runs a foundation and a
television station, and publishes a newspaper. She
and Talabani have two sons: one, Bafel, runs the
counterinsurgency wing of his father's party; the
other, Qubad, represents the autonomous Kurdish
government in the US.
At home in Baghdad one morning, Talabani invited me
up to his private quarters. It was early, and he was
still dressed in loose-fitting pyjama bottoms and an
immense yellow-and-blue striped rugby shirt. A valet
brought us Nescafé stirred with sugar into a creamy
mixture. (I later learned that this was "Mam Jalal
style".) Talabani lit a cigar. (He favours the long
ones known as Churchills.) The day before, two
suicide bombers had blown themselves up at a police
recruitment centre just outside the Green Zone,
killing 38 potential recruits. It was the latest
incident in what almost everyone but Talabani
acknowledged was an accelerating sectarian war. "I
don't think Iraq is on the eve of a civil war," he
said stubbornly. "Day by day - and this is not an
exaggeration - Sunni and Shia leaders are coming
close to each other."
Iraq's main problem was not sectarianism, he said,
but a terrorist war waged by Ba'athists and foreign
forces such as al-Qaida. Without losing his habitual
equanimity, he added that the situation had been
made worse by American ineptitude, arrogance and
naivety, saying: "I think the main one responsible
for this was Rumsfeld" - Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who had resigned days earlier. (Talabani
has since welcomed President Bush's plan to send an
additional 21,500 American soldiers to Baghdad in a
so-called "surge". He said in a statement that it
showed "a new effort to improve security in Iraq"
and that it "concurs and corresponds with Iraq's
plans and ideas" - although some members of the
government had been openly sceptical.)
After breakfast, Talabani went downstairs to deal
with the affairs of the day. Half a dozen senior
personnel were waiting, as they do each morning.
When Talabani has an appointment elsewhere, he is
driven in a BMW 7 Series armoured black saloon,
preceded and followed by a sizable fleet of white
Nissan Patrols carrying peshmerga guards. But, more
often than not, people come to Talabani. It is a
measure of his ascendancy that Nuri al-Maliki, the
prime minister, usually comes to Talabani, rather
than vice versa. Maliki is the third prime minister
since 2004, while Talabani has been a constant
fixture. Maliki does not have Talabani's access to
American and other foreign leaders, and must often
work through him. In public, Talabani tries to defer
to Maliki, and he appears to wish him to succeed.
One source of Talabani's power is his wealth.
Together with his old rival Massoud Barzani, who is
the president of the autonomous Kurdish region,
Talabani is believed to have amassed many millions
of dollars in "taxes" on oil smuggled out of Iraq
through Kurdistan between 1991 and 2003, when the
country was under UN sanctions. And Talabani
obsessively dispenses gifts, trades favours, and
buys allegiances, on the assumption that, in Iraq,
the richest suitor has the best chance of winning
the bride.
In many ways, Talabani's behaviour and his lifestyle
are those of a clandestine party boss. His private
quarters are cramped, poorly lit, and undecorated,
with counters cluttered with satellite phones. His
indulgences are food and a large personal staff. He
and the US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad have regular
meetings over kallapacha, an Iraqi dish consisting
of the head and stuffed intestines of a sheep. Twice
a month, Talabani sends consignments of Kurdish
yogurt, cheeses, honey and handmade sweets to
foreign ambassadors and leading politicians.
Several of Talabani's aides told me privately about
men in his entourage who, they suspected, profited
from government contracts that they steered toward
their friends. In this, Talabani's circle is not
unusual. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, is close to
Talabani but is scathing about the entire
government's profligacy, corruption and moral
cowardice. "How does the government expect to have
respect when it is closed off?" he said. "The
leaders live in Saddam's palaces, and in the Green
Zone, and they never go out. The prime minister and
the president have discretionary funds to spend as
they like of a million or more dollars a month. I
think the corruption is widespread and systemic and
comes from the very top . . . All of this is against
a reality in which the families of killed soldiers
or police are given pensions of only $100 a month."
