In the Eye of the Storm
by Nyier Abdou
Nyier Abdou talks to Kurdish Prime Minister Barham Saleh about the end of an era - and the storms kept at bay.
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Barham Saleh is pleased with Cairo. The weather is good, the accommodation agreeable, the city cleaner than he remembers it from his last visit, years ago. "It's been relaxing," he says, as we settle into a table on the Marriott terrace. "I needed some relaxation."
For the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), everything is relative. On his
three-day visit to Cairo, Saleh has not been lounging by the pool. Between meetings with Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa and Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher on plans for post-war Iraq, Saleh is busy being the Western-friendly public face of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). But following the tense situation in the north during the US-led military campaign in Iraq, shuttle diplomacy is probably a welcome relief.
With international attention focussed on preparations for an interim leadership in Iraq, the timing of Saleh's visit to Cairo is conspicuous, in large part because a US-administered Iraq will hold a tenuous position within the Arab world. Many in the Arab world were shocked by the swift fall of Baghdad, having expected a long and tenacious fight before Iraq was grudgingly relinquished to the US-led coalition. Scenes of jubilation when American forces entered Baghdad, while balanced by spates of resistance, spoke differently. Saleh is not shy to say I told you so.
"It's no secret to say that the people of Iraq are utterly disappointed with the Arab League, and with the political order in the Arab world," he says. "Many in the Arab world stood by Saddam Hussein, in the name of Arab solidarity, and lost sight of the plight of the Iraqi people."
Saleh argues that rather than "trying to derail international efforts at our liberation" and appease swelling anti-American sentiment in the region with statements opposing the US-UK thrust to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein, Arab and Muslim nations should have seen an opportunity to remove a brutal dictator and seized it. "We were facing the tyranny of Saddam Hussein alone," he said, "while it would have been right for Arab armies, and Islamic armies, to be the vanguard of our liberation."
As prominent Iraqi political figures make the transition from "opposition" to "democrats", many are vying for a place in Iraq's post-war power structure. But as representatives from Iraq's patchwork of predominantly ethnic-based political factions make their way to Cairo - a delegation of the Tehran-based Shi'a group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) met with Ahmed Maher on Monday - it seems that there is more to these visits than a chance to vent long simmering resentments and maintain a high profile. Speaking as an Iraqi and not as a Kurdish leader, Saleh stressed that despite its former isolation, the new Iraq will have to be taken into the Arab fold.
Citing Egypt as "an important centre of gravity in the region" and a "regional power", Saleh highlighted the need for "serious dialogue with the region about Iraq, new and future". Asked if he felt that Egypt and the rest of the Arab world had a role to play in the development of the new political framework of Iraq, Saleh touched on what is both a chief concern and a sensitive issue among Arab leaderships: the democratisation of the Arab world. "Obviously, we look forward to help from Egypt to make sure that the political process in Iraq will lead to the establishment of a federal, democratic government that will be at peace with the people of Iraq and at peace with the neighbours of Iraq," Saleh said. "What happens in Iraq is of consequence to the interests of Egypt."
Saleh extended an implicit warning to regional powers not to stand in the way of Iraqi democracy because of anxiety over US hegemony. "We are part of the region. It's time for the region to help Iraq rebuild itself - help us have the space within which we, as Iraqis, can make free decisions about our future."
Pressed whether the issue of a Western-backed democratic leadership in Baghdad had Arab states nervous about the future of regional strategic relationships, Saleh accentuated that the post-war period is essentially ground zero for Iraq's political process. "Let us all have the courage to admit failure," he said. "Iraq is the embodiment of a failed state. The 'humpty dumpty' of Iraq's centralised dictatorship cannot be put back together." Pointing to the darkest days of the Hussein regime, Saleh recalled "one of the most brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing against its own citizens" and called on the Arab world to face up to the horrors that occurred in Iraq.
"The Middle East has to accept the reality of this failure," Saleh said. "We are serious about making sure that our future is fundamentally different from our miserable past. I hope that Iraq will become a model, a beacon for hope, for others around the Middle East. No one should doubt that business as usual is over."
