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In Kurdistan's long-delayed parliamentary contest,
everyone is running as a reformer |
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In Kurdistan's long-delayed parliamentary
contest, everyone is running as a reformer
25.6.2009
By Ferhad Murasil
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Count
Your Change
June
25, 2009
SULAIMANIYAH, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', —
If raw excitement is any indication, big things may
be happening in Iraqi Kurdistan. After months of
delay, campaign season has finally begun for the
autonomous region's July 25 parliamentary elections.
Billboards, banners, posters, and fliers are
everywhere. Big-name candidates are greeted like
rock stars. Patriotic songs blare from cars on the
streets. Kurds who were too young to vote in the
northern enclave's last election, four years ago,
talk eagerly about reform, and their parents and
grandparents seem no less enthusiastic. "Everyone
feels that this time will be totally different,"
says Asos Hardi,
a veteran journalist and political
analyst. "It will be the first time after the
invasion that we will have real competition."
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Iraqi Kurdistan |
Many Kurds would say they've waited far longer than
that. Ever since the region effectively gained
independence from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in
1991, its government has been dominated by two
political blocs: the Kurdistan Democratic Party and
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The two groups
were once deadly adversaries, but over the years
their relationship has grown cozy to the point where
they run as partners, with a single unified slate of
candidates known as the Kurdistani List. They
steamrolled the opposition that way four years ago,www.ekurd.net
and they're trying it again this year. Party leaders
say the purpose is to "maintain continuity." Other
Kurds believe the real point is to perpetuate the
KDP-PUK machine and its control over the oil-rich
northern Iraqi enclave. Still, by abandoning any
pretense of competition, the two parties have
cleared the way for the creation of a reformist
party known as Gorran, the Kurdish word for
"change." Hardi rates the group as "the strongest
challenge to the two ruling parties. Every day they
get more popularity and support."
Gorran's leader, a former PUK politician and
regional media baron named Nawshirwan Mustafa, says
he quit his old party in frustration over several
issues: the KDP-PUK stranglehold on power, the
failure to provide services to the region's people,
and the pursuit of policies that enrich party bosses
and their friends. Gorran's platform is aimed
straight at those targets. "We will campaign on an
anti-corruption, public-services, and infrastructure
agenda," says party spokesman Jwamer Mustafa. All
across the region—not only in Gorran's stronghold,
Sulaimaniyah, but also in the neighboring provinces
of Erbil and Duhok—the reformists have plastered
their logo on buses, taxis, private cars, T shirts,
and baseball caps: a candle on a dark blue
background, with orange script promising, "Change is
on the way."
The Kurdistani List enjoys some huge advantages in
resources, organization, and old political favors
and patronage. Those long-term assets haven't
deterred the group from making its own sweeping vows
of change: more public services and better
education, delivered by "the people who struggled in
the past"—a none-too-subtle allusion to the
peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrillas who spent years
fighting in the mountains against Saddam Hussein's
Army. (The fact is that Gorran's standard bearer, Nawshirwan Mustafa, is also one of the peshmerga's
heroes,www.hawlati.net
just like KDP boss Massoud Barzani and PUK leader
Jalal Talabani.) "Renewal and reconstruction,"
promises the Kurdistani List's omnipresent
green-and-yellow logo with the horse in the center.
"We plan to make reforms in all aspects—political,
economic, industrial, education, health, and women
and children—by allocating more funds and drafting
more bills," says Sozan Shahab, a Kurdistani List
candidate.
A total of 509 candidates are officially competing
for 111 available seats among Kurdistan's 2.5
million registered voters. Kurds are praying that
the rhetoric won't turn violent while they decide
whose promises to believe. Salah Khalil, an Erbil
schoolteacher who voted for the Kurdistani List in
2005, is thinking twice about which slate will get
his support this year: "We are not asking for a
miracle and for everything to change quickly, but
there's a lot to be done still, and people are fed
up with the situation." Others are more fatalistic.
Erbil car dealer Mazhar Mohammed also voted
Kurdistani in 2005, but says he won't vote this time
because he thinks it will change nothing.
There's already been a poll or two, but none has yet
predicted a loss for the KDP-PUK ticket. Most people
seem to expect the Kurdistani List to prevail, with
Gorran finishing a strong second, making a far
deeper dent than such perennial also-ran slates as
the Toilers Party and the Islamic Union. A survey by
the Kurdistan-based Point Organization for Opinion
Polls & Strategic Studies found that 51 percent of
respondents believe Gorran poses a serious challenge
to the Kurdistani List. The survey (which included
the largely Kurdish areas of Kirkuk and Mosul along
with Duhok,www.ekurd.net
Sulaimaniyah, and Erbil, the three governates of
Kurdistan proper) also found that 49 percent of its
1,000 respondents said the KDP and PUK will use
threats and fraud in the election process. Gorran
spokesman Jwamer Mustafa accuses the PUK and KDP of
sacking government employees who have links to the
challengers' list. But Shahab is unapologetic. "No
party allows its members to vote for another list,"
she says. "But they are free to join another party
or list and struggle for it." Meanwhile, the
Kurdistani List insists that fighting corruption is
one of its main priorities, and it promises to
establish a committee to do so. But come July 25,
the votes will be counted in Baghdad—just to make
sure everyone's using the same rulebook.
With Ferhad Murasil
Copyright, respective
author or news agency,
newsweek.com
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