In Maliki's government, cobbled together after four
months of tortuous negotiations following the
December 2005 parliamentary elections, Talabani
helped make sure that many of the high-level jobs
that didn't go to Shias went to Kurds. (A number of
them are Talabani's friends and relatives.) One of
the two deputy prime ministers is a Kurd, and Kurds
head several ministries, including the foreign
ministry; the minister of water resources is
Talabani's brother-in-law. From the American
perspective, there is simply an abundance of
qualified Kurds - or, at least, many with whom the
US feels comfortable.
Talabani, like many senior Iraqi politicians, views
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia militia leader
whose militia is known as the Mahdi army, with a
mixture of condescension and contempt. The key to
weakening Sadr, Talabani said, was Iran. "If the
Iranians will calm down the Mahdi army, if there
will be no assassination, if these - what do you
call them? - 'death squads' will be no more, then
only the terrorists will remain. And if Syria will
be silent, only al-Qaida will remain, and we can
defeat al -Qaida very easily."
Talabani went on, "One of the main mistakes the
Americans have made in fighting terrorism is tying
our hands and the hands of the Shias, while at the
same time the terrorists are free to do what they
want. If they let us, within one week we will clean
all Kirkuk and adjacent areas." (Talabani's
implication was clear: "to clean" is a euphemism for
wiping out your opposition, for killing or capturing
your enemies.) Talabani then adopted a high-pitched,
whining voice, to mimic the Americans: "'No-o, Kurds
must not move to the Arab areas, this is sensitive.'
If they let the Shias clean the road from Najaf to
Baghdad, they can do it within days. If they permit
the people of Anbar to liberate their area, they
will do it, but they say, 'Ah, no, this is another
kind of militia.' They don't understand the
realities of Iraq. From the beginning, we have had
this problem with them." He added, "Wrong plan,
wrong tactic, and wrong policy."
Talabani has been involved in politics since 1946,
when, at the age of 13, with Iraq still ruled by the
British-installed Hashemite monarchy, he joined an
underground Kurdish student organisation. It was
part of a Kurdish independence movement that had
taken shape during the breakup of the Ottoman
Empire, after the first world war, when the
victorious European powers failed to give the Kurds
their own state. The division of the empire left the
Kurds spread among Iraq (with an estimated four
million Kurds today, or between 15% and 20% of
Iraq's population), Turkey, Syria, and Iran; the
greater Kurdistan envisaged by some separatists
would encompass parts of each of those countries.
Talabani was born in the village of Kelkan, in
south-eastern Iraqi Kurdistan; his father was a
local sheikh. By 18, Talabani was the youngest
member of the central committee of the Soviet-backed
Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Mullah Mustafa
Barzani. He studied law in Baghdad (interrupted by a
period spent in hiding) and completed his obligatory
service in the Iraqi army. Then, in 1961, Talabani
joined an armed uprising launched by Barzani.
Three years later, Talabani split with Barzani to
join a splinter group founded by Ibrahim Ahmed, the
father of his future wife, Hero. Ahmed did not like
the terms of Barzani's negotiations with the central
government. This was a period of violent political
instability in Iraq, with four presidents in the
space of 10 years. After a Ba'athist coup in 1968,
Talabani made a deal with Saddam, who was then the
deputy president, to obtain more rights for the
Kurds and to get his help in fighting Barzani -only
to reconcile with Barzani when Saddam switched
sides. It was the beginning of a dizzying sequence
of schisms within the Kurdish rebellion, for which
Talabani bears significant responsibility, and
which, for a time, strengthened Saddam.
Talabani was a Marxist, and then a Maoist, attracted
by "Mao's idea of popular war, of fighting in the
mountains against dictatorship". He was also drawn
to the anti-colonial Arab nationalist causes of the
day. On trips during the 60s, he made important
contacts - with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt, King
Hussein of Jordan, Muammar Gadafy, Yasser Arafat,
and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. (In
Talabani's office, there is a single photograph on
the wall, of him with Assad. "He was very, very kind
to me," Talabani said.)
