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Kurdistan Democratic Party's Jalal Talabani: The next president of Iraq?
ARBIL, Iraq, Feb 10 (IPS) - Fresh from their success at the polls, Iraq’s two main Kurdish political parties have put forward 72-year-old Jalal Talabani as their candidate for the presidency of Iraq. If he succeeds in winning the post, it will be a fitting coda to one of Iraq’s most colourful careers.
Born into a prominent Kurdish family in1933, Talabani didn’t waste much time getting into politics.
After obtaining a law degree in Baghdad, he threw himself into the movement for Kurdish autonomy. He served on the politburo of the movement’s main organisation, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and when the Ba’ath Party came to power in a coup in 1963, he served on the KDP’s negotiating team with the regime.
When negotiations didn’t go well, the founder of the KDP, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, opted to keep fighting.
Talabani disagreed. He called Barzani ”tribal, feudal, and reactionary” and formed his own splinter group, taking part of the group’s politburo with him.
The split got so bad that in 1966, Talabani launched an armed assault on Barzani’s KDP with the help of the Iraqi Army. It would be the first of Talabani’s many short-term alliances.
”We Kurds are surrounded by enemies in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq,” says poet and human rights activist Farhad Pirbal. ”Sometimes our leaders go crazy and they think that by making an agreement with one of these leaders they can help themselves and the Kurdish cause.”
Talabani’s alliance with the Ba’ath Party didn’t last long. He returned to the Kurdish nationalist movement as the KDP’s representative in Damascus, but when Barzani’s revolt failed in 1975, Talabani split again -- this time forming a new group called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which came to control much of Kurdish northeastern Iraq along the Iranian border.
In 1978, he fought another round of battles with Barzani, but his main confrontation would come in the 1980s, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. This time Talabani threw in his lot with Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeni against Hussein. His PUK fighters took part in joint missions with the Iranian military, and he became an arch-enemy of the regime in Baghdad.
In 1988, Hussein launched al-Anfal, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, depopulating thousands of Kurdish villages where support for Talabani was strong.
As part of the Anfal, tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians were brought to desert camps in southern Iraq while others were simply shot and buried in hastily dug trenches near Kirkuk. At least 50,000 were killed. Kurdish politicians say the number is 182,000.
Many survivors remember officers in Hussein’s army making specific reference to Talabani during their detention.
”They told us that we are bringing you here for dying because you follow Jalal Talabani,” relates Hasna Ali Mohammed, an elderly woman who was sent to a desert detention facility near Samawa, where she says that seven to eight prisoners died daily. ”What could we do? We had to stay there with no food and no water.”
Nuri Abdel-Rahman Mohammed, a 63-year-old night watchman, tells a similar story.
”During the dark nights, we were pressed against each other like sardines and we would ask (the Iraqi military captors) ’for God’s sake, at least provide us with some candles to have light’.”
He says the Ba’athists responded: ”Go and tell Jalal Talabani to send you some candles.”
On Mar. 19, 1988, the Iraqi Army issued a communique after it attacked the city of Halabjah, which had been held jointly by the Iranian Army and the PUK.
”Our forces attacked the headquarters of the rebellion led by the traitor Jalal Talabani, agent of the Iranian regime, the enemy of the Arabs and Kurds,” it read. ”Our people have rejected from their ranks all traitors who sold themselves cheaply to the covetous foreign enemy.”
Some 5,000 Kurdish civilians died on Mar. 16 of that year when Hussein doused Halabjah with chemical weapons.
Through all this the West stood by and watched.
”It was because they were thinking about Iran,” says Aref Korbani, a journalist at the PUK’s television station in Kirkukand and an expert on the Anfal campaign.
”They were thinking that Iran would be powerful and they were worried that there would be a strong, powerful Islamic state in the region. The U.S., Britain, Germany and so many other countries filled Iraq with weapons to help destroy Iran.”
But when Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait a few years later, geopolitical calculations changed, and so did Talabani’s. The United States and Britain began supporting Kurdish leaders as a way of containing Hussein, and Talabani played his part.
