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Rejoicing in democracy, Kurds look beyond
oil
31.7.2008
By Gail Bensinger
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July
31, 2008
Even if Democrat Barack Obama appears to have the
backing of Iraq's Arab political establishment, this
part of Iraq hopes Republican John McCain's prospect
of becoming America's next president will prevail.
Here in Kurdistan, the northernmost tier of Iraqi
provinces that has avoided much of the chaos of the
war, McCain's comment that some U.S. troops may have
to stay in Iraq indefinitely is wildly popular.
Praise is lavished on President Bush.
"The Kurds are very grateful to the United States
for liberating Iraq from dictatorship," said Rawand
Darwesh, protocol officer for the Kurdish Regional
Government's Foreign Relations Ministry. He was
referring, of course, to the ouster of Saddam
Hussein, the reviled Iraqi leader who waged a
genocidal campaign called the Anfal against the
Kurds.
Along with their loyalty to the United States, the
Kurds contend they offer a model for Iraqi
development once the fighting dies down for good.
"We want to make an example to the world that there
is a success story in Iraq," said Darwesh, a
cheerful man wearing a San Francisco T-shirt, a
souvenir of his year in America as a Fulbright
scholar. "It's not just the war."
A building boom is evident all over Kurdistan, a
three-province region of more than 5 million
inhabitants. The regional government is actively
looking beyond Iraq's borders for investment and
expertise to rebuild its rural economy and to
recruit modern industries so it can diversify beyond
oil.
"Kurdistan is a good candidate for the future of
freedom, and we need some help to promote democracy
and development together," said Anwar Abdullah, an
adviser to the regional government on sustainable
long-term development. A specialist in plant
biotechnology, he says that economic and
environmental restoration should go hand in hand.
This once was the breadbasket of Iraq, he said, with
fertile soil and plenty of water from the mountains
that dominate Kurdistan's topography. The long
isolation during the years of Anfal and
international sanctions against Iraq had an
unexpected benefit,www.ekurd.net
Abdullah said - the
croplands are suitable for organic agriculture
because no pesticides or chemical fertilizers were
available to Kurdish farmers.
With food scarcity and food security so much in the
public eye, Abdullah said, Kurdistan could feed
people beyond Iraq if it can adapt Western models of
production and marketing. For now, though, it's
still cheaper to import food, chiefly from Turkey,
than for Kurds to grow their own.
Indeed, all across Kurdistan economic development is
more concept than reality. By law, the regional
budget is almost entirely dependent on oil revenues
- 17 cents of every petrodollar is delivered, in
cash, from Baghdad to the regional treasury. The
national government, which has yet to adopt a
permanent law on distribution of oil revenues,
controls much of Kurdistan's fate - Iraq's banks are
not tied in to the international banking system, and
the country as a whole still lacks adequate
electricity and water, even mail service.
Iraq's known northern oilfields are productive, and
geologists speculate that as-yet undiscovered oil
and gas reserves will be extensive. But no
refineries exist in the north, and reliable fuel for
vehicles remains a problem - there are separate gas
stations for passenger cars, taxis and trucks.
Nearly all of the widespread building projects in
Irbil, the sprawling capital city of Kurdistan, and
elsewhere are being carried out by foreign companies
that bring not only their own managers and
equipment, but also their own workers, either from
their home countries or from such labor-exporting
places as the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Locally educated engineers are not finding much work
in these big projects, said Rund Hammoudi, a
geologist who heads international relations at the
University of Dohuk, which teaches all classes in
English. University graduates have a hard time
finding jobs except in the fields of computers and
medicine, she said.
The university is near the Turkish border, and the
newly paved highway that passes by Dohuk underscores
the challenges. Southbound trucks crammed with
building supplies, food, consumer goods and new cars
stream along in a flowing river of commerce, while
the ones heading north travel empty. Aside from oil,
Kurdistan has nothing, yet, to offer the outside
world.
Still, the Kurds feel like they have breathing space
while the rest of Iraq figures out how to quell the
violence and move ahead. The hardships of the Anfal
years and the enforced isolation under anti-Hussein
sanctions are behind them. The Kurdish militia known
as the peshmerga has been transformed into a police
force and regular Iraqi army units. Food is
plentiful,www.ekurd.net
and the bazaars teem
with Chinese and Turkish clothes and household
goods.
And unlike the Kurdish regions of neighboring Turkey
and Iran, Iraqi Kurds are free to speak their own
language, enjoy their own culture and govern their
own land.
"From the beginning," said Asmat Khalid, the
forward-looking president of the University of Dohuk,
"we believed democracy was the answer."
Up to 200,000 killed to
pacify Hussein
Saddam Hussein's two-year campaign of terror against
Iraq's Kurdish population, called the Anfal, began
in 1987, as the Iran-Iraq War was winding down.
During that war, Hussein was enraged because some
Kurds backed Iran over the Baathist government in
Baghdad. Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid -
known as "Chemical Ali" - was in charge of the Anfal
program.
There is still no definitive accounting of how many
Kurds died during that period. Human Rights Watch
says about 100,000 died, though many Kurds put the
number at roughly 200,000. The most notorious
killings occurred in the town of Halabja, the first
widespread use of chemical weapons on a noncombatant
civilian population. About 4,000 villages were
destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds became
refugees across the Iranian and Turkish borders.
Tens of thousands went into exile in Europe and the
United States, returning only after Hussein was
removed from power by the American-led invasion in
2003.
After the Anfal years, the Baathist government began
a new campaign of "Arabization," forcing Kurds to
resettle in Arab regions and repopulating the north
with poor Arabs from elsewhere. When U.S.-British
"no-fly zone" protection began in 1991, following
the first Gulf War, Hussein cut off the Kurds from
the national electrical grid and stopped other
resources from flowing north.
Hussein's trial on genocide charges was ongoing when
he was executed in Baghdad in late 2006. "Chemical
Ali" has been tried and sentenced to death, but has
not yet been executed.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, sfgate
com
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