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Trying to Overturn the Game Board in Iraqi
Kurdistan
10.2.2011
By Rudaw |
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February 10, 2011
The resort to violence only finds justification when
a political system remains closed to any other
attempts at change. Even then, non-violent protests
and civil disobedience are generally preferable to
armed resistance. Few doubt that the Tunisian and
Egyptian political systems were completely closed in
every meaningful sense of the word. This in turn
justified the mass protests that erupted in both
countries, and the international sympathy they
garnered.
The Gorran Party’s recent talk of replicating the
Tunisian example in Kurdistan, however, amounts to
crying wolf. As my fellow columnists for this
newspaper correctly pointed out, Gorran participated
in the last elections, which were declared free and
fair by international observers, and accepted the
results. In other words, the political system in
Iraqi Kurdistan, despite its many shortcomings,
still allows room for the legal, institutionalized
pursuit of change. If the Tunisians and Egyptians
had been so lucky, they wouldn’t have needed to take
to the streets by the millions.
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Gorran leader Nawshirwan Mustafa (L) Kurdistan
president Massoud Barzani. |
To turn suddenly around and demand the dissolution
of the Kurdistan Regional Government and Parliament
strikes most people as petty. Gorran is acting like
a child who overturns the game board when he starts
to lose. It complains that Gorran people were not
given any posts in KRG institutions. Since the
current KRG government is not a minority coalition
government, why should they have expected any
appointments? After Gorran forsook Kurdish national
goals in Baghdad by quitting the Kurdistan Alliance
(a unified bloc formed to press Kurdistan’s
objectives vis-a-vis political groups in the rest of
Iraq), they should count themselves lucky that
anyone still speaks to them at all. At a time when
Iraqi Kurdistan still faces serious threats from
outside, it also strikes many Kurdistanis as the
height of folly to try to bring down the government
through non-institutionalized means.
What makes this whole incident all the more
depressing is that, lost in Gorran’s overdone
histrionics, are some very legitimate complaints
against the KRG. Nawshirwan Mustafa is correct when
he points out that a great many key institutions in
the KRG,www.ekurd.netfrom
the peshmerga and Asayish to various
not-so-non-governmental organizations (also known as
‘fake NGOs’, or GONGOs – government organized
non-governmental organizations), remain under KDP
and PUK party control rather than that of the
government. Corruption still runs rampant, as does
nepotism. Most, although thankfully not all, media
outlets are party controlled (of course this
includes Wusha Corporation, the Gorran Party’s media
company). Services, including education and health
care, still need a lot more improvement – the kind
of advances that are less likely to occur when
corruption keeps society from running as efficiently
as it could.
Most countries in the world face problems more
similar to those of Kurdistan than Egypt or Tunisia
– partly open, partly liberal political systems
where incumbent political parties enjoy all kinds of
unfair advantages. Such systems are not the closed,
deeply authoritarian political environments that
spawned protest in Tunisia and Egypt. The proper
response in such a context would be to exercise
one’s right to free speech (Wusha Corporation and
its KNN television channel are very useful to Gorran
in this case) and work hard to compete in the next
elections, rather than demanding that the current
game be overturned. We’re all anxiously waiting for
Gorran to develop the political maturity to realize
as much.
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