After the 1991 Gulf War, Talabani’s PUK, along with his old rivals in the PDK (now led by Mullah Barzani’s son, Masoud Barzani), responded to then U.S. President George Bush, Sr.’s call to rise up against Hussein and launched attacks throughout the region..
The revolt failed when Bush withdrew U.S. support, but it eventually led to the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous region in the north, protected by a U.S.-British no-fly zone.
Even then, the situation was difficult. From 1994 until 1998, Talabani’s PUK and Barzani’s KDP fought a civil war for control of all of Iraqi Kurdistan. Before the conflict was over, both sides called in Ba’athists, and Talabani called on Hussein’s Kurdish supporters. Barzani called directly on the Iraqi Army, which ejected the PUK from the regional capital, Arbil.
Then, in 2003, with George W. Bush in charge in Washington, Talabani’s alliance with the U.S. intensified. When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, PUK forces fought alongside U.S. soldiers and kicked the Iraqi Army out of the country’s northern oil-rich city Kirkuk. Today, the PUK is the most powerful force in the city.
Now, at age 72, Jalal Talabani is a front-runner in the race for president of Iraq. A unified Kurdish slate came in second in the voting during the country’s Jan. 30 elections and Talabani has made a proposal to the victorious Shi’ite slate, together with his rival Barzani.
Either Jalal Talabani will go to Baghdad and become president or prime minister of Iraq, or the Kurds won’t join the government. Under this agreement, Barzani would become the president of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Talabani’s alliance with the United States has so far proved successful for both the aging leader and the Kurdish people. But as history demonstrates, especially in the mountains of northern Iraq, political winds have a tendency to change direction.
http://kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=6250
After obtaining a law degree in Baghdad, he threw himself into the movement for Kurdish autonomy. He served on the politburo of the movement’s main organisation, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and when the Ba’ath Party came to power in a coup in 1963, he served on the KDP’s negotiating team with the regime.
When negotiations didn’t go well, the founder of the KDP, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, opted to keep fighting.
Talabani disagreed. He called Barzani ”tribal, feudal, and reactionary” and formed his own splinter group, taking part of the group’s politburo with him.
The split got so bad that in 1966, Talabani launched an armed assault on Barzani’s KDP with the help of the Iraqi Army. It would be the first of Talabani’s many short-term alliances.
”We Kurds are surrounded by enemies in Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq,” says poet and human rights activist Farhad Pirbal. ”Sometimes our leaders go crazy and they think that by making an agreement with one of these leaders they can help themselves and the Kurdish cause.”
Talabani’s alliance with the Ba’ath Party didn’t last long. He returned to the Kurdish nationalist movement as the KDP’s representative in Damascus, but when Barzani’s revolt failed in 1975, Talabani split again -- this time forming a new group called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which came to control much of Kurdish northeastern Iraq along the Iranian border.
In 1978, he fought another round of battles with Barzani, but his main confrontation would come in the 1980s, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. This time Talabani threw in his lot with Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeni against Hussein. His PUK fighters took part in joint missions with the Iranian military, and he became an arch-enemy of the regime in Baghdad.
In 1988, Hussein launched al-Anfal, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, depopulating thousands of Kurdish villages where support for Talabani was strong.
As part of the Anfal, tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians were brought to desert camps in southern Iraq while others were simply shot and buried in hastily dug trenches near Kirkuk. At least 50,000 were killed. Kurdish politicians say the number is 182,000.
Many survivors remember officers in Hussein’s army making specific reference to Talabani during their detention.
”They told us that we are bringing you here for dying because you follow Jalal Talabani,” relates Hasna Ali Mohammed, an elderly woman who was sent to a desert detention facility near Samawa, where she says that seven to eight prisoners died daily. ”What could we do? We had to stay there with no food and no water.”
Nuri Abdel-Rahman Mohammed, a 63-year-old night watchman, tells a similar story.
