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Jalal Talabani: From Kurdish Villager to
Iraqi President
28.8.2009
By Chibli Mallat
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The
student who refused to be a crawling lawyer
August
28, 2009
Jalal Talabani, 76, is a larger-than-life character.
I met him for the first time back in January 1991 at
the London Russell Hotel with my friend Edward
Mortimer, who had helped Iraqis of all hues break
the barrier of silence since his coverage for the
London Times of the 1973 Kurdish uprising against
the regime of Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam
Hussein. Five months after the invasion of Kuwait in
August 1990, Talabani could still not get a meeting
with a lower level diplomat in the State department,
courtesy of a US presidential directive issued in
1987 or 1988 to forbid American diplomats from
meeting with members of the Iraqi opposition.
Jalal Talabani now meets any president in the world
on a par, and is better known than 90 percent of
world leaders. He is the only democratically elected
president in the Arab world, I would even argue in
the Middle East.
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Iraqi President : Jalal Talabani, a Kurd |
This
is quite a trajectory, worth a solid biography: how
did the Kurdish-only speaking kid of a forlorn
village in the Sulaimaniyah region of Iraq become
the elected president of a country with a massive
Arab majority?
Language is the least of Talabani's problems. Back
in 1991, at the Russell Hotel, we spoke in Arabic,
but he was not shy from arguing in his then-halting
English. Two decades or so later, he is comfortable
with rare English turns-of-phrases, and peppers his
meetings with trans-linguistic puns. Talabani's
Arabic is remarkable, very much in the vein of
Deleuze’s “littérature mineure,” in which the French
philosopher showed how Franz Kafka and Joseph
Conrad, respectively non-native German and English
denizens,www.ekurd.net
compensated for their “minority” status by the
excellence of their literary language in German and
English. I had actually read Talabani, years before
meeting him, in an impressive Arabic book that had
been published in a leftist Beirut publishing house,
al-Talia. It is entitled “Kurdistan wal-haraka al-qawmiyya
al-kurdiyya” (“Kurdistan and the Kurdish national
movement”), and remains one of the best works about
the history of Kurdish nationalism in the 20th
century. This is a book written by a convinced
secular leftist. Talabani is proud of his
vice-presidency of the Socialist International and
says he remains convinced by its principles.
In Sulaimaniyah over two days and five hours of
conversation at lunch and dinner on May 15-16, I
sought the Iraqi president’s views on a number of
issues of historic importance, central among them
Talabani the lawyer and the ways law colored his
vision. We talked about the Iraqi Constitution,
which is undergoing a revision, about federalism in
Iraq, about persisting differences over Iraq’s oil
and gas. We also discussed the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. Talabani remains proud of his active
support of Palestinians, and fondly recalls his work
in the late 1960s with the radical Palestinian
leader Wadih Haddad.
These are current topics which deserve a fuller,
separate treatment. I just want to convey here some
of the flavor of Talabani the lawyer. I knew he had
studied law, and I was keen to get some of his
recollections on that professional dimension. One
striking recollection was his years at law school,
and his early apprenticeship. Already committed to
the wider political world, a leftist one which took
him in the late 1950s to China and Soviet Russia, he
refused to be “a crawling lawyer” to get “the
certificate of good behavior” then needed for
graduation. His professor Hassan Chalabi, who
currently presides over the Islamic University of
Lebanon, allowed him to dispense with it. Talabani
remains grateful to this day.
Talabani is a wordsmith who does not get lost in
unnecessary word-parsing. In one of our many
meetings during the hard years of the opposition, at
the Iraqi National Congress founding in Vienna in
June 1992, I could see how he could get impatient
with side issues like the number of delegates that
the INC chose to enlist for its inevitably
ineffectual legislative branch of the exile group.
When we talked in Sulaimaniyah about the Iraqi
Constitution, it was different: on my suggestion
that the present text risked undermining the
election of the next president of Iraq, because of
an elastic timetable for the president’s choice by
the Council of Representatives (CoR), Talabani was
adamant. It did not happen for his election – he was
readily elected because of his immense popularity
across the board in Iraq – but he said
procrastination would not happen either for a less
consensual successor. The Constitution plans a
two-tier process in Article 70, whereby the
president is elected by a two-third majority of the
CoR in a first ballot, otherwise by majority. That
was sufficient, he explained, and did not need to be
revised. I was swayed.
On the more controversial three-member Presidency
Council (PC) (with him as president and two
vice-presidents, Adel Abdel-Mehdi and Tareq al-Hashimi)
which was appended to the 2005 Constitution, we
agreed that it would be beneficial for the country
to keep it: while the veto power of the PC,
occasionally exercised by a sole member of the
triumvirate, unduly complicated the legislative
process, the PC was a strong guarantor of Iraqi
unity. The relevant constitutional article is
temporary in nature, and will not be effective after
the next election in January. Responding to my
concern about the disappearance of the PC, Talabani
was philosophical: if the Iraqis decide not to
extend it, he said, “then this is part of democracy,
and we must accept it.”
In our farewell dinner meeting, I was at the
president’s house with a close friend, Andrew Allen.
Andrew is a leading British barrister who chose to
spend a year in Iraq to help the judiciary and the
legislative branch on the difficult route to the
rule of law, in the Global Justice Project: Iraq
which the University of Utah established in Baghdad
with a grant of the US government. Andrew is not
fluent in Arabic, and toward the end of the
conversation, the Iraqi president turned to him to
express a heartfelt apology: “I am extremely sorry,”
he said, “for shutting you off from our
conversation.” To Andrew’s polite demurrer, he
added: “I understand so intimately how you feel, for
so many of my Kurdish compatriots were as helpless
in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.” For me, it had been a
long time I had not felt so miffed. God knows that I
never had much sympathy for the Arab dictators,www.ekurd.net
but
this goes well beyond to a deeper problem of the
travails of Arab nationalism. I still shudder at the
terror of a Kurdish citizen at the checkpoint,
arrested and ordered around, in a language he does
not understand, by suspicious security members of an
Arab-dominated Iraq. Andrew was the guest of the
Iraqi president, and I suddenly felt profoundly
sorry for not providing the translation needed
throughout those long hours of a unique encounter.
Talabani's closing remark goes to his unique
sensitivity to structural injustice.
A Kurdish lawyer president of a federal Iraq, this
is a symbol of hope for a different Arab world, and
a different Middle East. But the contrarian odds are
heavy.
Chibli Mallat, presidential professor at the
University of Utah, and EU Jean Monnet chair at St
Joseph’s University, edits The Daily Star law page.
Copyright, respective
author or news agency, dailystar com.lb
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