In the mid-70s, Talabani spent time in Beirut,
working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, a Marxist Palestinian guerrilla
organisation. It is a murky period about which
Talabani says little, but Kurds close to him suggest
that he was then at his most radical, and at one
point became involved in a Palestinian plot to
hijack an American plane in Europe. He is said to
have abandoned the scheme when a contact warned him
that Mossad planned to assassinate him.
"We considered the US the enemy of the Iraqi Kurdish
people," Talabani told me. Through the 80s, the US,
for its part, saw the Kurds primarily as
troublemakers and as pawns of Syria and Iran. In
Turkey, America's Nato ally, Kurdish separatists had
been waging a remorseless guerrilla war, to which
the Turkish military responded with a vicious
counterinsurgency campaign; thousands of Kurdish
civilians were killed.
At the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Talabani once
again allied himself with Saddam, then opposed him
and helped Iran. Saddam's next move was the
genocidal Anfal campaign. Saddam razed thousands of
Kurdish villages, primarily in Talabani's territory.
In the town of Halabja, between March 16 and March
17 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed when
planes dropped a lethal chemical cocktail that
reportedly included mustard gas and nerve agents
such as sarin, tabun and VX. Although these attacks
later became part of the current Bush
administration's case for overthrowing Saddam, the
Reagan administration, which was supporting Saddam
in his war with Iran, paid little attention; when
the news of Halabja broke, the White House blamed
Iran.
After Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf war, in
early 1991, Shias in the south and Kurds in the
north carried out uprisings. Talabani led his forces
into Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. With the US looking on,
Saddam dispatched his army against them. Hundreds of
thousands of Kurds fled, in the midst of a harsh
winter, provoking a humanitarian crisis. The US and
its allies declared a safe haven in the north;
Talabani and Barzani (who had temporarily
reconciled) began negotiating terms of settlement
with Saddam.
There is an unfortunate photograph from this period
that shows Talabani kissing Saddam on the cheek.
"But, you know, at that time the Kurdish people were
in danger of being annihilated," Talabani told me,
by way of explanation. "Fighting is not playing
ping-pong," Talabani said. "Fighting is killing each
other. When we were fighting Saddam, we killed them,
they killed us. It's something ordinary. It's war.
And when we stop the war both killers sit down to
receive each other. And this happens all over the
world. Mao, he sat down with Chiang Kai-shek! Chiang
Kai-shek killed his wife. His son! . . . But when
the time comes to talk peace, they must sit down
with each other. This is the process of life."
As the Kurdish "safe haven" developed into a "no fly
zone" policed by US and British warplanes - a de
facto Kurdish autonomous zone, beyond the authority
of Saddam Hussein - Barzani and Talabani fought for
pre-eminence. One dispute was over revenues from oil
smuggling.
"Jalal is at his best when he is down, and is prone
to making mistakes when he is up," a longtime friend
of Talabani's told me. "In 1991, he was emerging as
a statesman of the Kurds, internationally renowned.
Instead of moving to become the nation builder that
he was supposed to be, he moved into battle, playing
with fire, undermining all that he built. "
In 1994, a civil war broke between the armies of
Talabani and Barzani. In the midst of the fighting,
Talabani provided a base for a CIA task force, and
for Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, who were
involved in various failed coup plots. Hundreds of
people died in these efforts. Talabani continued
fighting Barzani, who at one point, astoundingly,
invited Saddam's army into the north.
When President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation
Act, in 1998, promising American support for Iraqi
opposition groups, Talabani and Barzani went to
Washington and settled their differences. By then,
several thousand Kurds from both sides had been
killed.
Talabani called the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's
report "unfair" and "unjust"; he compared it to
terms imposed on a "colony". But one recommendation
that he had no problem with was that President Bush
begin direct talks with Syria and Iran. "It is in
our interest that relations between the US and Iran
about Iraq be at least normal, and if they have
other differences let them take them to other parts
of the world," he had told me a couple of weeks
earlier. He was about to leave for his delayed trip
to Iran. He was also keeping the Americans informed.
"We never hide our relation with Iran from America."
