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When Warriors Become Politicians
1.2.2007
By Twana Osman, editor-in-chief of the Sulaimaniyah-based
newspaper Hawlati
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Real democracy in the Kurdish
regions will only emerge when the criteria for
leadership becomes accountability and competence
rather than years of military service.
February 1, 2007
Before the Kuwait war, the Kurdish struggle was led
by the warriors in the mountains, the Peshmerga
guerrilla fighters.
After the 1991 uprising and the establishment of the
Kurdish autonomous area in Iraq, the Kurds elected a
council of representatives and established a Kurdish
government. It was then that the problems started,
when the warriors became politicians.
Usually when there is a revolution, a military
takeover or coup d’etat, at some point the warriors
step aside and allow the politicians, the experts
and the technicians to run the country. You need
people with political and bureaucratic experience. |
Twana Osman, editor-in-chief of the Sulaimaniyah-based
independent Hawlati newspaper
|
But in Iraqi Kurdistan, the field commanders from
the mountains took all the important positions in
government, from the prime minister and speaker of
the parliament down to director generals of
industries.
Even to this day, every Iraqi Kurd in a key
position, from the president of the country on down,
was in some way associated with the fighters from
the hills.
The post-uprising generation, those who were five-
and ten-years-old in 1991 and are now in their 20s
and 30s, are almost entirely excluded from any
position of importance. They were not Peshmerga.
Once I was interviewing the deputy prime minister in
the Sulaimaniyah administration and I raised a
sensitive issue. He said to me bluntly, “You weren’t
a Peshmerga, you didn’t fight, you have no right to
discuss this with me.”
This is their mentality. They have and keep all of
the privileges, and will not allow anyone to compete
with them.
It is as if Iraqi Kurdistan is a limited company and
whoever was a Peshmerga has shares in the company
equal to the time he spent as a warrior. A year with
the Peshmerga is equal to 20 years of normal
activity.
We now have a parliament and the only legitimacy
should be legal and constitutional. That is the
basis of accountability and good governance.
But the elite in Kurdistan today rely on
revolutionary legitimacy. And that, in the end,
means the ones with the guns calls the shots.
They are the ones, they always insist on reminding
you, who kicked out Saddam in 1991. Of course this
kind of revolutionary legitimacy paralyses the logic
of a legal legitimacy and the rule of law. It
impedes democracy.
There are positive signs that social changes,
including the media environment and social
movements, are prompting the beginning of a change.
There is a huge amount of criticism now towards the
Kurdish government, both in the media and on the
street. Everyone is participating. The core of this
criticism is that the main political parties, the
Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, and the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, PUK, have to change the way they
are running the government.
But at the same time, the poor security situation in
the rest of Iraq is having an impact in the Kurdish
region. It only encourages Kurdish officials to
boast about their security stronghold. Before the
fall of Saddam Hussein, they used his existence as a
reason for not undertaking democratic reforms. Now
it is terrorism.
The only winners of all this are the political
parties, the PUK and the KDP. They have the approval
of both the Americans and the Iraqi governments, and
put every obstacle they can in the way of transition
and democratic reforms.
The Peshmerga in fact have only been formalised as
the Kurdish military. They use central government
funds to strengthen their position and the whole
security apparatus. The salary of a Peshmerga is
three times that of a university graduate, and as a
result thousands of young people, professionals and
people from small businesses are signing up,
continuing the militarisation of society.
All of this is used to put pressure on dissent.
In June 2006, there were demonstrations in many
cities in the Kurdish region over the lack of
services, especially electricity.
There are now only two hours of electricity a day,
and when a new electricity feeder was put into
place, the lines went directly to the home towns of
the two main leaders, Iraqi president Jalal Talabani
and president of the autonomous Kurdish government
Massoud Barzani.
But when people tried to gather to raise pressure
over public services, the Peshmerga intervened and
sent them home.
It is forbidden to hold a demonstration without
getting approval first, and in some areas the
Peshmerga the night before surrounded the gathering
places to prevent people from holding their actions.
In Halabja, they resorted to force. Two people were
killed, more than 20 injured and 200 arrested. Of
these, two of the arrested and ten of the wounded
were Hawlati correspondents.
Such events do show that there is a popular desire
for change. But the institutional base for this is
very small. The media is one pressure point. But
otherwise, real civil society is chaotic and
disorganised. In fact, the two parties almost
completely control the non-governmental
organisations and civil society groups in the
region, and dominate the main broadcast media
outlets.
As a result, change can only come from within the
parties for now, and they are trying to reform
internally – to ensure that no popular reform
movement can gain momentum.
An improvement in the security situation in the rest
of Iraq would be important, as it would remove the
Kurdish parties’ false excuse for continuing their
political control. The continuing influx of people
from the rest of Iraq is also driving inflation,
increasing the pressure on housing and creating
other problems.
The Americans could put more pressure on the
parties. So far, unfortunately, the US has
maintained relations only with the party elite and
is not in touch with the grassroots. Unlike in the
rest of Iraq, they haven’t really made a serious
effort to support the media and civil society in the
Kurdish region.
The new American discourse - emphasising strong
government over democratic government, talking more
about a stable Iraq than a diverse Iraq - seems only
to underline this approach.
Just because the Kurdish region is stable, the
Americans seem to behave as if it is a fully
established democracy with no problems. We will not
have a real democracy in the Kurdish area until we
move beyond revolutionary legitimacy and make the
criteria for leadership accountability and
competence rather than years of military service.
Twana Osman is editor-in-chief of the
Sulaimaniyah-based newspaper Hawlati.
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