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Kurdistan or Barbaristan?
6.1.2008
By Dr. Kamal Mirawdali - The contents of this article
reflect the author's personal opinions
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January 6, 2008
Destruction of Kurdish identity, society and culture
under the primitive totalitarian rule of KDP and PUK.
My long silence was direct result of my travel to
Kurdistan. Whenever I go and come back I feel sick:
physically, psychologically and spiritually. If I
write, I must write with blood of my heart.
Kurdistan region is no longer a country, a land, a
society and least a civilization. It is Barbaristan;
it is a jungle of crime without punishment, of abuse
of power without accountability, of the control of
tribal party totalitarianism over every aspect of
human life without limits and checks, of absolute
hegemony of a handful of rotten families over
economy, media, land and people, of trivialization
of everything that is sacred, valuable and
meaningful in human life. Two concepts have
completely disappeared in south Kurdistan: concept
of human beings and human rights and concept of
country/homeland. Nothing is as cheap as human life.
Nothing is as worthless as human dignity.
Women are killed and burned every day, not because
of backwardness and patriarchy structure of Kurdish
society as some intellectual prostitutes and phony
feminists claim but as a direct result of the sexual
and physical abuse and harassment they
systematically receive at the hands of KDP and PUK
thugs who abuse their absolute control over economy,
jobs, services, opportunities and lives to make
sexual satisfaction of their beastly instincts the
main mechanism of equal opportunity in Kurdish
society. Tens of people die on the same streets and
roads of death by car accidents every day. You
cannot eat food and be certain it is not expired or
even poisoned. Hospitals have only name left to
them. Schooling and education have lost their
principles and purpose. In a school, 67 children
have one Kurdish text book. In another six children
sit on a chair made for three. Universities and
cultural ‘institutions’ have become places of party
tribalism and science and knowledge have lost their
basic definitions.
Tens of newspapers are owned and published by party
officials or people related to them without anyone
reading them. Sulaimaniyah from a city of culture
and Kurdism has been transformed to a village of
desolation and despair without basic services and
amenities. Often drinking water is mixed with
sewage. Electricity is becoming rarer and rarer. In
the whole city there is no a pedestrian crossing
even for children. Such things as postal service,
cleaning streets or provision of social services are
alien terminology. As an act of nepotism and
corruption, not culture, Ibrahim Ahmad’s novelette
Jani Gel has been produced as a film. But there is
no cinema house in Sulaimaniyah now to show it while
Sulaimaniyah had had respectable thriving cinemas
since 1940s.www.ekurd.net
They had to use the Cultural Hall built
by the Ba’th regime to show it! Everything that is
beautiful, honourable, cultural, historical and
local in the city has been destroyed. Young people
stopped reading and showing interest in culture.
Where there is no opposition, there is no hope of
change. Where there is no hope of change, people
especially the young ones, live in hell.
Schooling in many of the few surviving villages,
with 50-70 per cent reduced population, has
disappeared. A whole generation of young people are
disfranchised, marginalized and forced to migrate
often dying lonely on the roads of exile.
Kurdistan’s productive and beautiful villages have
been devastate as a direct deliberate result by PUK
and KDP mafias to destroy all the infrastructures of
independence and autonomy in Kurdish society.
Iranians attack at will, bomb border villages, kill
civilians and flock, force thousands to flee. Yet
according to Talabani Iran is the best friend and
ally to the Kurds. Turkish warplanes come and go at
will, bomb villages with napalm, killing dozens of
civilians, displacing thousands of people. Up to
2000 children have lost their education.
No problem. According to Talabani, Urdogan is the
best democrat in history. Displaced people and
refugees of Kirkuk still, after four years, have not
returned to their homes. Most Anfal families in a
recent survey wish that they had been eliminated by
Saddam with the rest of their lost members rather
than suffering such degree of indignity, poverty and
hardship under the new PUK and KDP. No problem. The
suffering of Anfal women is normal for Talabani. He
has never met them or kissed their children. What
makes him sleepless at night is the bad conditions
of Chemical Ali and Sultan Hashim in their prisons.
These are the people who need protection and care.
They were so dignified that they did not even
express regret or apologize for eliminating 200,000
Kurds and 4000 Kurdish villages.
The only semi-independent newspaper in Kurdistan is
Hawlati. The most usually critical piece of writing
in this paper is a small column in its final page
called “hanasa”. This means “breath”, a small tiny
corner of free breath in a jungle of lawlessness,
theft and daily abuse of power against people. Yet
even this is too much for this great democrat,
lawyer, humanist veteran leader Talabani,www.ekurd.net
who is too
sensitive and kind to sign the death sentence of
Saddam or allow the murderers of 200,000 of ‘his
own’ people (this expression was used to be applied
to Saddam after his Halabja and Anfal massacres) to
meet the justice decided by proper legal and
judicial processes which he as lawyer always
upholds! Last year two of Hawlati editors were
forced to resign as a result of pressure by PUK
authorities whose illiterate partisan ‘judges’
shamelessly use Ba'thist Saddamist laws to punish
journalists as if we offered half million martyrs
and wanted the end of Saddam and Arab occupation
only to be ruled by Kurdish incarnations of Arab
Ba’thists.
The owner of the paper was publicly beaten and
humiliated in a public club. Another journalist from
Halabajwas kidnapped, beaten and left on street in
Halabja immediately after he wrote a critical
article about Talabani. Editors of a magazine in
Hawler Bzaw were forced to close it down after it
published an analytical article about Talabani's
conduct during his Cairo visit.
As I said in an interview with Hawalti in June it is
absolutely criminal, immoral and insult to human
reason and values to use the words “civil society”
and “democracy” to refer to any aspect of life in
such closed barbaric totalitarian decadent dynasty
of Talabani and Barzani families and their vassals.
This is the model of democracy that the Bush
administration has given Kurdish society. Once upon
a time Powell and Bremer boasted of taking the
example of PUK/KDP democracy into the rest of Iraq.
Now after 4 years of American control of Iraqi
politics, this fantastic model has been consummated.
Perhaps that is what Mr Freedman calls the Kurdish
secret. He writes: “The Kurdish autonomous zone
should be our model for Iraq. Does George Bush or
Condi Rice have a better idea? Do they have any
idea?”[New York Times, September 3, 2007].
No they don’t. If this Kurdish model cannot inspire
them, whatever can? Perhaps that is why Mr Bush
seems so dull! Perhaps Mr Freedman should advise
Bush and Rice to apply this Kurdish model to
American society before they leave office.
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The contents of this article reflect the author's
personal opinions
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