Saying that Saddam Hussein's rule had reduced the once vibrant and wealthy nation of Iraq to "a big prison", Saleh suggests that one need only look at the most basic social indicators, such as child mortality and literacy, to see the "miserable reality that Iraqis had to endure". Asked if this was not directly related to the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq following the First Gulf War, Saleh is adamant that no blame be shifted away from Hussein's regime.
"Many people wanted to blame it on sanctions," he says. "There were many problems with the UN [Oil-for-Food] programme. I am the first to admit that. In fact, if anything, I am one of the big critics of the United Nations and its mismanagement of the situation in Iraq. But the fundamentals of the situation are that Saddam Hussein's dictatorship killed Iraqis. His adventures turned Iraq into the wasteland that we know."
Former UN coordinators for Iraq Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom resigned from their posts in protest against sanctions and became active in the international anti-war movement, have long maintained that the workings of the Oil-for-Food programme were efficient but that the programme itself was fundamentally flawed. Saleh disagrees, maintaining that Hussein had a ruthless policy of keeping people deprived by withholding medicine and keeping hospitals undersupplied "so he could make a point to the rest of the world: sanctions are killing babies".
"Politics killed babies," he says firmly. "Dictatorship killed Iraqi babies."
No element of the anti-war movement is spared Saleh's dignified disdain, be it the weak official opposition expressed by some Arab leaderships or the fiery oratory offered by anti-war icons like Halliday, von Sponeck, British MP George Galloway and veteran Labour politician Tony Benn - though he admits that many "ordinary people" who participated in the movement were "well-meaning". Tapping into a deep well of resentment that he insists is pervasive throughout Iraq, however, Saleh dismissed celebrity activists as moving their own political agenda.
"I can tell you for sure the interests of the Iraqi people were not among their priorities," he says. "Because had that been the case, they would have come and advocated that Saddam Hussein's dictatorship not use medicine and food as weapons of war against the people of Iraq." Suggesting that the brutalities of Saddam Hussein were shamefully overshadowed by persuasive anti-war rhetoric, Saleh relegated figures like Halliday and von Sponeck to duplicitous "advocates for evil".
The anti-war cry that the US-led campaign was a "war for oil" has no resonance with Saleh, who notes that Iraqi oil "has always been used as a justification to keep the status quo in Iraq", at the expense of the Iraqi people. Even if it were a war for oil, then "at least for once Iraqi oil became a blessing for the people of Iraq rather than the curse it has always been."
As Saleh speaks, one can easily imagine him on the podium, where his decisive tone obviously flourishes. Based out of Washington for some 10 years, he has been a key figure in the self-administered Kurdish enclave in the north of Iraq, which has enjoyed relative stability since the First Gulf War. Despite rampant speculation that Kurdish leaders like PUK founder Jalal Talabani and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) head Massoud Barzani would capitalise on the uncertainty engendered by the war in Iraq to push for an independent Kurdish state, Saleh repeatedly returns to the copiously quoted catchphrase of the Iraqi opposition: a "federal, democratic Iraq".
Federalism in the Iraqi context is a broad concept, but Saleh is certain in his vision of an "ethnic-based federal arrangement". He steers clear of using the word "state", even in the loose sense of the word analogous to the makeup of the United States, stressing that the new political map in Iraq would be drawn as a federation of member "regions". He notes that while issues of national defence, foreign policy and fiscal policy should emanate from the seat of government in Baghdad, it is "vitally important" that power is "devolved from the centre to the various regions".
Though Iraqi Kurds guard their hard-won autonomy jealously, Saleh maintains that the "mainstream" of Kurdish politics "is realistic, is reasonable - is moderate". Asked if Iraqi Kurds still held out hope that they would see an independent Kurdistan, Saleh stresses that this latent desire is subordinate to a larger dream of stability.
"The Kurdish people have been dealt a lousy hand - both from history and geography," he says. "The Kurdish people are no different from other peoples around the world. We deserve our right to self-determination." But the forces of history, he says, demand a more "realistic" solution. Rather than "curse the hand delivered to us forever, and commit our people to an arduous journey whose outcome may not be so certain", Saleh says that Kurds would rather aim for something attainable: self-government within a "voluntary union" between Iraq's various regions.
