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Iraqi Kurds: Five Years of Disappointment
11.4.2008
By Rebaz Mahmood in Sulaimaniyah (ICR No. 253) |
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One Iraqi Kurd’s hopes that life would improve after
Saddam have largely been dashed.
April 11, 2008
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq'
On April 9, 2003, as a crowd in central Baghdad’s
Al-Firdous square brought down Saddam’s statute, I
felt a rush of pure joy.
I still can’t express my pleasure as I watched
footage of the statute being pulled down, and people
dragging Saddam’s bronze head and beating it with
their sandals. I watched those images over and over
again, and every time my heart beat faster and my
hopes grew bigger. My expectations had never been
higher.
As I am a Kurd, the fall of Saddam meant more to me
than merely the end of a dictator. It meant that, as
I had been dreaming, we would finally get Kirkuk
back and build a bigger and stronger region within
Iraq. I hoped that we eventually would have our own
independent Kurdish state.
I had nurtured these dreams, along with the hope
that Iraq would be a new, peaceful and more
prosperous country. There would be no more genocide,
wars or authoritarian parties. People would be
better off economically. The country would build a
pluralist system in which human rights, freedom of
the press and free speech would be respected and
protected.
However, as we mark the fifth anniversary of the
fall of Saddam’s regime, I look back with a deep
sense of disappointment. Too little has been
achieved, and too much has been lost.
I had thought that Saddam was the source of all
problems and that removing him would solve
everything. While I still believe that the late
dictator is the root of Iraq’s problems, the past
five years have proved that we have a lot more to
deal with than we expected.
For example, I cannot go to Baghdad. Because I have
a Kurdish name, I am a potential target for
kidnapping and killing. When Arabs come to my
province in Iraqi Kurdistan,www.ekurd.net
they must register with
the security services. Someone within the community
has to act as sponsor for them because they are
considered potential terrorists.
Five years have passed since Saddam was overthrown,
and day after day, the ranks of those who still
support the initial war are thinning. Dreams of
getting rid of a dictator have turned to dreams of a
peaceful and stable country. Our lives are more
about survival than making change, and the shadow of
death hangs over everyone.
As a Kurd, my frustrations are enormous.
I know that while the middle and southern parts of
Iraq are engulfed in instability, my region has
rarely seen acts of terrorism. Life in Iraqi
Kurdistan is definitely safer - but otherwise, it is
not better. Although the economy is booming, the
standard of living is decreasing. While cranes and
construction sites abound, many people have nowhere
to live and inflation is at an all-time high.
Although the region gets billions of US dollars from
the national budget and makes a great deal of money
from regional revenues as well, the average
citizen’s quality of life is not improving.
Last week, the Kurdish press reported that a family
had given their ten-year-old daughter to a friend to
raise because they were too poor to look after her
themselves.
When I go to wash my face in the morning and the tap
is dry, or if I want to watch TV and the power is
out, it makes me angry. I would never have imagined
that I would think more about basic services like
water and electricity than about democracy and
freedom.
At the same time, democracy is retreating, not
growing, and press freedoms are constantly being
violated.
In contrast to past years, this year I will not be
celebrating on April 9. I see no light in the
future. Iran is becoming increasingly influential in
the south of the country, al-Qaeda continues to
attack in the centre; and Turkey has made repeated
incursions into the north.
Iraq’s political factions have failed to make peace
among themselves, let alone create prosperity for
the country’s people. Religious extremism is
increasing, and secularists are leaving the country.
What is happening in Iraq is not the fault of the
United States alone.
Iraqis must take the lion’s share of the
responsibility because they have made huge mistakes
in choosing the direction in which they want to take
their country.
They could have chosen to unite, shun sectarian
violence and revenge attacks, and build a new Iraq.
But unfortunately they chose another direction,www.ekurd.net
and the results are
shocking. While it is the fault of the
multi-national forces when they kill an innocent
civilian, Iraqis themselves are to blame when they
kill instead of embracing each other and accepting
coexistence.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, where people face problems such
as poor basic services, lack of democracy and
restricted press freedom, the two ruling parties
which dominate everything have failed to truly unite
their own administrations. The region still has two
centres of power - one in Erbil and the other in
Sulaimaniyah – with separate interior and finance
ministries, as well as two peshmerga military
forces.
The problem with the dominant parties, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, PUK, and the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, KDP, is that they will not accept
different points of view. They believe that because
they fought against the Baath regime, they each have
the right to the whole pie.
These parties have failed in everything I once
thought they could accomplish. I am no longer
hopeful that we will make Kirkuk part of Iraqi
Kurdistan again. It has again become a dream, and
one that I am not sure will ever come true.
The Kurdish parties – once advocates of freedom when
they were in the mountains – now repress opposition
voices and independent media. They are afraid of
losing the power they have held for the last 17
years since the region gained some autonomy from
Saddam’s government.
The Kurdish region was supposed to be a model for
democracy for the rest of Iraq; it is no longer
that.
Despite all these problems, I remain relieved about
one thing – Saddam is no longer alive or in power. I
am unwavering in my belief that life is much better
without him.
Today, I am not afraid that I will be forcibly
enlisted in the Iraqi army and made to fight for a
dictator’s lust for power. I do not worry that one
day, my family will be arrested and will vanish into
the deserts of southwestern Iraq, where hundreds of
thousands of Kurds disappeared during the Baath
regime’s Anfal campaigns of the Eighties.
When Saddam was in power, I relied on my sense of
hope to stay alive. I will never relinquish that
hope. We waited for 35 years for Saddam to be
overthrown. I can wait longer to see a different
Iraq.
I’m hoping that in the next five years, things will
be different. We have to decide what we want, and I
believe we must choose tolerance, democracy, freedom
and coexistence. Once we decide unanimously that
these are our goals, then everything will change.
Rebaz Mahmood is an IWPR-trained journalist in
Sulaimaniyah.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, iwpr
net
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