”During the dark nights, we were pressed against each other like sardines and we would ask (the Iraqi military captors) ’for God’s sake, at least provide us with some candles to have light’.”
He says the Ba’athists responded: ”Go and tell Jalal Talabani to send you some candles.”
On Mar. 19, 1988, the Iraqi Army issued a communique after it attacked the city of Halabjah, which had been held jointly by the Iranian Army and the PUK.
”Our forces attacked the headquarters of the rebellion led by the traitor Jalal Talabani, agent of the Iranian regime, the enemy of the Arabs and Kurds,” it read. ”Our people have rejected from their ranks all traitors who sold themselves cheaply to the covetous foreign enemy.”
Some 5,000 Kurdish civilians died on Mar. 16 of that year when Hussein doused Halabjah with chemical weapons.
Through all this the West stood by and watched.
”It was because they were thinking about Iran,” says Aref Korbani, a journalist at the PUK’s television station in Kirkukand and an expert on the Anfal campaign.
”They were thinking that Iran would be powerful and they were worried that there would be a strong, powerful Islamic state in the region. The U.S., Britain, Germany and so many other countries filled Iraq with weapons to help destroy Iran.”
But when Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait a few years later, geopolitical calculations changed, and so did Talabani’s. The United States and Britain began supporting Kurdish leaders as a way of containing Hussein, and Talabani played his part.
After the 1991 Gulf War, Talabani’s PUK, along with his old rivals in the PDK (now led by Mullah Barzani’s son, Masoud Barzani), responded to then U.S. President George Bush, Sr.’s call to rise up against Hussein and launched attacks throughout the region..
The revolt failed when Bush withdrew U.S. support, but it eventually led to the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous region in the north, protected by a U.S.-British no-fly zone.
Even then, the situation was difficult. From 1994 until 1998, Talabani’s PUK and Barzani’s KDP fought a civil war for control of all of Iraqi Kurdistan. Before the conflict was over, both sides called in Ba’athists, and Talabani called on Hussein’s Kurdish supporters. Barzani called directly on the Iraqi Army, which ejected the PUK from the regional capital, Arbil.
Then, in 2003, with George W. Bush in charge in Washington, Talabani’s alliance with the U.S. intensified. When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, PUK forces fought alongside U.S. soldiers and kicked the Iraqi Army out of the country’s northern oil-rich city Kirkuk. Today, the PUK is the most powerful force in the city.
Now, at age 72, Jalal Talabani is a front-runner in the race for president of Iraq. A unified Kurdish slate came in second in the voting during the country’s Jan. 30 elections and Talabani has made a proposal to the victorious Shi’ite slate, together with his rival Barzani.
Either Jalal Talabani will go to Baghdad and become president or prime minister of Iraq, or the Kurds won’t join the government. Under this agreement, Barzani would become the president of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Talabani’s alliance with the United States has so far proved successful for both the aging leader and the Kurdish people. But as history demonstrates, especially in the mountains of northern Iraq, political winds have a tendency to change direction.
http://kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=6250
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Having his family uprooted at gunpoint so distressed Amir Khadum Farhood that he refuses to see the rough justice that is being done in liberated Iraq.
As he tells it, he went to Kurdistan in the 1970s. The Government "gave" him a house, and in time he bought a farm with money from the sale of another plot of land that was a "gift" from the regime.
But these were deals with the devil and they implicate the teacher in two of the deposed Saddam Hussein's most brutal acts against his own people.
In the Anfal campaign, Saddam trucked tens of thousands of Kurds to prisons and mass graves, and in a parallel Arabisation program he replaced the "disappeared" Kurds with Arabs from the south, who were enticed to go north with cash and grants of confiscated Kurdish land.
Now Farhood sits in Baghdad with a bundle of title deeds that he thinks have become worthless as new local officials in the north - like Abdul Rehman Belaf, the Mayor of Makhmur, near Kirkuk - boast of reversing local demographics in less than a year. His district used to be 80 per cent Arab; now it is more than 80 per cent Kurdish.