Saleh seems exasperated by persistent claims, particularly from hawks in neighbouring Turkey, that an independent Kurdistan remains the end-goal in Kurdish politics. "The irony is that while it is the Kurds who have been the primary victims of Saddam Hussein's rule, while it is the Kurds who have suffered genocide, chemical weapons and ethnic cleansing, many circles in our neighbourhood still seek assurances from us. It is time that the Kurdish people are given some assurance - that the terrible past will not be revisited upon them."
The gassing of the Kurdish population in the town of Halabje following the 1991 Gulf War is only one of the examples of this "terrible past". Traditionally Kurdish towns in the north were also subjected to a programme of "Arabisation", in which Arabs were encouraged to resettle there - often at the expense of Kurdish farmers. Some of these settlers have been the subject of violent retaliation in recent weeks.
"In many, many ways, the Arab settlers are also victims of ethnic cleansing," suggests Saleh. "Many of them were brought into Kirkuk by force - against their will, by the Iraqi regime."
When the oil- and natural gas-rich towns of Kirkuk and Mosul were taken by Talabani's peshmerga forces during the war, a tense stand-off between the Kurdish leadership and Ankara, which threatened military intervention, was ameliorated by assurances from Washington that control would be swiftly handed over to US forces.
Kirkuk stands as an extremely sensitive sticking point for Kurdish politics, both because of its wealth of natural resources and the large community of former inhabitants displaced by the "Arabisation" process. "My view is that Kirkuk is an integral part of Kurdistan," says Saleh. "But not exclusively Kurdish," he adds, significantly. "This is a very important distinction that we always have to draw." Saleh concedes that the status of Kirkuk "has to be subject to negotiation and discussion" within the political process of Iraq. "Ultimately, the people of Kirkuk - the original people of Kirkuk themselves - have to be given their right to choose their status."
Saleh stresses that the goal of the Kurdish leadership in Kirkuk is to "reverse" ethnic cleansing through "an orderly, lawful process", preferably under international supervision. This process will have to come soon to avoid a wave of internal acts of vengeance, or even the outbreak of civil war. But Saleh refuses to feed depictions of Kirkuk as a "tinderbox".
"Look at things in the proper context," he says. "Kirkuk's situation was normalised almost two days, three days, after liberation. Public services, law and order resumed. And the incidents that are referred to were not as widespread. ... If anything, Kirkuk was a success story. Kirkuk was, and is, a lot better than Basra, Baghdad and the other places around in Iraq. ... I'm proud of what we have done in Kirkuk."
The joint administration of Iraqi Kurdistan united once bitter rivals Talabani and Barzani in the cause of self-government. Many suspect that the removal of their common enemy will dangerously weaken what has always been a mutually suspicious relationship between the PUK and KDP. Saleh says that this is a reasonable concern but notes that it also extends to all of the Iraqi opposition. "The defining characteristic for the Iraqi opposition has always been Saddam Hussein - our unity in the face of Saddam Hussein," he said. "Saddam Hussein is no longer."
Still, says Saleh, "So far, the omens are good." Noting that both the PUK and KDP "fully understand the imperative of staying together and working together", Saleh suggests that "in many ways, getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the easy part. Building the new federal democracy, the peaceful federal democracy that we aspire to, will be the difficult part."
On the issue of whether the US will once again turn its back on Iraq - as many have said it has done in Afghanistan - Saleh says that Iraqis must look inward for strength. "The Middle East always looks for leadership elsewhere," says Saleh. "We always blame our failures on the outside and try and claim our successes for ourselves. ... Ultimately, this is our country. We will live with the pieces and the consequences of our actions. We must take the initiative as Iraqis and ensure that we can reclaim this country for our generations to come."
As he paints a picture of Iraq's future, Saleh can't resist a final jab at leading Arab nations. "The way that the Arab world engaged in the Iraqi crisis was very unfortunate. There are important lessons to be learned." Notably frank about his emphasis on this issue in his talks in Cairo, Saleh remarks: "The wounds are deep in Iraq. ... We deserve an apology for the failure of the Arab League to come to terms with the tragedy that had to be endured by the people of Iraq at the hands of Saddam Hussein."
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– Nyier H Abdou
Nyier H Abdou
Al-Ahram Weekly
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E-mail: Nyier H Abdou
This article was first run on Al-Ahram Weekly
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