Tehran was cold and grey on November 27 last year,
when Talabani and his entourage arrived. Several
ministers and a clutch of Iraqi journalists and
photographers were on board. During our descent into
Tehran, one of Talabani's junior aides came down the
aisles, handing each person a form to sign. It was
printed in Arabic, and, assuming it was an official
landing document of some sort, I signed it,
whereupon he handed me a thick envelope and moved
on. Inside were 20 $100 bills. After we landed, I
asked the aide why he had given me money, and he
said it was "a gift from the president". I thanked
him, but said that I could not accept it, and handed
the envelope back. He looked very confused. A senior
aide translated my explanation about "journalistic
ethics", which left the man looking only more
mystified. The senior aide then opened his own
envelope and, whistling, counted out 50 $100 bills.
"I think he's given me the same amount as the
ministers," he exclaimed. "He does this from his own
pocket, you know." He said that, on each trip,
Talabani gives money to all those on board,
including the bodyguards, the flight attendants and
the pilot. We calculated that during the one-hour
flight Talabani had given away about $100,000.
The contrast with Baghdad was striking. There were
no armed soldiers or blast walls and security
barricades to negotiate. Instead, we drove through
street after street of brightly lit stores with neon
signs; the sidewalks were full of people. But what
most caught the attention of the Iraqis was the
large number of women and girls out on the street;
the sight of women in public has become a rarity in
Baghdad.
The next morning, Talabani awoke early and visited
the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Then he met
Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei. Sources close to Talabani told me that in
their talks he requested a reversal in Iran's policy
- specifically, that Iran's leadership "control"
Sadr's militia and ally itself instead with his
government, and that it persuade its allies,
including Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, to do the
same. Talabani then asked that Iran open up
communications with the multinational forces in
Iraq, and cooperate with the Iraqi and US
governments in their security plan for Baghdad. And,
perhaps most controversial from the Americans' point
of view - assuming that they knew about it -
Talabani proposed that Tehran and Baghdad exchange
intelligence, and that Iran help train and equip
Iraq's security forces.
One of the Iraqis who attended the meeting said that
Talabani told Khamenei that Iraq was "at a
make-or-break point and needed Iran's help". He went
on: "The Supreme Leader said that he understood and
would do everything he could. In return, he wanted
the Iraqis to take more control over their own
security from the Americans."
At a press conference, Ahmadinejad said, "Iraq is
like a wounded hero." Talabani, standing next to
him, said, smiling, "We can only hope that he
recovers." The crowd laughed; it was a classic Mam
Jalal moment. Ahmadinejad added, "The best way to
support Iraq is to support its democratically
elected government." However disingenuous this may
have sounded under the circumstances, Talabani's
officials took it as a further sign that the
Iranians were prepared to help. They told me it was
the first time that the Iranians had explicitly
endorsed the current Iraqi government.
An Iraqi minister came up to me afterward, looking
enthusiastic, and said, "You see? I told you it was
more than symbolic!" After a short pause, the
official leaned over and whispered excitedly, "These
guys even offered us weapons!"
That evening, a senior Iraqi official said that he
was worried about the "mixed messages" coming from
the US. "I emphasised with the Iranians that they
should not just assume that because the Americans
were bogged down in Iraq they were incapable of
taking action against Iran; I said that they were
entirely capable of it."
Saddam's execution, which came at dawn on December
30, was a clumsy and brutish affair. As he stood on
a scaffold with the noose around his neck, he was
taunted by some of his hooded executioners and by
spectators. Talabani was in Sulaimaniyah. Hours
before the execution, he had found the perfect
solution to his dilemma concerning the death
warrant. "It couldn't have been any better," Hiwa
Osman, his media adviser, explained. "He found that
in cases of international war crimes the
constitution did not give him the authority to alter
the court's ruling. In a way, it was a blessing from
the sky, and it solved his ethical dilemma."
As for Talabani's reaction to the execution, Osman
said: "Remember what he did in Paris when the death
sentence was announced, and he went into his bedroom
for an hour or so? This time, it lasted three or
four days. No one saw him".
Jon Lee Anderson
· Jon Lee Anderson is the author of The Fall of
Baghdad, The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from
Afghanistan and Che Guevara: A
Revolutionary Life
guardian co.uk
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