"We made sure there wasn't a single Arab left who came as part of the Arabisation program [and] we haven't stopped yet," he told a reporter. "We have more land to take back."
Farhood is still shocked by the events of April 2003: "An official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan came to my house with men who were shooting in the air - they told me I had 24 hours to clear out. If I didn't leave, we'd all be killed. My home was worth $US35,000, so as we left I complained to officials in Kirkuk. But they told me that the man from the PUK - Mr Saleh Azziz - was untouchable."
Farhood's family of seven is not exactly homeless - they came south to Baghdad, where they and hundreds like them have managed to commandeer homes abandoned by the families of Saddam's military as US forces poured into the capital.
But the Kurds are positioning themselves for more than simply reversing Saddam's ethnic cleansing: their nationalist cohesion and the tightness of their voting on January 30 appear to have delivered them the role of king-maker in Iraq's new National Assembly. Other parties have to rely on the Kurds' estimated 20-plus per cent backing to endorse decisions that require an absolute majority.
The vote garnered by the various coalitions that contested the election translates directly into the number of seats each wins in the 275-member assembly, which will vote for the three-man presidential council that will appoint a prime minister who, in turn, will name a cabinet.
So the Kurds will have a say in key appointments, like the president and prime minister, and they will be able to force their own demands in return for backing the demands of others.
Already emboldened by the likely outcome, the Kurds are insisting on the presidency for one of their own, Jalal Talabani of the PUK. And they will arrive in the assembly with one of the most controversial demands in the new Iraq - the inclusion of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in their semi-autonomous northern fiefdom.
Good politics requires Kurdish leaders to curb their tongues. But sometimes exuberance gets the better of them, as this week, when Masoud Barzani, with whom Talabani shares leadership of the Kurds, claimed: "Only death, no powers or states in the world, can make me give up Kirkuk."
They also want their autonomy guaranteed and a constitutional right for their Peshmerga militia to continue to function locally and independently as a separate part of Iraq's national military.
Their every claim is another brick in a path to a dream that burns in most Kurdish hearts: independence. The leadership insists that it must remain part of an Iraqi federation, but already neighbouring Turkey, which oppresses its 12 million Kurds, is threatening military incursions if Iraq's Kurds win too much autonomy.
In Baghdad this week, a PUK envoy, Sadoun Shafi, put the federation argument to the Herald, but he insisted: "Talabani must be president and Kirkuk is ours. And just as the wealth of New York belongs to the people of New York, the oil belongs to us as the centrepiece of our economy."
The demands of the Kurds enrage Arab Iraqis, but the Kurds can be expected to drive hard bargains before they will support efforts by the other parties, the religious Shiites in particular, to shape the new Iraq according to their agendas.
Ordinarily the Kurds would be expected to stand in the way of any Shiite attempt to incorporate elements of sharia law into the constitution, but given their secular quasi-autonomy in the north, might they do a deal in return for recognition of some of their own seemingly non-negotiable demands?
Other secular parties can be expected to call on the Kurds to join them in blocking any excess by a Shiite religious majority in the assembly, but they will not be able to deliver on the Kurds' demands.
So it seems that the two groups most oppressed by Saddam, the religious Shiites and the Kurds, may be destined to shape the new Iraq. But that requires the fragile coalition of religious Shiite parties to remain united in the face of efforts by the secular backers of the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, to pick it apart.
Watching from the sidelines will be two unelected and massively powerful players - the US ambassador, John Negroponte, and the spiritual leader of the Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who brought together the coalition of religious parties, the United Iraqi Alliance.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the alliance, last week claimed to be cementing in a coalition with the Kurds, when he told reporters: "The alliance with the Kurds is known, it is continuing, and it will continue."
The US has worked longest and most closely in Iraq with the Kurds. It will be sorely tempted, but should resist any urge to press them to do its bidding in the National Assembly.
The people of Iraq have been here before - it was in the 1920s, the invader was Britain, and they chose a different minority, the Sunnis, to do their work for them.
Look where it got them.